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Stephanie shares about her vacation at Disney World, particularly emphasizing the technological advancements in the park's mobile app that made her visit remarkably frictionless. Joël had a conversation about a topic he loves: units of measure, and he got to go deep into the idea of dimensional analysis with someone this week. Together, Joël and Stephanie talk about module documentation within software development. Joël shares his recent experience writing module docs for a Ruby project using the YARD documentation system. He highlights the time-consuming nature of crafting good documentation for each public method in a class, emphasizing that while it's a demanding task, it significantly benefits those who will use the code in the future. They explore the attributes of good documentation, including providing code examples, explaining expected usage, suggesting alternatives, discussing edge cases, linking to external resources, and detailing inputs, outputs, and potential side effects. Multidimensional numbers episode (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/416) YARD docs (https://yardoc.org/) New factory_bot documentation (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/new-docs-for-factory_bot) Dash (https://kapeli.com/dash) Solargraph (https://solargraph.org/) Transcript: JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn, and together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, I recently was on vacation, and I'm excited [chuckles] to tell our listeners all about it. I went to Disney World [laughs]. And honestly, I was especially struck by the tech that they used there. As a person who works in tech, I always kind of have a little bit of a different experience knowing a bit more about software, I suppose, than just your regular person [laughs], citizen. And so, at Disney World, I was really impressed by how seamlessly the like, quote, unquote, "real life experience" integrated with their use of their branded app to pair with, like, your time at the theme park. JOËL: This is, like, an app that runs on your mobile device? STEPHANIE: Yeah, it's a mobile app. I haven't been to Disney in a really long time. I think the last time I went was just as a kid, like, this was, you know, pre-mobile phones. So, I recall when you get into the line at a ride, you can skip the line by getting what's called a fast pass. And so, you kind of take a ticket, and it tells you a designated time to come back so that you could get into the fast line, and you don't have to wait as long. And now all this stuff is on your mobile app, and I basically did not wait in [laughs] a single line for more than, like, five minutes to go on any of the rides I wanted. It just made a lot of sense that all these things that previously had more, like, physical touchstones, were made a bit more convenient. And I hesitate to use the word frictionless, but I would say that accurately describes the experience. JOËL: That's kind of amazing; the idea that you can use tech to make a place that's incredibly busy also feel seamless and where you don't have to wait in line. STEPHANIE: Yeah and, actually, I think the coolest part was it blended both your, like, physical experience really well with your digital one. I think that's kind of a gripe I have as a technologist [laughs] when I'm just kind of too immersed in my screen as opposed to the world around me. But I was really impressed by the way that they managed to make it, like, a really good supplement to your experience being there. JOËL: So, you're not hyped for a future world where you can visit Disney in VR? STEPHANIE: I mean, I just don't think it's the same. I rode a ride [laughs] where it was kind of like a mini roller coaster. It was called Expedition Everest. And there's a moment, this is, like, mostly indoors, but there's a moment where the roller coaster is going down outside, and you're getting that freefall, like, drop feeling in your stomach. And it also happened to be, like, drizzling that day that we were out there, and I could feel it, you know, like, pelting my head [laughs]. And until VR can replicate that experience [chuckles], I still think that going to Disney is pretty fun. JOËL: Amazing. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: I'm really excited because I had a conversation about a topic that I like to talk about: units of measure. And I got to go deep into the idea of dimensional analysis with someone this week. This is a technique where you can look at a calculation or a function and sort of spot-check whether it's correct by looking at whether the unit for the measure that would come out match what you would expect. So, you do math on the units and ignore the numbers coming into your formula. And, you know, let's say you're calculating the speed of something, and you get a distance and the amount of time it took you to take to go that distance. And let's say your method implements this as distance times time. Forget about doing the actual math with the numbers here; just look at the units and say, okay, we've got our meters, and we've got our seconds, and we're multiplying them together. The unit that comes out of this method is meters times seconds. You happen to know that speeds are not measured in meters times seconds. They're measured in meters divided by seconds or meters per second. So, immediately, you get a sense of, like, wait a minute, something's wrong here. I must have a bug in my function. STEPHANIE: Interesting. I'm curious how you're representing that data to, like, know if there's a bug or not. In my head, when you were talking about that, I'm like, oh yeah, I definitely recall doing, like, math problems for homework [laughs] where I had, you know, my meters per second. You have your little fractions written out, and then when you multiply or divide, you know how to, like, deal with the units on your piece of paper where you're showing your work. But I'm having a hard time imagining what that looks like as a programmer dealing with that problem. JOËL: You could do it just all in your head based off of maybe some comments that you might have or the name of the variable or something. So, you're like, okay, well, I have a distance in meters and a time in seconds, and I'm multiplying the two. Therefore, what should be coming out is a value that is in meters times seconds. If you want to get fancier, you can do things with value objects of different types. So, you say, okay, I have a distance, and I have a time. And so, now I have sort of a multiplication of a distance and a time, and sort of what is that coming out as? That can sometimes help you prevent from having some of these mistakes because you might have some kind of error that gets raised at runtime where it's like, hey, you're trying to multiply two units that shouldn't be multiplied, or whatever it is. You can also, in some languages, do this sort of thing automatically at the type level. So, instead of looking at it yourself and sort of inferring it all on your own based off of the written code, languages like F# have built-in unit-of-measure systems where once you sort of tag numbers as just being of a particular unit of measure, any time you do math with those numbers, it will then tag the result with whatever compound unit comes from that operation. So, you have meters, and you have seconds. You divide one by the other, and now the result gets tagged as meters per second. And then, if you have another calculation that takes the output of the first one and it comes in, you can tell the compiler via type signature, hey, the input for this method needs to be in meters per second. And if the other calculation sort of automatically builds something that's of a different unit, you'll get a compilation error. So, it's really cool what it can do. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that is really neat. I like all of those built-in guardrails, I suppose, to help you, you know, make sure that your answer is correct. Definitely could have used that [chuckles]. Turns out I just needed a calculator to take my math test with [laughs]. JOËL: I think what I find valuable more than sort of the very rigorous approach is the mindset. So, anytime you're dealing with numbers, thinking in your mind, what is the unit of this number? When I do math with it with a different number, is it the same unit? Is it a different unit? What is the unit of the thing that's coming out? Does this operation make sense in the domain of my application? Because it's easy to sometimes think you're doing a math operation that makes sense, and then when you look at the unit, you're like, wait a minute, this does not make sense. And I would go so far as to say that, you know, you might think, oh, I'm not doing a physics app. I don't care about units of measure. Most numbers in your app that are actually numbers are going to have some kind of unit of measure associated to them. Occasionally, you might have something where it's just, like, a straight-up, like, quantity or something like that. It's a dimensionless number. But most things will have some sort of unit. Maybe it's a number of dollars. Maybe it is an amount of time, a duration. It could be a distance. It could be all sorts of things. Typically, there is some sort of unit that should attach to it. STEPHANIE: Yeah. That makes sense that you would want to be careful about making sure that your mathematical operations that you're doing when you're doing objects make sense. And we did talk about this in the last episode about multidimensional numbers a little bit. And I suppose I appreciate you saying that because I think I have mostly benefited from other people having thought in that mindset before and encoding, like I mentioned, those guardrails. So, I can recall an app where I was working with, you know, some kind of currency or money object, and that error was raised when I would try to divide by zero because rather than kind of having to find out later with some, not a number or infinite [laughs] amount of money bug, it just didn't let me do that. And that wasn't something that I had really thought about, you know, I just hadn't considered that zero value edge case when I was working on whatever feature I was building. JOËL: Yeah, or even just generally the idea of dividing money. What does that even mean? Are you taking an amount of money and splitting it into two equivalent piles to split among multiple people? That kind of makes sense. Are you dividing money by another money value? That's now asking a very different kind of question. You're asking, like, what is the ratio between these two, I guess, piles of money if we want to make it, you know, in the physical world? Is that a thing that makes sense in your application? But also, realize that that ratio that you get back is not itself an amount of money. And so, there are some subtle bugs that can happen around that when you don't keep track of what your quantities are. So, this past week, I've been working on a project where I ended up having to write module docs for the code in question. This is a Ruby project, so I'm writing docs using the YARD documentation system, where you effectively just write code comments at the sort of high level covering the entire class and then, also, individual documentation comments on each of the methods. And that's been really interesting because I have done this in other languages, but I'd never done it in Ruby before. And this is a piece of code that was kind of gnarly and had been tricky for me to figure out. And I figured that a couple of these classes could really benefit from some more in-depth documentation. And I'm curious, in your experience, Stephanie, as someone who's writing code, using code from other people, and who I assume occasionally reads documentation, what are the things that you like to see in good sort of method-level docs? STEPHANIE: Personally, I'm really only reading method-level docs when, you know, at this point, I'm, like, reaching for a method. I want to figure out how to use it in my use case right now [laughs]. So, I'm going to search API documentation for it. And I really am just scanning for inputs, especially, I think, and maybe looking at, you know, some potential various, like, options or, like, variations of how to use the method. But I'm kind of just searching for that at a glance and then moving on [laughs] with my day. That is kind of my main interaction with module docs like that, and especially ones for Ruby and Rails methods. JOËL: And for clarity's sake, I think when we're talking about module docs here, I'm generally thinking of, like, any sort of documentation that sort of comments in code meant to document. It could be the whole modular class. It could be on a per-method level, things like RDoc or YARD docs on Ruby classes. You used the word API docs here. I think that's a pretty similar idea. STEPHANIE: I really haven't given the idea of writing this kind of documentation a lot of thought because I've never had to do too much of it before, but I know, recently, you have been diving deep into it because, you know, like you said, you found these classes that you were working with a bit ambiguous, I suppose, or just confusing. And I'm wondering what kind of came out of that journey. What are some of the most interesting aspects of doing this exercise? JOËL: And one of the big ones, and it's not a fun one, but it is time-consuming. Writing good docs per method for a couple of classes takes a lot of time, and I understand why people don't do it all the time. STEPHANIE: What kinds of things were you finding warranted that time? Like, you know, you had to, at some point, decide, like, whether or not you're going to document any particular method. And what were some of the things you were looking out for as good reasons to do it? JOËL: I was making the decisions to document or not document on a class level, and then every public method gets documentation. If there's a big public API, that means every single one of those methods is getting some documentation comments, explaining what they do, how they're meant to be used, things like that. I think my kind of conclusion, having worked with this, is that the sort of sweet spot for this sort of documentation is for anything that is library-like, so a lot of things that maybe would go into a Rails lib directory might make sense. Anything you're turning into a gem that probably makes sense. And sometimes you have things in your Rails codebase that are effectively kind of library-like, and that was the case for the code that I was dealing with. It was almost like a mini ORM style kind of ActiveRecord-inspired series of base classes that had a bunch of metaprogramming to allow you to write models that were backed by not a database but a headless CMS, a content management system. And so, these classes are not extracted to the lib directory or, like, made into a gem, but they feel very library-esque in that way. STEPHANIE: Library-like; I like that descriptor a lot because it immediately made me think of another example of a time when I've used or at least, like, consumed this type of documentation in a, like, SaaS repo. Rather, you know, I'm not really seeing that level of documentation around domain objects, but I noticed that they really did a lot of extending of the application record class because they just had some performance needs that they needed to write some, like, custom code to handle. And so, they ended up kind of writing a lot of their own ORM-like methods for just some, like, custom callbacks on persisting and some just, like, bulk insertion functionality. And those came with a lot of different ways to use them. And I really appreciated that they were heavily documented, kind of like you would expect those ActiveRecord methods to be as well. JOËL: So, I've been having some conversations with other members at thoughtbot about when they like to use the style of module doc. What are some of the alternatives? And one that kept coming up for different people that they would contrast with this is what they would call the big README approach, and this could be for a whole gem, or it could be maybe some directory with a few classes in your application that's got a README in the root of the directory. And instead of documenting each method, you just write a giant README trying to answer sort of all of the questions that you anticipate people will ask. Is that something that you've seen, and how do you feel about that as a tool when you're looking for help? STEPHANIE: Yes. I actually really like that style of documentation. I find that I just want examples to get me started, especially; I guess this is especially true for libraries that I'm not super familiar with but need to just get a working knowledge about kind of immediately. So, I like to see examples, the getting started, the just, like, here's what you need to know. And as I start to use them, that will get me rolling. But then, if I find I need more details, then I will try to seek out more specific information that might come in the form of class method documentation. But I'm actually thinking about how FactoryBot has one of the best big README-esque [laughs] style of documentation, and I think they did a really big refresh of the docs not too long ago. It has all that high-level stuff, and then it has more specific information on how to use, you know, the most common methods to construct your factories. But those are very detailed, and yet they do sit, like, separately from inline, like, code documentation in the style of module docs that we're talking about. So, it is kind of an interesting mix of both that I think is helpful for me personally when I want both the “what do I need to know now?” And the, “like, okay, I know where to look for if I need something a little more detailed.” JOËL: Yeah. The two don't need to be mutually exclusive. I thought it was interesting that you mentioned how much examples are valuable to you because...I don't know if this is controversial, but an opinion that I have about sort of per-method documentation is that you should always default to having a code example for every method. I don't care how simple it is or how obvious it is what it does. Show me a code example because, as a developer, examples are really, really helpful. And so, seeing that makes documentation a lot more valuable than just a couple of lines that explain something that was maybe already obvious from the title of the method. I want to see it in action. STEPHANIE: Interesting. Do you want to see it where the method definition is? JOËL: Yes. Because sometimes the method definition, like, the implementation, might be sort of complex. And so, just seeing a couple of examples, like, oh, you call with this input, you get that. Call with this other input; you get this other thing. And we see this in, you know, some of the core docs for things like the enumerable methods where having an example there to be like, oh, so that's how map works. It returns this thing under these circumstances. That sort of thing is really helpful. And then, I'll try to do it at a sort of a bigger level for that class itself. You have a whole paragraph about here's the purpose of the class. Here's how you should use it. And then, here's an example of how you might use it. Particularly, if this is some sort of, like, base class you're meant to inherit from, here's the circumstances you would want to subclass this, and then here's the methods you would likely want to override. And maybe here are the DSLs you might want to have and to kind of package that in, like, a little example of, in this case, if you wanted a model that read from the headless CMS, here's what an example of such a little model might look like. So, it's kind of that putting it all together, which I think is nice in the module docs. It could probably also live in the big README at some level. STEPHANIE: Yeah. As you are saying that, I also thought about how I usually go search for tests to find examples of usage, but I tend to get really overwhelmed when I see inline, like, that much inline documentation. I have to, like, either actively ignore it, choose to ignore it, or be like, okay, I'm reading this now [laughs]. Because it just takes up so much visual space, honestly. And I know you put a lot of work into it, a lot of time, but maybe it's because of the color of my editor theme where comments are just that, like, light gray [laughs]. I find them quite easy to just ignore. But I'm sure there will be some time where I'm like, okay, like, if I need them, I know they're there. JOËL: Yeah, that is, I think, a downside, right? It makes it harder to browse the code sometimes because maybe your entire screen is almost taken up by documentation, and then, you know, you have one method up, and you've got to, like, scroll through another page of documentation before you hit the next method, and that makes it harder to browse. And maybe that's something that plays into the idea of that separation between library-esque code versus application code. When you browse library-esque code, when you're actually browsing the source, you're probably doing it for different reasons than you would for code in your application because, at that point, you're effectively source diving, sometimes being like, oh, I know this class probably has a method that will do the thing I want. Where is it? Or you're like, there's an edge case I don't understand on this method. I wonder what it does. Let me look at the implementation. Or even some existing code in the app is using this library method. I don't know what it does, but they call this method, and I can't figure out why they're using it. Let me look at the source of the library and see what it does under the hood. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I like the distinction of it is kind of a different mindset that you're reading the code at, where, like, sometimes my brain is already ready to just read code and try to figure out inputs and outputs that way. And other times, I'm like, oh, like, I actually can't parse this right now [chuckles]. Like, I want to read just English, like, telling me what to expect or, like, what to look out for, especially when, like you said, I'm not really, like, trying to figure out some strange bug that would lead me to diving deep in the source code. It's I'm at the level where I'm just reaching for a method and wanting to use it. We're writing these YARD docs. I think I also heard you mention that you gave some, like, tips or maybe some gotchas about how to use certain methods. I'm curious why that couldn't have been captured in a more, like, self-documenting way. Or was there a way that you could have written the code for that not to have been needed as a comment or documented as that? And was there a way that method names could have been clear to signal, like, the intention that you were trying to convey through your documentation? JOËL: I'm a big fan of using method names as a form of documentation, but they're frequently not good enough. And I think comments, whether they're just regular inline comments or more official documentation, can be really good to help avoid sort of common pitfalls. And one that I was working with was, there were two methods, and one would find by a UID, so it would search up a document by UID. And another one would search by ID. And when I was attempting to use these before I even started documenting, I used the wrong one, and it took me a while to realize, oh wait, these things have both UIDs and IDs, and they're slightly different, and sometimes you want to use one or the other. The method names, you know, said like, "Find by ID" or "Find by UID." I didn't realize there were both at the time because I wasn't browsing the source. I was just seeing a place where someone had used it. And then, when I did find it in the source, I'm like, well, what is the difference? And so, something that I did when I wrote the docs was sort of call out on both of those methods; by the way, there is also find by UID. If you're searching by UID, consider using the other one. If you don't know what the difference is, here's a sentence summarizing the difference. And then, here's a link to external documentation if you want to dive into the nitty gritty of why there are two and what the differences are. And I think that's something you can't capture in just a method name. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's true. I like that a lot. Another use case you can think of is when method names are aliased, and it's like, I don't know how I would have possibly known that until I, you know, go through the journey of realizing [laughs] that these two methods do the same thing or, like, stumbling upon where the aliasing happens. But if that were captured in, like, a little note when I'm in, like, a documentation viewer or something, it's just kind of, like, a little tidbit of knowledge [laughs] that I get to gain along the way that ends up, you know, being useful later because I will have just kind of...I will likely remember having seen something like that. And I can at least start my search with a little bit more context than when you don't know what you don't know. JOËL: I put a lot of those sorts of notes on different methods. A lot of them are probably based on a personal story where I made a mistaken assumption about this method, and then it burned me. But I'm like, okay, nobody else is going to make that mistake. By the way, if you think this is what the method does, it does something slightly different and, you know, here's why you need to know that. STEPHANIE: Yeah, you're just looking out for other devs. JOËL: And, you know, trying to, like, take my maybe negative experience and saying like, "How can I get value out of that?" Maybe it doesn't feel great that I lost an hour to something weird about a method. But now that I have spent that hour, can I get value out of it? Is the sort of perspective I try to have on that. So, you mentioned kind of offhand earlier the idea of a documentation viewer, which would be separate than just reading these, I guess, code comments directly in your code editor. What sort of documentation viewers do you like to use? STEPHANIE: I mostly search in my browser, you know, just the official documentation websites for Rails, at least. And then I know that there are also various options for Ruby as well. And I think I had mentioned it before but using DuckDuckGo as my search engine. I have nice bang commands that will just take me straight to the search for those websites, which is really nice. Though, I have paired with people before who used various, like, macOS applications to do something similar. I think Alfred might have some built-in workflows for that. And then, a former co-worker used to use one called Dash, that I have seen before, too. So, it's another one of those just handy just, like, search productivity extensions. JOËL: You mentioned the Rails documentation, and this is separate from the guides. But the actual Rails docs are generated from comments like this inline in code. So, all the different ActiveRecord methods, when you search on the Rails documentation you're like, oh yeah, how does find_by work? And they've got a whole, like, paragraph explaining how it works with a couple of examples. That's this kind of documentation. If you open up that particular file in the source code, you'll find the comments. And it makes sense for Rails because Rails is more of, you know, library-esque code. And you and I search these docs pretty frequently, although we don't tend to do it, like, by opening the Rails gem and, like, grepping through the source to find the code comment. We do it through either a documentation site that's been compiled from that source or that documentation that's been extracted into an offline tool, like you'd mentioned, Dash. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I realized how conflicting, I suppose, it is for me to say that I find inline documentation really overwhelming or visually distracting, whereas I recognize that the only reason I can have that nice, you know, viewing experience is because documentation viewers use the code comments in that format to be generated. JOËL: I wonder if there's like a sort of...I don't know what this pattern is called, but a bit of a, like, middle-quality trap where if you're going to source dive, like, you'd rather just look at the code and not have too much clutter from sort of mediocre comments. But if the documentation is really good and you have the tooling to read it, then you don't even need to source dive at all. You can just read the documentation, and that's sufficient. So, both extremes are good, but that sort of middle kind of one foot in each camp is sort of the worst of both worlds experience. Because I assume when you look for Rails documentation, you never open up the actual codebase to search. The documentation is good enough that you don't even need to look at the files with the comments and the code. STEPHANIE: Yeah, and I'm just recalling now there's, like, a UI feature to view the source from the documentation viewer page. JOËL: Yes. STEPHANIE: I use that actually quite a bit if the comments are a little bit sparse and I need just the code to supplement my understanding, and that is really nice. But you're right, like, I very rarely would be source diving, unless it's a last resort [laughs], let's be honest. JOËL: So, we've talked about documentation viewers and how that can make things nice, and you're able to read documentation for things. But a lot of other tooling can benefit from this sort of model documentation as well, and I'm thinking, in particular, Solargraph, which is Ruby's language server protocol. And it has plugins for VS Code, for Vim, for a few different editors, takes advantage of that to provide all sorts of things. So, you can get smart expansion of code and good suggestions. You can get documentation for what's under your cursor. Maybe you're reading somebody else's code that they've written, and you're like, why are they calling this parameterized method here? What does that even do? Like, in VS Code, you could just hover over it, and it will pop up and show you documentation, including the, like, inputs and return types, and things like that. That's pretty nifty. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that is cool. I use VS Code, but I've not seen that too much yet because I don't think I've worked in enough codebases with really comprehensive [laughs] YARD docs. I'm actually wondering, tooling-wise, did you use any helpful tools when you were writing them or were you hand-documenting each? JOËL: I was hand-documenting everything. STEPHANIE: Class. Okay. JOËL: The thing that I did use is the YARD gem, which you don't need to have the gem to write YARD-style documentation. But if you have the gem, you can run a local server and then preview a documentation site that is generated from your comments that has everything in there. And that was incredibly helpful for me as I was trying to sort of see an overview of, okay, what would someone who's looking at the docs generated from this see when they're trying to look for what the documentation of a particular method does? STEPHANIE: Yeah, and that's really nice. JOËL: Something that I am curious about that I've not really had a lot of experience with is whether or not having extra documentation like that can help AI tools give us better suggestions. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I don't know the answer to that either, but I would be really curious to know if that is already something that happens with something like Copilot. JOËL: Do better docs help machines, or are they for humans only? STEPHANIE: Whoa, that's a very [laughs] philosophical question, I think. It would make sense, though, that if we already have ways to parse and compile this kind of documentation, then I can see that incorporating them into the types of, like, generative problems that AI quote, unquote "solves" [chuckles] would be really interesting to find out. But anyone listening who kind of knows the answer to that or has experience working with AI tools and various types of code comment documentation would be really curious to know what your experience is like and if it improves your development workflow. So, for people who might be interested in getting better at documenting their code in the style of module docs, what would you say are some really great attributes of good documentation in this form? JOËL: I think, first of all, you have to write from the motivation of, like, if you were confused and wanting to better understand what a method does, what would you like to see? And I think coming from that perspective, and that was, in my case, I had been that person, and then I was like, okay, now that I've figured it out, I'm going to write it so that the next person is not confused. I have five or six things that I think were really valuable to add to the docs, a few of which we've already mentioned. But rapid fire, first of all, code example. I love code examples. I want a code example on every method. An explanation of expected usage. Here's what the method does. Here's how we expect you to use this method in any extra context about sort of intended use. Callouts for suggested alternatives. If there are methods that are similar, or there's maybe a sort of common mistake that you would reach for this method, put some sort of call out to say, "Hey, you probably came here trying to do X. If that's what you were actually trying to do, you should use method Y." Beyond that, a discussion of edge cases, so any sort of weird ways the method behaves. You know, when you pass nil to it, does it behave differently? If you call it in a different context, does it behave differently? I want to know that so that I'm not totally surprised. Links to external resources–really great if I want to, like, dig deeper. Is this method built on some sort of, like, algorithm that's documented elsewhere? Please link to that algorithm. Is this method integrating with some, like, third-party API? You know, they have some documentation that we could link to to go deeper into, like, what these search options do. Link to that. External links are great. I could probably find it by Googling myself, but you are going to make me very happy as a developer if you already give me the link. You'd mentioned capturing inputs and outputs. That's a great thing to scan for. Inputs and outputs, though, are more sometimes than just the arguments and return values. Although if we're talking about arguments, any sort of options hash, please document the keys that go in that because that's often not obvious from the code. And I've spent a lot of time source diving and jumping between methods trying to figure out like, what are the options I can pass to this hash? Beyond the explicit inputs and outputs, though, anything that is global state that you rely on. So, do you need to read something from an environment variable or even a global variable or something like that that might make this method behave differently in different situations? Please document that. Any situations where you might raise an error that I might not expect or that I might want to rescue from, let me know what are the potential errors that might get raised. And then, finally, any sorts of side effects. Does this method make a network call? Are you writing to the file system? I'd like to know that, and I'd have to, like, figure it out by trial and error. And sometimes, it will be obvious in just the description of the method, right? Oh, this method pulls data from a third-party API. That's pretty clear. But maybe it does some sort of, like, caching in the background or something to a file that's not really important. But maybe I'm trying to do a unit test that involves this, and now, all of a sudden, I have to do some weird stubbing. I'd like to know that upfront. So, those are kind of all the things I would love to have in my sort of ideal documentation comment that would make my life easier as a developer when trying to use some code. STEPHANIE: Wow. What a passionate plea [laughs]. I was very into listening to you list all of that. You got very animated. And it makes a lot of sense because I feel like these are kind of just the day-to-day developer issues we run into in our work and would be so awesome if, especially as the, you know, author where you have figured all of this stuff out, the author of a, you know, a method or a class, to just kind of tell us these things so we don't have to figure it out ourselves. I guess I also have to respond to that by saying, on one hand, I totally get, like, you want to be saved [chuckles] from those common pitfalls. But I think that part of our work is just going through that and playing around and exploring with the code in front of us, and we learn all of that along the way. And, ultimately, even if that is all provided to you, there is something about, like, going through it yourself that gives you a different perspective on it. And, I don't know, maybe it's just my bias against [laughs] all the inline text, but I've also seen a lot of that type of information captured at different levels of documentation. So, maybe it is a Confluence doc or in a wiki talking about, you know, common gotchas for this particular problem that they were trying to solve. And I think what's really cool is that, you know, everyone can kind of be served and that people have different needs that different styles of documentation can meet. So, for anyone diving deep in the source code, they can see all of those examples inline. But, for me, as a big Googler [laughs], I want to see just a nice, little web app to get me the information that I need to find. I'm happy having that a little bit more, like, extracted from my source code. JOËL: Right. You don't want to have to read the source code with all the comments in it. I think that's a fair criticism and, yeah, probably a downside of this. And I'm wondering, there might be some editor tooling that allows you to just collapse all comments and hide them if you wanted to focus on just the code. STEPHANIE: Yeah, someone, please build that for me. That's my passionate plea [laughs]. And on that note, shall we wrap up? JOËL: Let's wrap up. STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Bye. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.
Stephanie shares her task of retiring a small, internally-used link-shortening app. She describes the process as both celebratory and a bit mournful. Meanwhile, Joël discusses his deep dive into ActiveRecord, particularly in the context of debugging. He explores the complexities of ActiveRecord querying schemas and the additional latency this introduces. Together, the hosts discuss the nuances of package management systems and their implications for developers. They touch upon the differences between system packages and language packages, sharing personal experiences with tools like Homebrew, RubyGems, and Docker. Transcript: JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, this week, I got to have some fun working on some internal thoughtbot work. And what I focused on was retiring one of our just, like, small internal self-hosted on Heroku apps in favor of going with a third-party service for this functionality. We basically had a tiny, little app that we used as a link-shortening service. So, if you've ever seen a tbot.io short link out in the world, we were using our just, like, an in-house app to do that, you know, but for various reasons, we wanted to...just it wasn't worth maintaining anymore. So, we wanted to just use a purchased service. But today, I got to just, like, do the little bit of, like, tidying up, you know, in preparation to archive a repo and kind of delete the app from Heroku, and I hadn't done that before. So, it felt a little bit celebratory and a little bit mournful even [laughs] to, you know, retire something like that. And I was pairing with another thoughtbot developer, and we used a pairing app called Tuple. And you can just send, like, fun reactions to each other. Like, you could send, like, a fire emoji [laughs] or something if that's what you're feeling. And so, I sent some, like, confetti when we clicked the, "I understand what deleting this app means on GitHub." But I joked that "Actually, I feel like what I really needed was a, like, a salute kind of like thank you for your service [laughs] type of reaction." JOËL: I love those moments when you're kind of you're hitting those kind of milestone-y moments, and then you get to send a reaction. I should do that more often in Tuple. Those are fun. STEPHANIE: They are fun. There's also a, like, table flip reaction, too, is one that I really enjoy [laughs], you know, you just have to manifest that energy somehow. And then, after we kind of sent out an email to the company saying like, "Oh yeah, we're not using our app anymore for link shortening," someone had a great suggestion to make our archived repo public instead of private. I kind of liked it as a way of, like, memorializing this application and let community members see, you know, real code in a real...the application that we used here at thoughtbot. So, hopefully, if not me, then someone else will be able to do that and maybe publish a little blog post about that. JOËL: That's exciting. So, it's not currently public, the repo, but it might be at some point in the future. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's right. JOËL: We'll definitely have to mention it on a future episode if that happens so that people following along with the story can go check out the code. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: I've been doing a deep dive into how ActiveRecord works. Particularly, I am debugging some pretty significant slowdowns in querying ActiveRecord models that are backed not by a regular Postgres database but instead a Snowflake data warehouse via an ODBC connection. So, there's a bunch of moving pieces going on here, and it would just take forever to make any queries. And sure, the actual reported query time is longer than for a local Postgres database, but then there's this sort of mystery extra waiting time, and I couldn't figure out why is it taking so much longer than the actual sort of recorded query time. And I started digging into all of this, and it turns out that in addition to executing queries to pull actual data in, ActiveRecord needs to, at various points, query the schema of your data store to pull things like names of tables and what are the indexes and primary keys and things like that. STEPHANIE: Wow. That sounds really cool and something that I have never needed to do before. I'm curious if you noticed...you said that it takes, I guess, longer to query Snowflake than it would a more common Postgres database. Were you noticing this performance slowness locally or on production? JOËL: Both places. So, the nice thing is I can reproduce it locally, and locally, I mean running the Rails app locally. I'm still talking to a remote Snowflake data warehouse, which is fine. I can reproduce that slowness locally, which has made it much easier to experiment and try things. And so, from there, it's really just been a bit of a detective case trying to, I guess, narrow the possibility space and try to understand what are the parts that trigger slowness. So, I'm printing timestamps in different places. I've got different things that get measured. I've not done, like, a profiling tool to generate a flame graph or anything like that. That might have been something cool to try. I just did old-school print statements in a couple of places where I, like, time before, time after, print the delta, and that's gotten me pretty far. STEPHANIE: That's pretty cool. What do you think will be an outcome of this? Because I remember you saying you're digging a little bit into ActiveRecord internals. So, based on, like, what you're exploring, what do you think you could do as a developer to increase some of the performance there? JOËL: I think probably what this ends up being is finding that the Snowflake adapter that I'm using for ActiveRecord maybe has some sort of small bug in it or some implementation that's a little bit too naive that needs to be fine-tuned. And so, probably what ends up happening here is that this finishes as, like, an open-source pull request to the Snowflake Adapter gem. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's where I thought maybe that might go. And that's pretty cool, too, and to, you know, just be investigating something on your app and being able to make a contribution that it benefits the community. JOËL: And that's what's so great about open source because not only am I able to get the source to go source diving through all of this, because I absolutely need to do that, but also, then if I make a fix, I can push that fix back out to the community, and everybody gets to benefit. STEPHANIE: Cool. Well, that's another thing that I look forward to hearing more on the development of [laughs] later if it pans out that way. JOËL: One thing that has been interesting with this Snowflake work is that there are a lot of moving parts and multiple different packages that I need to install to get this all to work. So, I mentioned that I might be doing a pull request against the Snowflake Adapter for ActiveRecord, but all of this talks through a sort of lower-level technology protocol called ODBC, which is a sort of generic protocol for speaking to data stores, and that actually has two different pieces. I had to install two different packages. There is a sort of low-level executable that I had to install on my local dev machine and that I have to install on our servers. And on my Mac, I'm installing that via Homebrew, which is a system package. And then to get Ruby bindings for that, there is a Ruby gem that I install that allows Ruby code to talk to ODBC, and that's installed via RubyGems or Bundler. And that got me thinking about sort of these two separate ecosystems that I tend to work with every day. We've got sort of the system packages and the, I don't know what you want to call them, language packages maybe, things like RubyGems, but that could also be NPM or whatever your language of choice is, and realizing that we kind of have things split into two different zones, and sometimes we need both and wondering a little bit about why is that difference necessary. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I don't have an answer to that [laughs] question right now, but I can say that that was an area that really tripped me up, I think, when I was first a fledgling developer. And I was really confused about where all of these dependencies were coming from and going through, you know, setting up my first project and being, like, asked to install Postgres on my machine but then also Bundler, which then also installs more dependencies [laughs]. The lines between those ecosystems were not super clear to me. And, you know, even now, like, I find myself really just kind of, like, learning what I need to know to get by [laughs] with my day-to-day work. But I do like what you said about these are kind of the two main layers that you're working with in terms of package management. And it's really helpful to have that knowledge so you can troubleshoot when there is an issue at one or the other. JOËL: And you mentioned Postgres. That's another one that's interesting because there are components in both of those ecosystems. Postgres itself is typically installed via a system package manager, so something like Homebrew on a Mac or apt-get on a Linux machine. But then, if you're interacting with Postgres in a Ruby app, you're probably also installing the pg gem, which are Ruby's bindings for Postgres to allow Ruby to talk to Postgres, and that lives in the package ecosystem on RubyGems. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I've certainly been in the position of, you know, again, as consultants, we oftentimes are also setting up new laptops entirely [laughs] like client laptops and such and bundling and the pg gem is installed. And then at least I have, you know, I have to give thanks to the very clear error message that [laughs] tells me that I don't have Postgres installed on my machine. Because when I mentioned, you know, troubleshooting earlier, I've certainly been in positions where it was really unclear what was going on in terms of the interaction between what I guess we're calling the Ruby package ecosystem and our system level one. JOËL: Especially for things like the pg gem, which need to compile against some existing libraries, those always get interesting where sometimes they'll fail to compile because there's a path to some C compiler that's not set correctly or something like that. For me, typically, that means I need to update the macOS command line tools or the Xcode command line tools; I forget what the name of that package is. And, usually, that does the trick. That might happen if I've upgraded my OS version recently and haven't downloaded the latest version of the command line tools. STEPHANIE: Yeah. Speaking of OS versions, I have a bit of a story to share about using...I've never said this name out loud, but I am pretty sure that it would just be pronounced as wkhtmltopdf [laughs]. For some reason, whenever I see words like that in my brain, I want to, like, make it into a pronounceable thing [laughs]. JOËL: Right, just insert some vowels in there. STEPHANIE: Yeah, wkhtmltopdf [laughs]. Anyway, that was being used in an app to generate PDF invoices or something. It's a pretty old tool. It's a CLI tool, and it's, as far as I can tell, it's been around for a long time but was recently no longer maintained. And so, as I was working on this app, I was running into a bug where that library was causing some issues with the PDF that was generated. So, I had to go down this route of actually finding a Ruby gem that would figure out which package binary to use, you know, based off of my system. And that worked great locally, and I was like, okay, cool, I fixed the issue. And then, once I pushed my change, it turns out that it did not work on CI because CI was running on Ubuntu. And I guess the binary didn't work with the latest version of Ubuntu that was running on CI, so there was just so many incompatibilities there. And I was wanting to fix this bug. But the next step I took was looking into community-provided packages because there just simply weren't any, like, up-to-date binaries that would likely work with these new operating systems. And I kind of stopped at that point because I just wasn't really sure, like, how trustworthy were these community packages. That was an ecosystem I didn't know enough about. In particular, I was having to install some using apt from, you know, just, like, some Linux community. But yeah, I think I normally have a little bit more experience and confidence in terms of the Ruby package ecosystem and can tell, like, what gems are popular, which ones are trustworthy. There are different heuristics I have for evaluating what dependency to pull in. But here I ended up just kind of bailing out of that endeavor because I just didn't have enough time to go down that rabbit hole. JOËL: It is interesting that learning how to evaluate packages is a skill you have to learn that varies from package community to package community. I know that when I used to be very involved with Elm, we would often have people who would come to the Elm community from the JavaScript community who were used to evaluating NPM packages. And one of the metrics that was very popular in the JavaScript community is just stars on GitHub. That's a really important metric. And that wasn't really much of a thing in the Elm community. And so, people would come and be like, "Wait, how do I know which package is good? I don't see any stars on GitHub." And then, it turns out that there are other metrics that people would use. And similarly, you know, in Ruby, there are different ways that you might use to evaluate Ruby gems that may or may not involve stars on GitHub. It might be something entirely different. STEPHANIE: Yeah. Speaking of that, I wanted to plug a website that I have used before called the Ruby Toolbox, and that gives some suggestions for open-source Ruby libraries of various categories. So, if you're looking for, like, a JSON parser, it has some of the more popular ones. If you're looking for, you know, it stores them by category, and I think it is also based on things like stars and forks like that, so that's a good one to know. JOËL: You could probably also look at something like download numbers to see what's popular, although sometimes it's sort of, like, an emergent gem that's more popular. Some of that almost you just need to be a little bit in the community, like, hearing, you know, maybe listening to podcasts like this one, subscribing to Ruby newsletters, going to conferences, things like that, and to realize, okay, maybe, you know, we had sort of an old staple for JSON parsing, but there's a new thing that's twice as fast. And this is sort of becoming the new standard, and the community is shifting towards that. You might not know that just by looking at raw stats. So, there's a human component to it as well. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. I think an extension of knowing how to evaluate different package systems is this question of like, how much does an average developer need to know about package management? [laughs] JOËL: Yeah, a little bit to a medium amount, and then if you're writing your own packages, you probably need to know a little bit more. But there are some things that are really maybe best left to the maintainers of package managers. Package managers are actually pretty complex pieces of software in terms of all of the dependency management and making sure that when you say, "Oh, I've got Rails, and this other gem, and this other gem, and it's going to find the exact versions of all those gems that play nicely together," that's non-trivial. As a sort of working developer, you don't need to know all of the algorithms or the graph theory or any of that that underlies a package manager to be able to be productive in your career. And even as a package developer, you probably don't need to really know a whole lot of that. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that makes sense. I actually had referred to our internal at thoughtbot here, our kind of, like, expectations for skill levels for developers. And I would say for an average developer, we kind of just expect a basic understanding of these more complex parts of our toolchain, I think, specifically, like, command line tools and package management. And I think I'd mentioned earlier that, for me, it is a very need-to-know basis. And so, yeah, when I was going down that little bit of exploration around why wkhtmltopdf [chuckles] wasn't working [chuckles], it was a bit of a twisty and turning journey where I, you know, wasn't really sure where to go. I was getting very obtuse error messages, and, you know, I had to dive deep into all these forums [laughs] for all the various platforms [laughs] about why libraries weren't working. And I think what I did come away with was that like, oh, like, even though I'm mostly working on my local machine for development, there was some amount of knowledge I needed to have about the systems that my CI and, you know, production servers are running on. The project I was working on happened to have, like, a Docker file for those environments, and, you know, kind of knowing how to configure them to install the packages I needed to install and just knowing a little bit about the different ways of doing that on systems outside of my usual daily workflows. JOËL: And I think that gets back to some of the interesting distinctions between what we might call language packages versus system packages is that language packages more or less work the same across all operating systems. They might have a build step that's slightly different or something like that, but system packages might be pretty different between different operating systems. So, development, for me, is a Mac, and I'm probably installing system packages via something like Homebrew. If I then want that Rails app to run on CI or some Linux server somewhere, I can't use Homebrew to install things there. It's going to be a slightly different package ecosystem. And so, now I need to find something that will install Postgres for Linux, something that will install, I guess, wkhtmltopdf [laughs] for Linux. And so, when I'm building that Docker file, that might be a little bit different for Mac versus for...or I guess when you run a Docker file, you're running a containerized system. So, the goal there is to make this system the same everywhere for everyone. But when you're setting that up, typically, it's more of a Linux-like system. And so running inside the Docker container versus outside on the native Mac might involve a totally different set of packages and a different package tool. As opposed to something like Bundler, you've got your gem file; you bundle install. It doesn't matter if you're on Linux or macOS. STEPHANIE: Yes, I think you're right. I think we kind of answered our own question at the top of the show [laughs] about differences and what do you need to know about them. And I also like how you pointed out, oh yeah, like, Docker is supposed to [laughs], you know, make sure that we're all developing in the same system, essentially. But, you know, sometimes you have different use cases for it. And, yeah, when you were talking about installing an application on your native Mac and using Homebrew, but even, you know, not everyone even uses Homebrew, right? You can install manually [laughs] through whatever official installer that application might provide. So, there's just so many different ways of doing something. And I had the thought that it's too bad that we both [chuckles] develop on Mac because it could be really interesting to get a Linux user's perspective in here. JOËL: You mentioned not installing via Homebrew. A kind of glaring example of that in my personal setup is that I use Postgres.app to manage Postgres on my machine rather than using Homebrew. I've just...over the years, the Homebrew version every time I upgrade my operating system or something, it's just such a pain to update, and I've lost too many hours to it, and Postgres.app just works, and so I've switched to that. Most other things, I'll use the Homebrew version, but Postgres it's now Postgres.app. It's not even a command line install, and it works fine for me. STEPHANIE: Nice. Yeah. That's interesting. That's a good tip. I'll have to look into that next time because I have also certainly had to just install so many [laughs] various versions of Postgres and figure out what's going on with them every time I upgrade my OS. I'm with you, though, in terms of the packages world I'm looking for, it works [laughs]. JOËL: So, you'd mentioned earlier that packages is sort of an area that's a bit of a need-to-know basis for you. Are there, like, particular moments in your career that you remember like, oh, that's the moment where I needed to, like, take some time and learn a little bit of the next level of packages? STEPHANIE: That's a great question. I think the very beginnings of understanding how package versions work when you have multiple projects on your machine; I just remember that being really confusing for me. When I started out, like, you know, as soon as I cloned my second repo [laughs], and was very confused about, like, I'm sure I went through the process of not installing gems using Bundler, and then just having so much chaos [laughs] wrecked in my development environment and, you know, having to ask someone, "I don't understand how this works. Like, why is it saying I have multiple versions of this library or whatever?" JOËL: Have you ever sudo gem installed a gem? STEPHANIE: Oh yeah, I definitely have. I can't [laughs], like, even give a good reason for why I have done it, but I probably was just, like, pulling my hair out, and that's what Stack Overflow told me to do. I don't know if I can recommend that, but it is [chuckles] one thing to do when you just are kind of totally stuck. JOËL: There was a time where I think that that was in the READMEs for most projects. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a really good point. JOËL: So, that's probably why a lot of people end up doing that, but then it tends to install it for your system Ruby rather than for...because if you're using something like Rbenv or RVM or ASDF to manage multiple Ruby versions, those end up being what's using or even Homebrew to manage your Ruby. It wouldn't be installing it for those versions of Ruby. It would be installing it for the one that shipped with your Mac. I actually...you know what? I don't even know if Mac still ships with Ruby. It used to. It used to ship with a really old version of Ruby, and so the advice was like, "Hey, every repo tells you to install it with sudo; don't do that. It will mess you up." STEPHANIE: Huh. I think Mac still does ship with Ruby, but don't quote me on that [laughter]. And I think that's really funny that, like, yeah, people were just writing those instructions in READMEs. And I'm glad that we've collectively [laughs] figured out that difference and want to, hopefully, not let other developers fall into that trap [laughs]. Do you have a particular memory or experience when you had to kind of level up your knowledge about the package ecosystem? JOËL: I think one sort of moment where I really had to level up is when I started really needing to understand how install paths worked, especially when you have, let's say, multiple versions of a gem installed because you have different projects. And you want to know, like, how does it know which one it's using? And then you see, oh, there are different paths that point to different directories with the installs. Or when you might have an executable you've installed via Homebrew, and it's like, oh yeah, so I've got this, like, command that I run on my shell, but actually that points to a very particular path, you know, in my Homebrew directory. But maybe it could also point to some, like, pre-installed system binaries or some other custom things I've done. So, there was a time where I had to really learn about how the path shell variable worked on a machine in order to really understand how the packages I installed were sometimes showing up when I invoked a binary and sometimes not. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that is another really great example that I have memories of [laughs] being really frustrated by, especially if...because, you know, we had talked earlier about all the different ways that you can install applications on your system, and you don't always know where they end up [laughs]. JOËL: And this particular memory is tied to debugging Postgres because, you know, you're installing Postgres, and some paths aren't working. Or maybe you try to update Postgres and now it's like, oh, but, like, I'm still loading the wrong one. And why does PSQL not do the thing that I think it does? And so, that forced me to learn a little bit about, like, under the hood, what happens when I type brew install PostgreSQL? And how does that mesh with the way my shell interprets commands and things like that? So, it was maybe a little bit of a painful experience but eye-opening and definitely then led to me, I think, being able to debug my setup much more effectively in the future. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I like that you also pointed out how it was interacting with your shell because that's, like, another can of worms, right? [laughs] In terms of just the complexity of how these things are talking to each other. JOËL: And for those of our listeners who are not familiar with this, there is a shell command that you can use called which, W-H-I-C-H. And you can prefix that in front of another command, and it will tell you the path that it's using for that binary. So, in my case, if I'm looking like, why is this PSQL behaving weirdly or seems to be using the old version, I can type 'which space psql', and it'll say, "Oh, it's going to this path." And I can look at it and be like, oh, it's using my system install of Postgres. It's not using the Homebrew one. Or, oh, maybe it's using the Homebrew install, not my Postgres.app version. I need to, like, tinker with the paths a little bit. So, that has definitely helped me debug my package system more than once. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a really good tip. I can recall just totally uninstalling everything [laughs] and reinstalling and fingers crossed it would figure out a route to the right thing [laughs]. JOËL: You know what? That works. It's not the, like, most precise solution but resetting your environment when all else fails it's not a bad solution. So, we've been talking a lot about what it's like to interact with a package ecosystem as developers, as users of packages, but what if you're a package developer? Sometimes, there's a very clear-cut place where to publish, and sometimes it's a little bit grayer. So, I could see, you know, I'm developing a database, and I want that to be on operating systems, probably should be a system-level package rather than a Ruby gem. But what if I'm building some kind of command line tool, and I write it in Ruby because I like writing Ruby? Should I publish that as a gem, or should I publish that as some kind of system package that's installed via Homebrew? Any opinions or heuristics that you would use to choose where to publish on one side or the other? STEPHANIE: As not a package developer [laughs], I can only answer from that point of view. That is interesting because if you publish on a, you know, like, a system repository, then yeah, like, you might get a lot more people using your tool out there because you're not just targeting a specific language's community. But I don't know if I have always enjoyed downloading various things to my system's OS. I think that actually, like, is a bit complicated for me or, like, I try to avoid it if I can because if something can be categorized or, like, containerized in a way that, like, feels right for my mental model, you know, if it's written in Ruby or something really related to things I use Ruby in, it could be nice to have that installed in my, like, systems RubyGems. But I would be really interested to hear if other people have opinions about where they might want to publish a package and what kind of developers they're hoping to find to use their tool. JOËL: I like the heuristic that you mentioned here, the idea of who the audience is because, yeah, as a Ruby developer who already has a Ruby setup, it might be easier for me to install something via a gem. But if I'm not a Ruby developer who wants to use the packages maybe a little bit more generic, you know, let's say, I don't know, it's some sort of command line tool for interacting with GitHub or something like that. And, like, it happens to be written in Ruby, but you don't particularly care about that as a user of this. Maybe you don't have Ruby installed and now you've got to, like, juggle, like, oh, what is RubyGems, and Bundler, and all this stuff? And I've definitely felt that occasionally downloading packages sort of like, oh, this is a Python package. And you're going to need to, like, set up all this stuff. And it's maybe designed for a Python audience. And so, it's like, oh, you're going to set up a virtual environment and all these things. I'm like, I just want your command line tools. I don't want to install a whole language. And so, sometimes there can be some frustration there. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that is very true. Before you even said that, I was like, oh, I've definitely wanted to download a command line tool and be like, first install [laughs] Python. And I'm like, nope, I'm bailing out of this. JOËL: On the other hand, as a developer, it can be a lot harder to write something that's a bit more cross-platform and managing all that. And I've had to deal a little bit with this for thoughtbot's Parity tool, which is a command-line tool for working with Heroku. It allows you to basically run commands on either staging or production by giving you a staging command and a production command for common Heroku CLI tasks, which makes it really nice if you're working and you're having to do some local, some development, some staging, and some production things all from your command line. It initially started as a gem, and we thought, you know what? This is mostly command line, and it's not just Rubyists who use Heroku. Let's try to put this on Homebrew. But then it depends on Ruby because it's written in Ruby. And now we had to make sure that we marked Ruby as a dependency in Homebrew, which meant that Homebrew would then also pull in Ruby as a dependency. And that got a little bit messy. For a while, we even experimented with sort of briefly available technology called Traveling Ruby that allowed you to embed Ruby in your binary, and you could compile against that. That had some drawbacks. So, we ended up rolling that back as well. And eventually, just for maintenance ease, we went back to making this a Ruby gem and saying, "Look, you install it via RubyGems." It does mean that we're targeting more of the Ruby community. It's going to be a little bit harder for other people to install, but it is easier for us to maintain. STEPHANIE: That's really interesting. I didn't know that history about Parity. It's a tool that I have used recently and really enjoyed. But yeah, I think I remember someone having some issues between installing it as a gem and installing it via Homebrew and some conflicts there as well. So, I can also see how trying to decide or maybe going down one path and then realizing, oh, like, maybe we want to try something else is certainly not trivial. JOËL: I think, in me, I have a little bit of the idealist and the pragmatist that fight. The idealist says, "Hey, if it's not, like, aimed for Ruby developers as a, like, you can pull this into your codebase, if it's just command line tools and the fact that it's written in Ruby is an implementation detail, that should be a system package. Do not distribute binaries via RubyGems." That's the idealist in me. The pragmatist says, "Oh, that's a lot of work and not always worth it for both the maintainers and sometimes for the users, and so it's totally okay to ship binaries as RubyGems." STEPHANIE: I was totally thinking that I'm sure that you've been in that position of being a user and trying to download a system package and then seeing it start to download, like, another language. And you're like, wait, what? [laughter] That's not what I want. JOËL: So, you and I have shared some of our heuristics in the way we approach this problem. Now, I'm curious to hear from the audience. What are some heuristics that you use to decide whether your package is better shipped on RubyGems versus, let's say, Homebrew? Or maybe as a user, what do you prefer to consume? STEPHANIE: Yes. And speaking of getting listener feedback, we're also looking for some listener questions. We're hoping to do a bit of a grab-bag episode where we answer your questions. So, if you have anything that you're wanting to hear me and Joël's thoughts on, write us at hosts@bikeshed.fm. JOËL: On that note, shall we wrap up? STEPHANIE: Let's wrap up. Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeee!!!!!!! AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.
Joël shares a unique, time-specific bug he encountered, which causes a page to crash only in January. This bug has been fixed in previous years, only to reemerge due to subsequent changes. Stephanie talks about her efforts to bring more structure to her work-from-home environment. She describes how setting up a bird feeder near her desk and keeping chocolates at her desk serve as incentives to work more from her desk. Together, Stephanie and Joël take a deep dive into the challenges of breaking down software development tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks. They explore the concept of 'vertical slice' development, where features are implemented in thin, fully functional segments, contrasting it with the more traditional 'horizontal slice' approach. This discussion leads to insights on collaborative work, the importance of iterative development, and strategies for efficient and effective software engineering. thoughtbot Live Streams (https://www.youtube.com/@thoughtbot/streams?themeRefresh=1) Stephanie's Live Stream (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWmCOMbOxTs) Joël's Talk on Time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54Hs2E7zsQg) Finish the Owl Meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/572078-how-to-draw-an-owl) Full Stack Slices (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/break-apart-your-features-into-full-stack-slices) Elephant Carpaccio (https://blog.crisp.se/2013/07/25/henrikkniberg/elephant-carpaccio-facilitation-guide) Outside-in Feature Development (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/testing-from-the-outsidein) Working Iteratively (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/working-iteratively) Transcript: STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world in the year 2024? JOËL: Yeah, it's 2024. New year, new me. Or, in this case, maybe new year, new bugs? I'm working on a project where I ran into a really interesting time-specific bug. This particular page on the site only crashes in the month of January. There's some date logic that has a weird boundary condition there, and if you load that page during the month of January, it will crash, but during the entire rest of the year, it's fine. STEPHANIE: That's a fun New Year's tradition for this project [laughs], fixing this bug [laughs] every year. JOËL: It's been interesting because I looked a little bit at the git history of this bug, and it looks like it's been fixed in past Januarys, but then the fix changes the behavior slightly, so people bring the behavior back correct during the rest of the year that also happens to reintroduce the bug in January, and now I'm back to fixing it in January. So, it is a little bit of a tradition. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that is really funny. I was also recently debugging something, and we were having some flakiness with a test that we wrote. And we were trying to figure out because we had some date/time logic as well. And we were like, is there anything strange about this current time period that we are in that would potentially, you know, lead to a flaky test? And we were looking at the clock and we're like, "I don't think it's like, you know, midnight UTC or anything [laughs] like that." But, I mean, I don't know. It's like, how could you possibly think of, like, all of the various weird edge cases, you know, related to that kind of thing? I don't think I would ever be like, huh, it's January, so, surely, that must [laughs] mean that that's this particular edge case I'm seeing. JOËL: It's interesting because I feel like there's a couple of types of time-specific bugs that we see pretty frequently. If you're near the daylight savings boundary, let's say a week before sometimes, or whatever you're...if you're doing, like, a week from now logic or something like that, typically, I'll see failures in the test suite or maybe actual crashes in the code a week before springing forward and a week before falling back. And then, like you said, sometimes you see failures at the end of the day, Eastern time for me, when you approach that midnight UTC time boundary. I think this is the first time I've seen a failure in January due to the month being, like, a month boundary...or it's a year boundary really is what's happening. STEPHANIE: Yeah. That just sounds like another [laughs] thing you have to look out for. I'm curious: are you going to fix this bug for real or leave it for [laughs] 2025? JOËL: I've got a fix that I think is for real and that, like, not only fixes the break in January but also during the rest of the year gives the desired behavior. I think part of what's really interesting about this bug is that there are some subtle behavioral changes between a few different use cases where this code is called, part of which depend on when in the year you're calling it and whether you want to see it for today's date versus you can also specify a date that you want to see this report. And so, it turns out that there are a lot more edge cases than might be initially obvious. So, this turned into effectively a product discussion, and realizing, wait a minute, the code isn't telling the full story. There's more at a product level we need to discuss. And actually, I think I learned a lot about the product there. So, while it was maybe a surprising and kind of humorous bug to come across, I think it was actually a really good experience. STEPHANIE: Nice. That's awesome. That's a pretty good way to start the year, I would say. JOËL: I'd say so. How about you? What's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, I don't know, I think towards the end of the year, last year, I was in a bit of a slump where I was in that work-from-couch phase of [laughs] the year, you know, like, things are slowing down and I, you know, winter was starting here. I wanted to be cozy, so I'd, you know, set up on the couch with a blanket. And I realized that I really wasn't sitting at my desk at all, and I kind of wanted to bring a little bit of that structure back into my workday, so I [chuckles] added some incentives for me to sit at my desk, which include I recently got a bird feeder that attaches to the window in my office. So, when I sit at my desk, I can hopefully see some birds hanging out. They are very flighty, so I've only seen birds when I'm, like, in the other room. And I'm like, oh, like, there's a bird at the bird feeder. Like, let me get up close to, like, get to admire them. And then as soon as I, like [laughs], get up close to the window, they fly away. So, I'm hoping that if I sit at my desk more, I'll spontaneously see more birds, and maybe they'll get used to, like, a presence closer to the window. And then my second incentive is I now have little chocolates at my desk [laughs]. JOËL: Nice. STEPHANIE: I've just been enjoying, like, a little treat and trying to keep them as a...okay, I've worked at my desk for an hour, and now I get a little reward for that [laughs]. JOËL: I like that. Do you know what kind of species of birds have been coming to your feeder? STEPHANIE: Ooh, yes. So, we got this birdseed mix called Cardinal and Friends [laughs]. JOËL: I love that. STEPHANIE: So, I have seen, like, a really beautiful red male cardinal come by. We get some robins and some chickadees, I think. Part of what I'm excited for this winter is to learn more how to identify more bird species. And I usually like to be out in nature and stuff, and winter is a hard time to do that. So, this is kind of my way of [chuckles] bringing that more into my life during the season. So, this is our first episode after a little bit of a break for the holidays. There actually has been some content of ours that has been published out in the world on the internet [laughs] during this time. And just wanted to point out in the few weeks that there weren't any Bike Shed episodes, I ended up doing a thoughtbot Rails development livestream with thoughtbot CEO Chad Pytel, and that was my first-time live streaming code [laughs]. And it was a really cool experience. I'm glad I had this podcast experience. So, I'm like, okay, well I have, you know, that, like, ability to do stuff kind of off script and present in the moment. But yeah, that was a really cool thing that I got to do, and I feel a little bit more confident about doing those kinds in the future. JOËL: And for those who are not aware, Chad does–I think it's a weekly live stream on Fridays where he's doing various types of code. So, he's done some work on some internal projects. He did a series where he upgraded, I think, a Rails 2 app all the way to Rails 7, typically with a guest who's another teammate from thoughtbot working on a thing. So, for those of our listeners that might find interesting, we'll put a link in the show notes where you can go see that. I think it's on YouTube and on Twitch. STEPHANIE: Yes. JOËL: What did you pair on? What kind of project were you doing for the livestream? STEPHANIE: So, we were working on thoughtbot's internal application called Hub, which is where we have, like, our internal messaging features. It's where we do a lot of our business operations-y things [laughs]. So, all of the, like, agency work that we do, we use our in-house software for that, and so Chad and I were working on a feature to introduce something that would help out with how we staff team members on projects. In other content news [laughs], Joël, I think you have something to share as well. JOËL: Yeah. So, we've mentioned on past episodes that I gave a talk at RubyConf this past November all about what the concept of time actually means within a program and the different ways of representing it, and the fact that time isn't really a single thing but actually kind of multiple related quantities. And over the holiday break, the talks from that conference got published. I'm pretty excited that that is now out there. We'd mentioned that as a highlight in the previous episode, highlighting accomplishments for the year, but it just wasn't quite out yet. We couldn't link it there. So, I'll leave a link in the show notes for this episode for anyone who's interested in seeing that. STEPHANIE: Sounds like that talk is also timely for a debug you -- JOËL: Ha ha ha! STEPHANIE: Were also mentioning earlier in the episode. So, a few episodes ago, I believe we mentioned that we had recently had, like, our company internal hackathon type thing where we have two days to get together and work with team members who we might not normally work with and get some cool projects started or do some team bonding, that kind of thing. And since I'm still, you know, unbooked on client work, I've been doing a lot of internal thoughtbot stuff, like continuing to work on the Hub app I mentioned just a bit ago. And from the hackathon, there was some work that was unfinished by, like, a project team that I decided to pick up this week as part of my internal work. And as I was kind of trying to gauge how much progress was made and, like, what was left to accomplish to get it over the finish line so it could be shipped, I noticed that because there were a couple of different people working on it, they had broken up this feature which was basically introducing, like, a new report for one of our teams to get some data on how certain projects are going. And there was, like, a UI portion and then some back-end portion, and then part of the back-end portion also involved a bit of a complex query that was pulled out as a separate ticket on its own. And so, all of those things were slightly, you know, were mostly done but just needed those, like, finishing touches, and then it also needed to come together. And I ended up pairing on this with another thoughtboter, and we spent the same amount of time that the hackathon was, so two days. We spent those two days on that, like, aspect of putting it all together. And I think I was a bit surprised by how much work that was, you know, we had kind of assumed that like, oh, like, all these pieces are mostly finished, but then the bulk of what we spended our time doing was integrating the components together. JOËL: Does this feel like a bit of a finish the rest of the OWL meme? STEPHANIE: What is that meme? I'm not familiar with it, but now I really want to know [laughs]. JOËL: It's a meme kind of making fun of some of these drawing tutorials where they're like, oh; first you draw, like, three circles. STEPHANIE: [laughs] JOËL: And then just finish the rest of the owl. STEPHANIE: [laughs] JOËL: And I was thinking of this beautifully drawn picture. STEPHANIE: Oh, that's so funny. Okay, yeah, I can see it in my head [laughs] now. It's like how to go from three circles, you know, to a recognizable [laughs] owl animal. JOËL: So, especially, they're like, oh, you know, like, we put in all the core classes and everything. It's all just basically there. You just need to connect it all together, and it's basically done [laughs]. And then you spend a lot of time actually getting that what feels like maybe the last 20 or 10% but takes maybe 80% of the time. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that sounds about right. So, you know, kind of working on that got me thinking about the alternative, which is honestly something that I'm still working on getting better at doing in my day-to-day. But there is this idea of a vertical slice or a full-stack slice, and that, basically, involves splitting a large feature into those full-stack slices. So, you have, like, a fully implemented piece rather than breaking them apart by layers of the stack. So, you know, I just see pretty frequently that, like, maybe you'll have a back-end ticket to do the database migration, to create your models, just whatever, maybe your controllers, or maybe that is even, like, another piece and then, like, the UI component. And those are worked on separately, maybe even by different people. But this vertical slice theory talks about how what you really want is to have a very thin piece of the feature that still delivers value but fully works. JOËL: As opposed to what you might call a horizontal slice, which would be something like, oh, I've built three Rails models. They're there. They're in the code. They talk to tables in the database, but there's nothing else happening with them. So, you've done work, but it's also more or less dead code. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a good point. I have definitely seen a lot of unused code paths [laughs] when you kind of go about it that way and maybe, like, that UI ticket never gets completed. JOËL: What are some tips for trying to do some of these narrower slices? Like, I have a ticket, and I have some work I need to do. And I want to break it down because I know it's going to be too big, and maybe the, like, intuitive way to do it is to split it by layers of your stack where I might do all the models, commit, ship that, deploy, then do some controllers, then do some view, or something like that, and you're suggesting instead going full stack. How do you break down the ticket more when all the pieces are interrelated? STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a great point. One easy way to visualize it, especially if you have designs or something for this feature, right? Oftentimes, you can start to parse out sections or components of the user interface to be shipped separately. Like, yes, you would want all of it to have that rich feature, but if it's a view of some cards or something, and then, yeah, there's, like, the you can filter by them. You can search by them. All of those bits can be broken up to be like, well, like, the very basic thing that a customer would want to see is just that list of cards, and you can start there. JOËL: So, aggressively breaking down the card at, like, almost a product level. Instead of breaking it down by technical pieces, say, like, can we get even smaller amounts of behavior while still delivering value? STEPHANIE: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I like that you said product level because I think another axis of that could also be complexity. So, oftentimes, you know, I'll get a feature, and we're like, oh, we want to support these X number of things that we've identified [laughs]. You know, if it's like an e-com app you're building, you know, you're like, "Do we have all these products that we want to make sure to support?" And, you know, one way to break that down into that vertical slice is to ask, like, what if we started with just supporting one before we add variants or something like that? Teasing out, like, what would end up being the added complexity as you're developing, once you have to start considering multiple parameters, I think that is a good way to be able to start working more iteratively. And so, you don't have to hold all of that complexity in your head. JOËL: It's almost a bit of like a YAGNI principle but applied to features rather than to code. STEPHANIE: Yeah. Yeah. I like that. At first, I hesitated a little bit because I've certainly been in the position where someone has said like, "Well, we do really need this [laughs]." JOËL: Uh-huh. And, sometimes, the answer is, yes, we do need that, but what if I gave you a smaller version of that today, and we can do the other thing tomorrow? STEPHANIE: Right. Yeah, it's not like you're rejecting the idea that it's necessary but the way that you get about to that end result, right? JOËL: So, you keep using the term vertical slice or full-stack slice. I think when I hear that term, I think of specifically an article written by former thoughtboter, German Velasco, on our blog. But I don't know if that's maybe a term that has broader use in the industry. Is that a term that you've heard elsewhere? STEPHANIE: That's a good question. I think I mostly hear, you know, some form of like, "Can we break this ticket down further?" and not necessarily, like, if you think about how, right? I'm, like, kind of doing a motion with my hand [chuckles] of, like, slicing from top to bottom as opposed to, you know, horizontal. Yeah, I think that it may not be as common as I wish it were. Even if there's still some amount of adapting or, like, persuading your team members to get on board with this idea, like, I would be interested in, like, introducing that concept or that vocabulary to get teams talking about, like, how do they break down tickets? You know, like, what are they considering? Like, what alternatives are there? Like, are horizontal slices working for them or not? JOËL: A term that I've heard floating around and I haven't really pinned down is Elephant Carpaccio. Have you heard that before? STEPHANIE: I have, only because I, like, discovered a, like, workshop facilitation guide to run an exercise that is basically, like, helping people learn how to identify, like, smaller and smaller full-stack slices. But with the Elephant Carpaccio analogy, it's kind of like you're imagining a feature as big as an elephant. And you can create, like, a really thin slice out of them, and you can have infinite number of slices, but they still end up creating this elephant. And I guess you still get the value of [chuckles] a little carpaccio, a delicious [laughs] appetizer of thinly sliced meat. JOËL: I love a colorful metaphor. So, I'm curious: in your own practice, do you have any sort of guidelines or even heuristics that you like to use to help work in a more, I guess, iterative fashion by working with these smaller slices? STEPHANIE: Yeah, one thought that I had about it is that it plays really well with Outside-In Test Driven Development. JOËL: Hmmm. STEPHANIE: Yeah. So, if, you know, you are starting with a feature test, you have to start somewhere and, you know, maybe starting with, like, the most valuable piece of the feature, right? And you are starting at that level of user interaction if you're using Capybara, for example. And then it kind of forces you to drop down deeper into those layers. But once you go through that whole process of outside-in and then you arrive back to the top, you've created your full-stack feature [laughs], and that is shippable or, like, committable and, you know, potentially even shippable in and of itself. And you already have full test coverage with it. And that was a cool way that I saw some of those two concepts work well together. JOËL: Yeah, there is something really fun about the sort of Red-Green-Refactor cycle that TDD forces on you and that you're typically writing the minimum code required to pass a test. And it really forces you out of that developer brain where you're just like, oh, I've got to cover my edge cases. I've got to engineer for some things. And then maybe you realize you've written code that wasn't necessary. And so, I've found that often when I do, like, actually TDD a feature, I end up with code that's a lot leaner than I would otherwise. STEPHANIE: Yes, lean like a thin slice of Elephant Carpaccio. [laughter] JOËL: One thing you did mention that I wanted to highlight was the fact that when you do this outside-in approach for your tiny slice, at the end, it is shippable. And I think that is a core sort of tenet of this idea is that even though you're breaking things down into smaller and smaller slices, every slice is shippable to production. Like, it doesn't break the build. It doesn't break the website. And it provides some kind of value to the user. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. I think one thing that I still kind of get hung up on sometimes, and I'm trying to, you know, revisit this assumption is that idea of, like, is this too small? Like, is this valuable enough? When I mentioned earlier that I was working on a report, I think there was a part of me that's like, could I just ship a report with two columns [laughs]? And the answer is yes, right? Like, I thought about it, and I was like, well, if that data is, like, not available anywhere else, then, yeah, like, that would be valuable to just get out there. But I think the idea that, like, you know, originally, the hope was to have all of these things, these pieces of information, you know, available through this report, I think that, like, held me back a little bit from wanting to break it down. And I held it a little bit too closely and to be like, well, I really want to, like, you know, deliver something impressive. When you click on it, it's like, wow, like, look at all this data [laughs]. So, I'm trying to push back a little bit on my own preconceived notions that, like, there is such a thing as, like, a too small of a demo. JOËL: I've often worked with this at a commit level, trying to see, like, how small can I get a commit, and what is too small? And now you get into sort of the fraught question of what is a, you know, atomic commit? And I think, for me, where I've sort of come down is that a commit must pass CI. Like, I don't want a commit that's going to go into the main branch. I'm totally pro-work-in-progress commits on a branch; that's fine. But if it's going to get shipped into the main branch, it needs to be green. And it also cannot introduce dead code. STEPHANIE: Ooh. JOËL: So, if you're getting to the point where you're breaking either of those, you've got some sort of, like, partial commit that's maybe too small that needs more to be functional. Or you maybe need to restructure to say, look, instead of adding just ten models, can I add one model but also a little bit of a controller and a view? And now I've got a vertical slice. STEPHANIE: Yeah, which might even be less code [laughs] in the end. JOËL: Yes, it might be less code. STEPHANIE: I really like that heuristic of not introducing dead code, that being a goal. I'm going to think about that a lot [laughs] and try to start introducing that into when I think something is ready. JOËL: Another thing that I'll often do, I guess, that's almost like it doesn't quite fit in the slice metaphor, but it's trying to separate out any kind of refactor work into its own commit that is, you know, still follows those rules: it does not introduce dead code; it does not break the build; it's independently shippable. But that might be something that I do that sets me up for success when I want to do that next slice. So, maybe I'm trying to add a new feature, but just the way we built some of the internal models, they don't have the interface that I need right now, and that's fine because I don't want to build these models in anticipation of the future. I can change them in the future if I need. But now the future has come, and I need a slightly different shape. So, I start by refactoring, commit, maybe even ship that deploy. Maybe I then do my small feature afterwards. Maybe I come back next week and do the small feature, but there are two independent things, two different commits, maybe two different deploys. I don't know that I would call that refactor a slice and that it maybe goes across the full stack; maybe it doesn't. It doesn't show to the user because a refactor, by definition, is just changing the implementation without changing behavior. But I do like to break that out and keep it separate. And I guess it helps keep my slices lean, but I'm not quite sure where refactors fit into this metaphor. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's interesting because, in my head, as I was listening to you talk about that, I was visualizing the owl again, the [laughs] owl meme. And I'm imagining, like, the refactoring making the slice richer, right? It's like you're adding details, and you're...it's like when you end up with the full animal, or the owl, the elephant, whatever, it's not just, like, a shoddy-looking drawing [laughs]. Like, ideally, you know, it has those details. Maybe it has some feathers. It's shaded in, and it is very fleshed out. That's just my weird, little brain trying [laughs] to stretch this metaphor to make it work. Another thing that I want to kind of touch a little bit more about when we're talking about how a lot of the work I was spending recently was that glue work, you know, the putting the pieces together, I think there was some aspect of discovery involved that was missed the first time around when these tickets were broken up more horizontally. I think that one really important piece that I was doing was trying to reconcile the different mental models that each person had when they were working on their separate piece. And so, maybe there's, like, an API, and then the frontend is expecting some sort of data, and, you know, you communicate it in a way that's, like, kind of hand-off-esque. And then when you put it together, it turns out that, oh, the pieces don't quite fit together, and how do you actually decide, like, what that mental model should be? Naming, especially, too, I've, you know, seen so many times when the name...like, an attribute on the frontend is named a little bit different than whatever is on the backend, and it takes a lot of work to unify that, like, to make that decision about, should they be the same? Should they be different? A lot of thought goes into putting those pieces together. And I think the benefit of a full-stack slice is that that work doesn't get lost. Especially if you are doing stuff like estimating, you're kind of discovering that earlier on. And I think what I just talked about, honestly, is what prevents those features from getting shipped in the end if you were working in a more horizontal way. JOËL: Yeah. It's so easy to have, like, big chunks of work in progress forever and never actually shipping. And one of the benefits of these narrower slices is that you're shipping more frequently. And that's, you know, interesting from a coding perspective, but it's kind of an agile methodology thing as well, the, like, ship smaller chunks more frequently. Even though you're maybe taking a little bit more overhead because you're having to, like, take the time to break down tasks, it will make your project move faster as a whole. An aspect that's really interesting to me, though, is what you highlighted about collaboration and the fact that every teammate has a slightly different mental model. And I think if you take the full-stack slice and every member is able to use their mental model, and then close the loop and actually, like, do a complete thing and ship it, I think it allows every other member who's going to have a slightly different mental model of the problem to kind of, yes, and... the other person rather than all sort of independently doing their things and having to reconcile them at the end. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I agree. I think I find, you know, a lot of work broken out into backend and frontend frequently because team members might have different specialties or different preferences about where they would like to be working. But that could also be, like, a really awesome opportunity for pairing [laughs]. Like, if you have someone who's more comfortable in the backend or someone more comfortable in the frontend to work on that full-stack piece together, like, even outside of the in-the-weeds coding aspects of it, it's like you're, at the very least, making sure that those two folks have that same mental model. Or I like what you said about yes, and... because it gets further refined when you have people who are maybe more familiar with, like, something about the app, and they're like, "Oh, like, don't forget about we should consider this." I think that, like, diversity of experience, too, ends up being really valuable in getting that abstraction to be more accurate so that it best represents what you're trying to build. JOËL: Early on, when I was pretty new working at thoughtbot, somebody else at the company had given me the advice that if I wanted to be more effective and work faster on projects, I needed to start breaking my work down into smaller chunks, and this is, you know, fairly junior developer at the time. The advice sounds solid, and everything we've talked about today sounds really solid. Doing it in practice is hard, and it's taken me, you know, a decade, and I'm still working on getting better at it. And I wrote an article about working iteratively that covers a lot of different elements where I've kind of pulled on threads and found out ways where you can get better at this. But I do want to acknowledge that this is not something that's easy and that just like the code that we're working on iteratively, our technique for breaking things down is something that we improve on iteratively. And it's a journey we're all on together. STEPHANIE: I'm really glad that you brought up how hard it is because as I was thinking about this topic, I was considering barriers into working in that vertical slice way, and barriers that I personally experience, as well as just I have seen on other teams. I had alluded to some earlier about, like, the perception of if I ship this small thing, is it impressive enough, or is it valuable enough? And I think I realized that, like, I was getting caught up in, like, the perception part, right? And maybe it doesn't matter [chuckles], and I just need to kind of shift the way I'm thinking about it. And then, there are more real barriers or, like, concrete barriers that are tough. Long feedback loops is one that I've encountered on a team where it's just really hard to ship frequently because PR reviews aren't happening fast enough or your CI or deployment process is just so long that you're like, I want to stuff everything into [chuckles] this one PR so that at least I won't have to sit and wait [laughs]. And that can be really hard to work against, but it could also be a really interesting signal about whether your processes are working for you. It could be an opportunity to be like, "I would like to work this way, but here are the things that are preventing me from really embracing it. And is there any improvement I can make in those areas?" JOËL: Yeah. There's a bit of a, like, vicious cycle that happens there sometimes, especially around PR review, where when it takes a long time to get reviews, you tend to decide, well, I'm going to not make a bunch of PRs; I'm going to make one big one. But then big PRs are very, like, time intensive and require you to commit a lot of, like, focus and energy to them, which means that when you ask me for a review, I'm going to wait longer before I review it, which is going to incentivize you to build bigger PRs, which is going to incentivize me to wait longer, and now we just...it's a vicious cycle. So, I know I've definitely been on projects where a question the team has had is, "How can we improve our process? We want faster code review." And there's some aspect of that that's like, look, everybody just needs to be more disciplined or more alert and try to review things more frequently. But there's also an element of if you do make things smaller, you make it much easier for people to review your code in between other things. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I really liked you mentioning incentives because I think that could be a really good place to start if you or your team are interested in making a change like this, you know, making an effort to look at your team processes and being like, what is incentivized here, and what does our system encourage or discourage? And if you want to be making that shift, like, that could be a good place to start in identifying places for improvement. JOËL: And that happens on a broader system level as well. If you look at what does it take to go from a problem that is going to turn into a ticket to in-production in front of a client, how long is that loop? How complex are the steps to get there? The longer that loop is, the slower you're iterating. And the easier it is for things to just get hung up or for you to waste time, the harder it is for you to change course. And so, oftentimes, I've come on to projects with clients and sort of seen something like that, and sort of seen other pain points that the team has and sort of found that one of the root causes is saying, "Look, we need to tighten that feedback loop, and that's going to improve all these other things that are kind of constellation around it." STEPHANIE: Agreed. On that note, shall we wrap up? JOËL: Let's wrap up. STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeee!!!!!!! AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.
Stephanie is hosting a holiday cookie swap. Joël talks about participating in thoughtbot's end-of-the-year hackathon, Ralphapalooza. We had a great year on the show! The hosts wrap up the year and discuss their favorite episodes, the articles, books, and blog posts they've read and loved, and other highlights of 2023 (projects, conferences, etc). Olive Oil Sugar Cookies With Pistachios & Lemon Glaze (https://food52.com/recipes/82228-olive-oil-sugar-cookies-recipe-with-pistachios-lemon) thoughtbot's Blog (https://thoughtbot.com/blog) Episode 398: Developing Heuristics For Writing Software (https://www.bikeshed.fm/398) Episode 374: Discrete Math (https://www.bikeshed.fm/374) Episode 405: Sandi Metz's Rules (https://www.bikeshed.fm/405) Episode 391: Learn with APPL (https://www.bikeshed.fm/391) Engineering Management for the Rest of Us (https://www.engmanagement.dev/) Confident Ruby (https://pragprog.com/titles/agcr/confident-ruby/) Working with Maybe from Elm Europe (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43eM4kNbb6c) Sustainable Rails Book (https://sustainable-rails.com/) Episode 368: Sustainable Web Development (https://www.bikeshed.fm/368) Domain Modeling Made Functional (https://pragprog.com/titles/swdddf/domain-modeling-made-functional/) Simplifying Tests by Extracting Side Effects (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/simplify-tests-by-extracting-side-effects) The Math Every Programmer Needs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzYYT40T8G8) Mermaid.js sequence diagrams (https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/sequenc) Sense of Belonging and Software Teams (https://www.drcathicks.com/post/sense-of-belonging-and-software-teams) Preemptive Pluralization is (Probably) Not Evil (https://www.swyx.io/preemptive-pluralization) Digging through the ashes (https://everythingchanges.us/blog/digging-through-the-ashes/) Transcript: JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: I am so excited to talk about this. I'm, like, literally smiling [chuckles] because I'm so pumped. Sometimes, you know, we get on to record, and I'm like, oh, I got to think of something that's new, like, my life is so boring. I have nothing to share. But today, I am excited to tell you about [chuckles] the holiday cookie swap that I'm hosting this Sunday [laughs] that I haven't been able to stop thinking about or just thinking about all the cookies that I'm going to get to eat. It's going to be my first time throwing this kind of shindig, and I'm so pleased with myself because it's such a great idea. You know, it's like, you get to share cookies, and you get to have all different types of cookies, and then people get to take them home. And I get to see all my friends. And I'm really [chuckles] looking forward to it. JOËL: I don't think I've ever been to a cookie swap event. How does that work? Everybody shows up with cookies, and then you leave with what you want? STEPHANIE: That's kind of the plan. I think it's not really a...there's no rules [laughs]. You can make it whatever you want it to be. But I'm asking everyone to bring, like, two dozen cookies. And, you know, I'm hoping for a lot of fun variety. Myself I'm planning on making these pistachio olive oil cookies with a lemon glaze and also, maybe, like, a chewy ginger cookie. I haven't decided if I'm going to go so extra to make two types, but we'll see. And yeah, we'll, you know, probably have some drinks and be playing Christmas music, and yeah, we'll just hang out. And I'm hoping that everyone can kind of, like, take home a little goodie bag of cookies as well because I don't think we'll be going through all of them. JOËL: Hearing you talk about this gave me an absolutely terrible idea. STEPHANIE: Terrible or terribly awesome? [laughs] JOËL: So, imagine you have the equivalent of, let's say, a LAN party. You all show up with your laptops. STEPHANIE: [laughs] JOËL: You're on a network, and then you swap browser cookies randomly. STEPHANIE: [laughs] Oh no. That would be really funny. That's a developer's take on a cookie party [laughs] if I've ever heard one. JOËL: Slightly terrifying. Now I'm just browsing, and all of a sudden, I guess I'm logged into your Facebook or something. Maybe you only swap the tracking cookies. So, I'm not actually logged into your Facebook, but I just get to see the different ad networks it would typically show you, and you would see my ads. That's maybe kind of fun or maybe terrifying, depending on what kind of ads you normally see. STEPHANIE: That's really funny. I'm thinking about how it would just be probably very misleading and confusing for those [laughs] analytics spenders, but that's totally fine, too. Might I suggest also having real cookies to munch on as well while you are enjoying [laughs] this browser cookie-swapping party? JOËL: I 100% agree. STEPHANIE: [laughs] JOËL: I'm curious: where do you stand on raisins in oatmeal cookies? STEPHANIE: Ooh. JOËL: This is a divisive question. STEPHANIE: They're fine. I'll let other people eat them. And occasionally, I will also eat an oatmeal cookie with raisins, but I much prefer if the raisins are chocolate chips [chuckles]. JOËL: That is the correct answer. STEPHANIE: [laughs] Thank you. You know, I understand that people like them. They're not for me [laughs]. JOËL: It's okay. Fans can send us hate mail about why we're wrong about oatmeal cookies. STEPHANIE: Yeah, honestly, that's something that I'm okay with being wrong about on the internet [laughs]. So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: So, as of this recording, we've just recently done thoughtbot's end-of-the-year hackathon, what we call Ralphapalooza. And this is sort of a time where you kind of get to do pretty much any sort of company or programming-related activity that you want as long as...you have to pitch it and get at least two other colleagues to join you on the project, and then you've got two days to work on it. And then you can share back to the team what you've done. I was on a project where we were trying to write a lot of blog posts for the thoughtbot blog. And so, we're just kind of getting together and pitching ideas, reviewing each other's articles, writing things at a pretty intense rate for a couple of days, trying to flood the blog with articles for the next few weeks. So, if you're following the blog and as the time this episode gets released, you're like, "Wow, there's been a lot of articles from the thoughtbot blog recently," that's why. STEPHANIE: Yes, that's awesome. I love how much energy that the blog post-writing party garnered. Like, I was just kind of observing from afar, but it sounds like, you know, people who maybe had started posts, like, throughout the year had dedicated time and a good reason to revisit them, even if they had been, you know, kind of just, like, sitting in a draft for a while. And I think what also seemed really nice was people were just around to support, to review, and were able to make that a priority. And it was really cool to see all the blog posts that are queued up for December as a result. JOËL: People wrote some great stuff. So, I'm excited to see all of those come out. I think we've got pretty much a blog post every day coming out through almost the end of December. So, it's exciting to see that much content created. STEPHANIE: Yeah. If our listeners want more thoughtbot content, check out our blog. JOËL: So, as mentioned, we're recording this at the end of the year. And I thought it might be fun to do a bit of a retrospective on what this year has been like for you and I, Stephanie, both in terms of different work that we've done, the learnings we've had, but maybe also look back a little bit on 2023 for The Bike Shed and what that looked like. STEPHANIE: Yes. I really enjoyed thinking about my year and kind of just reveling and having been doing this podcast for over a year now. And yeah, I'm excited to look back a little bit on both things we have mentioned on the show before and things maybe we haven't. To start, I'm wondering if you want to talk a little bit about some of our favorite episodes. JOËL: Favorite episodes, yes. So, I've got a couple that are among my favorites. We did a lot of good episodes this year. I really liked them. But I really appreciated the episode we did on heuristics, that's Episode 398, where we got to talk a little bit about what goes into a good heuristic, how we tend to come up with them. A lot of those, like, guidelines and best practices that you hear people talk about in the software world and how to make your own but then also how to deal with the ones you hear from others in the software community. So, I think that was an episode that the idea, on the surface, seemed really basic, and then we went pretty deep with it. And that was really fun. I think a second one that I really enjoyed was also the one that I did with Sara Jackson as a guest, talking about discrete math and its relevance to the day-to-day work that we do. That's Episode 374. We just had a lot of fun with that. I think that's a topic that more developers, more web developers, would benefit from just getting a little bit more discrete math in their lives. And also, there's a clip in there where Sara reinterprets a classic marketing jingle with some discrete math terms in there instead. It was a lot of fun. So, we'd recommend people checking that one out. STEPHANIE: Nice. Yes. I also loved those episodes. The heuristics one was really great. I'm glad you mentioned it because one of my favorite episodes is kind of along a similar vein. It's one of the more recent ones that we did. It's Episode 405, where we did a bit of a retro on Sandi Metz' Rules For Developers. And those essentially are heuristics, right? And we got to kind of be like, hey, these are someone else's heuristics. How do we feel about them? Have we embodied them ourselves? Do we follow them? What parts do we take or leave? And I just remember having a really enjoyable conversation with you about that. You and I have kind of treated this podcast a little bit like our own two-person book club [laughs]. So, it felt a little bit like that, right? Where we were kind of responding to, you know, something that we both have read up on, or tried, or whatever. So, that was a good one. Another one of my favorite episodes was Episode 391: Learn with APPL [laughs], in which we basically developed our own learning framework, or actually, credit goes to former Bike Shed host, Steph Viccari, who came up with this fun, little acronym to talk about different things that we all kind of need in our work lives to be fulfilled. Our APPL stands for Adventure, Passion, Profit, and Low risk. And that one was really fun just because it was, like, the opposite of what I just described where we're not discussing someone else's work but discovered our own thing out of, you know, these conversations that we have on the show, conversations we have with our co-workers. And yeah, I'm trying to make it a thing, so I'm plugging it again [laughs]. JOËL: I did really like that episode. One, I think, you know, this APPL framework is a little bit playful, which makes it fun. But also, I think digging into it really gives some insight on the different aspects that are relevant when planning out further growth or where you want to invest your sort of professional development time. And so, breaking down those four elements led to some really insightful conversation around where do I want to invest time learning in the next year? STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. JOËL: By the way, we're mentioning a bunch of our favorite things, some past episodes, and we'll be talking about a lot of other types of resources. We will be linking all of these in the show notes. So, for any of our listeners who are like, "Oh, I wonder what is that thing they mentioned," there's going to be a giant list that you can check out. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I love whenever we are able to put out an episode with a long list of things [laughs]. JOËL: It's one of the fun things that we get to do is like, oh yeah, we referenced all these things. And there is this sort of, like, further reading, more threads to pull on for people who might be interested. So, you'd mentioned, Stephanie, that, you know, sometimes we kind of treat this as our own little mini, like, two-person book club. I know that you're a voracious reader, and you've mentioned so many books over the course of the year. Do you have maybe one or two books that have been kind of your favorites or that have stood out to you over 2023? STEPHANIE: I do. I went back through my reading list in preparation for this episode and wanted to call out the couple of books that I finished. And I think I have, you know, I mentioned I was reading them along the way. But now I get to kind of see how having read them influenced my work life this past year, which is pretty cool. So, one of them is Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner. And that's actually one that really stuck with me, even though I'm not a manager; I don't have any plans to become a manager. But one thing that she talks about early on is this idea of having a shared value system. And you can have that at the company level, right? You have your kind of corporate values. You can have that at the team level with this smaller group of people that you get to know better and kind of form relationships with. And then also, part of that is, like, knowing your individual values. And having alignment in all three of those tiers is really important in being a functioning and fulfilled team, I think. And that is something that I don't think was really spelled out very explicitly for me before, but it was helpful in framing, like, past work experiences, where maybe I, like, didn't have that alignment and now identify why. And it has helped me this year as I think about my client work, too, and kind of where I sit from that perspective and helps me realize like, oh, like, this is why I'm feeling this way, and this is why it's not quite working. And, like, what do I do about it now? So, I really enjoyed that. JOËL: Would you recommend this book to others who are maybe not considering a management path? STEPHANIE: Yeah. JOËL: So, even if you're staying in the IC track, at least for now, you think that's a really powerful book for other people. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I would say so. You know, maybe not, like, all of it, but there's definitely parts that, you know, she's writing for the rest of us, like, all of us maybe not necessarily natural born leaders who knew that that's kind of what we wanted. And so, I can see how people, you know, who are uncertain or maybe even, like, really clearly, like, "I don't think that's for me," being able to get something out of, like, either those lessons in leadership or just to feel a bit, like, validated [laughs] about the type of work that they aren't interested in. Another book that I want to plug real quick is Confident Ruby by Avdi Grimm. That one was one I referenced a lot this year, working with newer developers especially. And it actually provided a good heuristic [laughs] for me to talk about areas that we could improve code during code review. I think that wasn't really vocabulary that I'd used, you know, saying, like, "Hey, how confident is this code? How confident is this method and what it will receive and what it's returning?" And I remember, like, several conversations that I ended up having on my teams about, like, return types as a result and them having learned, like, a new way to view their code, and I thought that was really cool. JOËL: I mean, learning to deal with uncertainty and nil in Ruby or maybe even, like, error states is just such a core part of writing software. I feel like this is something that I almost wish everyone was sort of assigned maybe, like, a year into their programming career because, you know, I think the first year there's just so many things you've got to learn, right? Like basic programming and, like, all these things. But, like, you're looking maybe I can start going a little bit deeper into some topic. I think that some topic, like, pretty high up, would be building a mental model for how to deal with uncertainty because it's such a source of bugs. And Avdi Grimm's book, Confident Ruby, is...I would put that, yeah, definitely on a recommended reading list for everybody. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I agree. And I think that's why I found myself, you know, then recommending it to other people on my team and kind of having something I can point to. And that was really helpful in the kind of mentorship that I wanted to offer. JOËL: I did a deep dive into uncertainty and edge cases in programs several years back when I was getting into Elm. And I was giving a talk at Elm Europe about how Elm handles uncertainty, which is a little bit different than how Ruby does it. But a lot of the underlying concepts are very similar in terms of quarantining uncertainty and pushing it to the edges and things like that. Trying to write code that is more confident that is definitely a term that I used. And so Confident Ruby ended up being a little bit of an inspiration for my own journey there, and then, eventually, the talk that I gave that summarized my learnings there. STEPHANIE: Nice. Do you have any reading recommendations or books that stood out to you this year? JOËL: So, I've been reading two technical books kind of in tandem this year. I have not finished either of them, but I have been enjoying them. One is Sustainable Rails by David Bryant Copeland. We had an episode at the beginning of this year where we talked a little bit about our initial impressions from, I think, the first chapter of the book. But I really love that vocabulary of writing Ruby and Rails code, in particular, in a way that is sustainable for a team. And that premise, I think, just gives a really powerful mindset to approach structuring Rails apps. And the other book that I've been reading is Domain Modeling Made Functional, so kind of looking at some domain-driven design ideas. But most of the literature is typically written to an object-oriented audience, so taking a look at it from more of a functional programming perspective has been really interesting. And then I've been, weirdly enough, taking some of those ideas and translating back into the object-oriented world to apply to code I'm writing in Ruby. I think that has been a very useful exercise. STEPHANIE: That's awesome. And it's weird and cool how all those things end up converging, right? And exploring different paradigms really just lets you develop more insight into wherever you're working. JOËL: Sometimes the sort of conversion step that you have to do, that translation, can be a good tool for kind of solidifying learnings or better understanding. So, I'm doing this sort of deep learning thing where I'm taking notes as I go along. And those notes are typically around, what other concepts can I connect ideas in the book? So, I'll be reading and say, okay, on page 150, he mentioned this concept. This reminds me of this idea from TDD. I could see this applying in a different way in an object-oriented world. And interestingly, if you apply this, it sort of converges on maybe single responsibility or whatever other OO principle. And that's a really interesting connection. I always love it when you do see sort of two or three different angles converging together on the same idea. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. JOËL: I've written a blog post, I think, two years ago around how some theory from functional programming sort of OO best practices and then TDD all kind of converge on sort of the same approach to designing software. So, you can sort of go from either direction, and you kind of end in the same place or sort of end up rediscovering principles from the other two. We'll link that in the show notes. But that's something that I found was really exciting. It didn't directly come from this book because, again, I wrote this a couple of years ago. But it is always fun when you're exploring two or three different paradigms, and you find a convergence. It really deepens your understanding of what's happening. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. I like what you said about how this book is different because it is making that connection between things that maybe seem less related on the surface. Like you're saying, there's other literature written about how domain modeling and object-oriented programming make more sense a little bit more together. But it is that, like, bringing in of different schools of thought that can lead to a lot of really interesting discovery about those foundational concepts. JOËL: I feel like dabbling in other paradigms and in other languages has made me a better Ruby developer and a better OO programmer, a lot of the work I've done in Elm. This book that I'm reading is written in F#. And all these things I can kind of bring back, and I think, have made me a better Ruby developer. Have you had any experiences like that? STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think I've talked a little bit about it on the show before, but I can't exactly recall. There were times when my exploration in static typing ended up giving me that different mindset in terms of the next time I was coding in Ruby after being in TypeScript for a while, I was, like, thinking in types a lot more, and I think maybe swung a little bit towards, like, not wanting to metaprogram as much [laughs]. But I think that it was a useful, like you said, exercise sometimes, too, and just, like, doing that conversion or translating in your head to see more options available to you, and then deciding where to go from there. So, we've talked a bit about technical books that we've read. And now I kind of want to get into some in-person highlights for the year because you and I are both on the conference circuit and had some fun trips this year. JOËL: Yeah. So, I spoke at RailsConf this spring. I gave a talk on discrete math and how it is relevant in day-to-day work for developers, actually inspired by that Bike Shed episode that I mentioned earlier. So, that was kind of fun, turning a Bike Shed episode into a conference talk. And then just recently, I was at RubyConf in San Diego, and I gave a talk there around time. We often talk about time as a single quantity, but there's some subtle distinctions, so the difference between a moment in time versus a duration and some of the math that happens around that. And I gave a few sort of visual mental models to help people keep track of that. As of this recording, the talk is not out yet, so we're not going to be able to link to it. But if you're listening to this later in 2024, you can probably just Google RubyConf "Which Time Is It?" That's the name of the talk. And you'll be able to find it. STEPHANIE: Awesome. So, as someone who is giving talks and attending conferences every year, I'm wondering, was this year particularly different in any way? Was there something that you've, like, experienced or felt differently community-wise in 2023? JOËL: Conferences still feel a little bit smaller than they were pre-COVID. I think they are still bouncing back. But there's definitely an energy that's there that's nice to have on the conference scene. I don't know, have you experienced something similar? STEPHANIE: I think I know what you're talking about where, you know, there was that time when we weren't really meeting in person. And so, now we're still kind of riding that wave of, like, getting together again and being able to celebrate and have fun in that way. I, this year, got to speak at Blue Ridge Ruby in June. And that was a first-time regional conference. And so, that was, I think, something I had noticed, too, is the emergence of regional conferences as being more viable options after not having conferences for a few years. And as a regional conference, it was even smaller than the bigger national Ruby Central conferences. I really enjoyed the intimacy of that, where it was just a single track. So, everyone was watching talks together and then was on breaks together, so you could mingle. There was no FOMO of like, oh, like, I can't make this talk because I want to watch this other one. And that was kind of nice because I could, like, ask anyone, "What did you think of, like, X talk or like the one that we just kind of came out of and had that shared experience?" That was really great. And I got to go tubing for the first time [laughs] in Asheville. That's a memory, but I am still thinking about that as we get into winter. I'm like, oh yeah, the glorious days of summer [laughs] when I was getting to float down a lazy river. JOËL: Nice. I wasn't sure if this was floating down a lazy river on an inner tube or if this was someone takes you out on a lake with a speed boat, and you're getting pulled. STEPHANIE: [laughs] That's true. As a person who likes to relax [laughs], I definitely prefer that kind of tubing over a speed boat [laughs]. JOËL: What was the topic of your talk? STEPHANIE: So, I got to give my talk about nonviolent communication in pair programming for a second time. And that was also my first time giving a talk for a second time [laughs]. That was cool, too, because I got to revisit something and go deeper and kind of integrate even more experiences I had. I just kind of realized that even if you produce content once, like, there's always ways to deepen it or shape it a little better, kind of, you know, just continually improving it and as you learn more and as you get more experience and change. JOËL: Yeah. I've never given a talk twice, and now you've got me wondering if that's something I should do. Because making a bespoke talk for every conference is a lot of work, and it might be nice to be able to use it more than once. Especially I think for some of the regional conferences, there might be some value there in people who might not be able to go to a big national conference but would still like to see your talk live. Having a mix of maybe original content and then content that is sort of being reshared is probably a great combo for a regional conference. STEPHANIE: Yeah, definitely. That's actually a really good idea, yeah, to just be able to have more people see that content and access it. I like that a lot. And I think it could be really cool for you because we were just talking about all the ways that our mental models evolve the more stuff that we read and consume. And I think there's a lot of value there. One other conference that I went to this year that I just want to highlight because it was really cool that I got to do this: I went to RubyKaigi in Japan [laughs] back in the spring. And I had never gone to an international conference before, and now I'm itching to do more of that. So, it would be remiss not to mention it [laughs]. I'm definitely inspired to maybe check out some of the conferences outside of the U.S. in 2024. I think I had always been a little intimidated. I was like, oh, like, it's so far [laughs]. Do I really have, like, that good of a reason to make a trip out there? But being able to meet Rubyists from different countries and seeing how it's being used in other parts of the world, I think, made me realize that like, oh yeah, like, beyond my little bubble, there's so many cool things happening and people out there who, again, like, have that shared love of Ruby. And connecting with them was, yeah, just so new and something that I would want to do more of. So, another thing that we haven't yet gotten into is our actual work-work or our client work [laughs] that we do at thoughtbot for this year. Joël, I'm wondering, was there anything especially fun or anything that really stood out to you in terms of client work that you had to do this year? JOËL: So, two things come to mind that were novel for me. One is I did a Rails integration against Snowflake, the data warehouse, using an ODBC connection. We're not going through an API; we're going through this DB connection. And I never had to do that before. I also got to work with the new-ish Rails multi-database support, which actually worked quite nice. That was, I think, a great learning experience. Definitely ran into some weird edge cases, or some days, I was really frustrated. Some days, I was actually, like, digging into the source code of the C bindings of the ODBC gem. Those were not the best days. But definitely, I think, that kind of integration and then Snowflake as a technology was really interesting to explore. The other one that's been really interesting, I think, has been going much deeper into the single sign-on world. I've been doing an integration against a kind of enterprise SAML server that wants to initiate sign-in requests from their portal. And this is a bit of an alphabet soup, but the term here is IdP-initiated SSO. And so, I've been working with...it's a combination of this third-party kind of corporate SAML system, our application, which is a Rails app, and then Auth0 kind of sitting in the middle and getting all of them to talk to each other. There's a ridiculous number of redirects because we're talking SAML on one side and OIDC on the other and getting everything to line up correctly. But that's been a really fun, new set of things to learn. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that does sound complicated [laughs] just based on what you shared with me, but very cool. And I was excited to hear that you had had a good experience with the Rails multi-database part because that was another thing that I remember being...it had piqued my interest when it first came out. I hope I get to, you know, utilize that feature on a project soon because that sounds really fun. JOËL: One thing I've had to do for this SSO project is lean a lot on sequence diagrams, which are those diagrams that sort of show you, like, being redirected from different places, and, like, okay, server one talks to server two talks, to the browser. And so, when I've got so many different actors and sort of controllers being passed around everywhere, it's been hard to keep track of it in my head. And so, I've been doing a lot of these diagrams, both for myself to help understand it during development, and then also as documentation to share back with the team. And I found that Mermaid.js supports sequence diagrams as a diagram type. Long-term listeners of the show will know that I am a sucker for a good diagram. I love using Mermaid for a lot of things because it's supported. You can embed it in a lot of places, including in GitHub comments, pull requests. You can use it in various note systems like Notion or Obsidian. And you can also just generate your own on mermaid.live. And so, that's been really helpful to communicate with the rest of the team, like, "Hey, we've got this whole process where we've got 14 redirects across four different servers. Here's what it looks like. And here, like, we're getting a bug on, you know, redirect number 8 of 14. I wonder why," and then you can start a conversation around debugging that. STEPHANIE: Cool. I was just about to ask what tool you're using to generate your sequence diagrams. I didn't know that Mermaid supported them. So, that's really neat. JOËL: So, last year, when we kind of looked back over 2022, one thing that was really interesting that we did is we talked about what are articles that you find yourself linking to a lot that are just kind of things that maybe were on your mind or that were a big part of conversations that happened over the year? So, maybe for you, Stephanie, in 2023, what are one or two articles that you find yourself sort of constantly linking to other people? STEPHANIE: Yes. I'm excited you asked about this. One of them is an article by a person named Cat Hicks, who has a PhD in experimental psychology. She's a data scientist and social scientist. And lately, she's been doing a lot of research into the sense of belonging on software teams. And I think that's a theme that I am personally really interested in, and I think has kind of been something more people are talking about in the last few years. And she is kind of taking that maybe more squishy idea and getting numbers for it and getting statistics, and I think that's really cool. She points out belonging as, like, a different experience from just, like, happiness and fulfillment, and that really having an impact on how well a team is functioning. I got to share this with a few people who were, you know, just in that same boat of, like, trying to figure out, what are the behaviors kind of on my team that make me feel supported or not supported? And there were a lot of interesting discussions that came out of sharing this article and kind of talking about, especially in software, where we can be a little bit dogmatic. And we've kind of actually joked about it on the podcast [chuckles] before about, like, we TDD or don't TDD, or, you know, we use X tool, and that's just like what we have to do here. She writes a little bit about how that can end up, you know, not encouraging people offering, like, differing opinions and being able to feel like they have a say in kind of, like, the team's direction. And yeah, I just really enjoyed a different way of thinking about it. Joël, what about you? What are some articles you got bookmarked? [chuckles] JOËL: This year, I started using a bookmark manager, Raindrop.io. That's been nice because, for this episode, I could just look back on, what are some of my bookmarks this year? And be like, oh yeah, this is the thing that I have been using a lot. So, an article that I've been linking is an article called Preemptive Pluralization is (Probably) Not Evil. And it kind of talks a little bit about how going from code that works over a collection of two items to a collection of, you know, 20 items is very easy. But sometimes, going from one to two can be really challenging. And when are the times where you might want to preemptively make something more than one item? So, maybe using it has many association rather than it has one or making an attribute a collection rather than a single item. Controversial is not the word for it, but I think challenges a little bit of the way people typically like to write code. But across this year, I've run into multiple projects where they have been transitioning from one to many. That's been an interesting article to surface as part of those conversations. Whether your team wants to do this preemptively or whether they want to put it off and say in classic YAGNI (You Aren't Gonna Need It) form, "We'll make it single for now, and then we'll go plural," that's a conversation for your team. But I think this article is a great way to maybe frame the conversation. STEPHANIE: Cool. Yeah, I really like that almost, like, a counterpoint to YAGNI [laughs], which I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that out loud [laughs] before. But as soon as you said preemptive pluralization is not evil, I thought about all the times that I've had to, like, write code, text in which a thing, a variable could be either one or many [laughs] things. And I was like, ooh, maybe this will solve that problem for me [laughs]. JOËL: Speaking of pluralization, I'm sure you've been linking to more than just one article this year. Do you have another one that you find yourself coming up in conversations where you've always kind of like, "Hey, dropping this link," where it's almost like your thing? STEPHANIE: Yes. And that is basically everything written by Mandy Brown [laughs], who is a work coach that I actually started working with this year. And one of the articles that really inspired me or really has been a topic of conversation among my friends and co-workers is she has a blog post called Digging Through the Ashes. And it's kind of a meditation on, like, post burnout or, like, what's next, and how we have used this word as kind of a catch-all to describe, you know, this collective sense of being just really tired or demoralized or just, like, in need of a break. And what she offers in that post is kind of, like, some suggestions about, like, how can we be more specific here and really, you know, identify what it is that you're needing so that you can change how you engage with work? Because burnout can mean just that you are bored. It can mean that you are overworked. It can mean a lot of things for different people, right? And so, I definitely don't think I'm alone [laughs] in kind of having to realize that, like, oh, these are the ways that my work is or isn't changing and, like, where do I want to go next so that I might feel more sustainable? I know that's, like, a keyword that we talked about earlier, too. And that, on one hand, is both personal but also technical, right? It, like, informs the kinds of decisions that we make around our codebase and what we are optimizing for. And yeah, it is both technical and cultural. And it's been a big theme for me this year [laughs]. JOËL: Yeah. Would you say it's safe to say that sustainability would be, if you want to, like, put a single word on your theme for the year? Would that be a fair word to put there? STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think so. Definitely discovering what that means for me and helping other people discover what that means for them, too. JOËL: I feel like we kicked off the year 2023 by having that discussion of Sustainable Rails and how different technical practices can make the work there feel sustainable. So, I think that seems to have really carried through as a theme through the year for you. So, that's really cool to have seen that. And I'm sure listeners throughout the year have heard you mention these different books and articles. Maybe you've also been able to pick up a little bit on that. So, I'm glad that we do this show because you get a little bit of, like, all the bits and pieces in the day-to-day, and then we aggregate it over a year, and you can look back. You can be like, "Oh yeah, I definitely see that theme in your work." STEPHANIE: Yeah, I'm glad you pointed that out. It is actually really interesting to see how something that we had talked about early, early on just had that thread throughout the year. And speaking of sustainability, we are taking a little break from the show to enjoy the holidays. We'll be off for a few weeks, and we will be back with a new Bike Shed in January. JOËL: Cheers to a new year. STEPHANIE: Yeah, cheers to a new year. Wrapping up 2023. And we will see you all in 2024. JOËL: On that note, shall we wrap up the whole year? STEPHANIE: Let's wrap up. Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeee!!!!!!! AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at tbot.io/ referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.
Stephanie is consciously trying to make meetings better for herself by limiting distractions. A few episodes ago, Joël talked about a frustrating bug he was chasing down and couldn't get closure on, so he had to move on. This week, that bug popped up again and he chased it down! AND he got to use binary search to find its source–which was pretty cool! Together, Stephanie and Joël discuss dependency graphs as a mental model, and while they apply to code, they also help when it comes to planning tasks and systems. They talk about coupling, cycles, re-structuring, and visualizations. Ruby Graph Library (https://github.com/monora/rgl) Graphviz (https://graphviz.org/) Using a Dependency Graph to Visualize RSpec let (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/using-a-dependency-graph-to-visualize-rspec-let) Mermaid.js (https://mermaid.js.org/) Strangler Fig pattern (https://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerFigApplication.html) Transcript: JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, I'm always trying to make meetings better for me [chuckles], more tolerable or more enjoyable. And in meetings a lot, I find myself getting distracted when I don't necessarily want to be. You know, oftentimes, I really do want to try to pay attention to just what I'm doing in that meeting in the moment. In fact, just now, I was thinking about the little tidbit I had shared on a previous episode about priorities, where really, you know, you can only have one priority [laughs] at a time. And so, in that moment, hopefully, my priority is the meeting that I'm in. But, you know, I find myself, like, accidentally opening Slack or, like, oh, was I running the test suite just a few minutes before the meeting started? Let me just go check on that really quick. And, oh no, there's a failure, oh God, that red is really, you know, drawing my eye. And, like, could I just debug it really quick and get that satisfying green so then I can pay attention to the meeting? And so on and so forth. I'm sure I'm not alone in this [laughs]. And I end up not giving the meeting my full attention, even though I want to be, even though I should be. So, one thing that I started doing about a year ago is origami. [laughs] And that ended up being a thing that I would do with my hands during meetings so that I wasn't using my mouse, using my keyboard, and just, like, looking at other stuff in the remote meeting world that I live in. So, I started with paper stars, made many, many paper stars, [laughs] and then, I graduated to paper cranes. [laughs] And so, that's been my origami craft of choice lately. Then now, I have little cranes everywhere around the house. I've kind of created a little paper crane army. [laughs] And my partner has enjoyed putting them in random places around the house for me [laughs] to find. So, maybe I'll open a cabinet, and suddenly, [laughs] a paper crane is just there. And I think I realized that I've actually gotten quite good at doing these crafts. And it's been interesting to kind of be putting in the hours of doing this craft but also not be investing time, like, outside of meetings. And I'm finding that I'm getting better at this thing, so that seemed pretty cool. And it is mindless enough that I'm mentally just paying attention but, yeah, like, building that muscle memory to perfecting the craft of origami. JOËL: I'm curious, for your army of paper cranes, is there a standard size that you make, or do you have, like, a variety of sizes? STEPHANIE: I have this huge stack of, like, 500 sheets of origami paper that are all the same size. So, they're all about, let's say, two or three inches large. But I think the tiny ones I've seen, really small paper cranes, maybe that would be, like, the next level to tackle because working with smaller paper seems, you know, even more challenging. JOËL: I'd imagine the ratio of, like, paper thickness to the size of the thing that you're making is different. STEPHANIE: At this point, they say that if you make 1,000, then you bring good luck. I think I'm well on my way [laughs] to hopefully being blessed with good luck in this household of my little paper crane army. JOËL: It's interesting that you mentioned the power of having something tactile to do with your hands during a meeting, and I definitely relate to that. I feel like it's so easy, even, like, mindlessly, to just hit Command-Tab when I'm doing things on a screen. Like, my hands are on the keyboard. If I'm not doing something, I'm just going to mindlessly hit Command-Tab. It's kind of like on your phone sometimes. I don't know if you do this, like, just scrolling side to side. You're not actually doing anything. You just want motion with your fingers. STEPHANIE: Yes. I know exactly what you're talking about. And it's funny because it's a bit of a duality where, you know, when you are in your development workflow, you want things to be as quick and convenient as possible, so that Command-Tab, you know, is very easy. It's just built in, and that helps speed up your, you know, day-to-day work. But then it's also that little bit of mindlessness, I think, that can get you down the distraction path. When I was first looking for something to do with my hands, to have, like, a little tactile thing to keep me focused in meetings, I did explore getting one of those fidget cubes; I have to say. [laughs] It's just a little toy, you know, that comes with a bunch of different settings for you to fidget with. There's, like, a ball you can roll, you know, with your thumb, or maybe some buttons to click, and it gives you that really satisfying tactile experience. And I know they work really well for a lot of people, but I've really enjoyed the, I guess, the unexpected benefits [chuckles] of getting better at a hobby [laughs] while spending my time at my work. Joël, what is new with you? JOËL: So, a few episodes ago, I talked about a really kind of frustrating bug that I was chasing down that was due to some, like, non-determinism in the environment. And it kind of came, and then it went away. And I wasn't able to get sort of closure on that and had to move on. Well, this week, that bug popped up again, and this time, I was actually able to chase it down. So, that felt really exciting. And I got to use binary search to try to find the source of it, which made me feel really cool. STEPHANIE: Oooh, do tell. What ended up being the issue? JOËL: I'm connecting to an external Snowflake data warehouse, and ActiveRecord tries to fetch the schema and crashes as part of that with some cryptic error that originates from the C extension ODBC Ruby driver package. I figured out that it's probably something to do with, like, a particular table name or something in the table metadata when we're pulling this schema that we're not happy about. But I don't know which table is the one that it's not happy with. Well, this time, I was able to figure out, by reading through some of the documentation, that I can pull subsets of the schema. So, I can pull the first n values of that schema, and it won't crash. It only crashes if I try to fetch the entire set, which is what is happening under the hood. At that point, you know, I could fetch each row individually, but there's hundreds of these. So, you know, I try, okay, what happens if I try to fetch 1,000 of these? Is it going to crash? Because it's a massive system. So, yes, I get a crash. So, I know that a table less than a thousandth in the list of tables is what's causing the problems. So, okay, fetch 500 halfway in between there. It's still going to crash. Okay, 250, 125. I then kind of keep halving all the time until I find one that doesn't crash. And now I know that it is somewhere between the last crash and this one. So, I think it was between 125 and 250. And now I can say, okay, well, let's fetch the first, you know, maybe 200 tables, okay, that crashes. And I keep halving that space until you finally find it. And then, like, okay, so it's this one right here. Now, the problem is the bad table actually crashes. So, I think it ended up being, like, number 175 or something like that. So, I never get to see the actual table itself. But because the list of tables is in alphabetical order, and I can see because I can fetch the first 174 and it succeeds, so I can tell what the previous 5, 6, you know, previous 174 are. I can pretty easily go and look at the actual database and the list of tables and say, okay, well, it's in the same order. And the next one is this one, and hey, look, there is some metadata there that has some very long fields that are longer than one might expect, specifically going over a potentially implied 256-character limit. That seems somewhat suspicious. And, oh, if we remove this table, all of a sudden, everything works. STEPHANIE: Wow, binary search, an excellent debugging tool [laughs] when you have no idea, you know, what could possibly be causing your issue. JOËL: It's such a cool tool. Like, I'm always so happy when I get a chance to use it. The problem is, you need a way to be able to answer the question, like, have I found it? Yes or no? Or, generally, is it greater or less than this current position? STEPHANIE: Well, that's really exciting that you ended up figuring out how to solve the bug. I know last time we talked about it, you kind of had left off in a space of, hopefully, we won't run into this issue again because it's no longer happening. But it seems like you were also set up this time around to be able to debug once it cropped up again. JOËL: Yes. So, binary search is really cool. It's got this, like, very, like, fancy computer science name. But in reality, it's a fairly simple, straightforward technique that I use fairly frequently in my development. And there's another kind of computer sciency fancy-sounding concept that I use all the time. You've all heard me reference this multiple times on the show. You're right; we're finally doing it. This is the dependency graph episode. STEPHANIE: Woo. [laughter] It's time. I'm excited to really dig into it because, you know, as someone who has heard you talk about it a lot, you know, and is maybe a little less familiar with graph theory and how, you know, it can be applied to my day to day work, I'm really excited to dig into a little bit about, you know, what a regular developer needs to know about dependency graphs to add to their toolbox of skills. JOËL: So, I think at its core, the idea of a dependency graph is that you have a group of entities, some of which depend on each other. They can't do a task, or they can't be created unless some other subtasks or dependent actions take place. And so, we have a sort of formal structural way of describing these things. Visually, we often draw these things out where each of the pieces is like a little bubble or a circle, and then we draw arrows towards the things that it depends on. So, if A cannot be done without B being done first, we draw an arrow from A to B. That's kind of how it is in the abstract. More concretely, this kind of thing shows up constantly throughout the work that we do because a lot of what we do as developers is managing things that are connected to each other or that depend on each other. We build complex systems out of smaller components that all rely on each other. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think it's interesting because I use the word dependency, you know, very frequently when talking about normal work that I'm doing, you know, dependencies as in libraries, right? That we've pulled into our application, or dependencies, like, talking about other classes that are referenced in this class that I'm working in. And I never really thought about what could be explored further or, like, what could be learned from really digging into those connections. JOËL: It's a really powerful mental model. And, like you said, dependencies exist all over our work, and we often use that word. So, you mentioned something like packages, where your application depends on Rails, which in turn depends on ActiveRecord, which in turn depends on a bunch of other things. And so, you've got this whole chain of maybe immediate dependencies, and then those dependencies have dependencies, and those dependencies have dependencies, and it kind of, like, grows outward from there. And in a very kind of simplistic model, you might think, oh, well, it's more, like, a kind of a tree structure. But oftentimes, you'll have things like branches on one side that connect back to branches on the other. And now you've got something that's no longer really tree-like. It's more of a sort of interconnected web, and that is a graph. STEPHANIE: I think understanding the dependencies of your system has also become more important to me as I learn about things that can go wrong when I don't know enough about what my system is, you know, relying on that I had kind of taken for granted previously. I'm especially thinking about packages like we were mentioning, and, you know, not realizing that your application is dependent on this other library, right? That's brought in by a gem that you're using. And there's maybe, like, a security issue, right? With that. And suddenly, you have this problem on your hands that you didn't realize before. And I know that that has been more of a common discussion now in terms of security practices, just being more aware of all the things that you are depending on as really our work becomes more and more interconnected with the things available to us with open source. JOËL: I think where understanding the graph-like nature of this becomes really important is when you're doing something like an upgrade. So, let's say you do have a gem that has a security problem, and you want to upgrade it to fix that security issue. But the upgrade that includes the security patch is also a breaking upgrade. And so, now everything else in your system that depends on that gem or on that package is going to break unless you have them in a version that is compatible with the new version of that gem. And so, you might have to then go downstream and upgrade those packages in a way that's compatible with your app before you can bring in the security patch. And a lot of that can be done automatically by Bundler. Bundler is software that is built around navigating dependency graphs like that and finding versions that are compatible with each other. But sometimes, your code will need to change in order to upgrade one of these downstream gems so that you can then pull in the upgrade from the gem that needs a security patch. And so, understanding a little bit of that graph is going to be important to safely upgrading that gem. STEPHANIE: So, I know another application of dependency graphs that you have thought about and written a blog post for is RSpec let declarations and how a lot of the time when we are using let, you know, we are likely calling other variables defined by let. And so, when you are encountering a test file, it can be really hard to grok what data is being set up in your test. JOËL: Yeah, so that is really interesting because you can define something that will get executed in a lazy fashion if it gets referenced. But then not only is the let lazy and will not trigger unless it's referenced, but a let can reference other lets, which are also lazy, and only get triggered if they get referenced. So, you might have a bunch of lets defined in any order you want throughout a file, and they're all kind of interconnected with these references to each other. But they only get triggered if something calls it directly or it's in this, like, chain of dependencies. And getting a grasp on what actually gets created, which lets will actually execute, which ones don't in a file can quickly get out of hand. And so, thinking of this in terms of a dependency graph has been a really helpful mental model for me to understand what's going on in a complex test file. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. Especially when sometimes the lets are coming from all over the place, you know, maybe a describe block hundreds of lines away, or even a completely different file if you are using a shared context that's being pulled in. So, I can see why this was a complex problem that could be made a little simpler with plotting out a dependency graph. And in preparation for this episode, I was doing a little bit of my own exploration on this because I certainly know, you know, the pain of trying to figure out what is being executed in my tests when there are a lot of lets that reference each other. And in the blog post, you kind of gave a little step-by-step of how you could start with creating a dependency graph for the test that you're working with. And I was really curious if this process could be automated because, you know, I do enjoy, you know, pulling out the pen and paper [chuckles] every now and then. But I'm not, like, a particularly visual person. God forbid I, like, draw a circle, but then, like, don't have enough space for the rest of the circles. [laughs] So, I was really hoping for a tool that could do this for me, especially if, you know, you do, you have a lot of tests that you have to try to understand in a relatively short amount of time. And so, I ended up doing something kind of hacky with RSpec and overriding let definitions to automate this process. JOËL: That's really cool. So, is the tool that you're trying to build something where you feed it in a spec file, and it gives you some kind of graphical representation like an SVG or something as output? STEPHANIE: Yeah. I did consider that approach first, where you feed in the file, but then I ended up going with something more dynamic where you are running the test, and then as it gets executed, tracing the let definitions and then registering them to build your dependency graph. JOËL: So, you've got some sort of internal modeling that describes a dependency graph. And then, somehow, you're going to turn that, you know, a series of Ruby objects into some kind of visual. STEPHANIE: Yeah, exactly. And the bulk of that work was actually done with a library called RGL, which stands for just Ruby Graph Library. [laughs] And what's nice is that it has a really easy interface for plugging in the vertices and edges of the dependency graph that you want to build. And then, it is already hooked up with Graphviz to, you know, write the SVG to a file. And so, I ended up really just having to build up an array of my dependencies and the connections to each other and then feed it into the constructor of the graph. JOËL: And for all of our listeners, you mentioned Graphviz. That is a third-party tool that can be installed on your machine that can generate these SVG diagrams from...I believe it has its own sort of syntax. So, you create, I believe it's dot, D-O-T, so dot dot file. And based off of that, it generates all sorts of things, but SVG being potentially one of them. STEPHANIE: Yeah. The nice thing was that I actually didn't end up having to use the DSL of Graphviz because the RGL gem was doing them for me. JOËL: Nice. So, it plugs in directly. STEPHANIE: Yeah, exactly. And I was really curious about using this gem because I, you know, just wanted to write Ruby, especially to plug into other things that are already in Ruby. And I found that surprisingly easy, thanks to all of the RSpec config options that they make available to you, including an option to extend the example group class, which is actually where let and let bang is defined. And so, I ended up overriding those classes and using, you know, the name of the let that you're defining and then the block to basically register the dependencies. And I also ended up exploring a little bit with using Ruby's built-in parser to figure out in the block that's being passed to the let, what parts of that block could potentially be a reference to another let. JOËL: That's really cool. Did you get any fun results from that? STEPHANIE: I did. It worked pretty well in being able to capture all of the let declarations, and other lets that it references. And so, I was able to successfully, you know, like, generate a visual dependency graph of all of the lets, so that was really neat. The part that I was really kind of excited about trying next, though I didn't end up having time to yet, was figuring out which of those let values are executed by way of the let bang, right? Which is eager or what is referenced in the test that then gets executed as well. And so, the RGL library is pretty neat and has some formatting options, too, with the Graphviz output. So, you can change the font color or styling options for different, you know, nodes and edges. And so, I was really curious to pursue this further, maybe, and use it to show exactly what gets evaluated now that I have successfully mapped my let graph. JOËL: Right. Because the whole point of this exercise is that not the entire graph is going to get evaluated. The underlying question is, what data actually gets created when my test runs? And so, you build out this whole dependency graph, and then you can follow a few simple rules to say, okay, this branch gets called, this branch gets called, this series of things gets called. And okay, this subset of let blocks trigger, and therefore this data has been created for my given test. STEPHANIE: Yeah. Though I will say that even where I got so far to, just seeing all of the let definitions in a spec file was really helpful to have a better understanding, you know, if I do have to add a test in here, and I'm thinking about reaching for a pre-existing let declaration, to be like, oh, like, it actually, you know, goes on to reference all of these other things that may be factories [chuckles] that are created might make me, you know, think twice, or just have a little better understanding of what I'm really dealing with. JOËL: Right. The idea that when you're calling out to a let, or a factory, or something else that's just a node in a large graph, you're not necessarily referencing just one thing. You might actually be referencing the head of a very long chain of things that maybe you don't intend to trigger the whole thing. STEPHANIE: Yeah, exactly. JOËL: So, in that sense, having a sort of visual or at least an idea of the graph can give you a much better sense of the cost of certain operations that you might have to do. STEPHANIE: The cost of the operations certainly, especially when, you know, you are working in a legacy codebase, and you, you know, like, maybe don't know how everything plays together or is connected. And it's very tempting to just reach for [chuckles] the things that have been, you know, created or built for you. And I'm certainly guilty of that sometimes on this client project, where the domain is so complex, and there are so many associated models. And I'm like, well, like, let me just, you know, use this let that already, you know, has a factory set up for what I think I need for this test. But then realizing, oh, actually, like, it is creating all these things, and do I really need them? I think it can be really challenging to unravel all of that in your head. And so, with this very scrappy tool that I [chuckles] built for my own purposes, you know, maybe it makes it, like, one step easier to try to fully understand what I'm working with and maybe do something different. JOËL: One aspect that I think is really powerful about dependency graphs is that it takes this kind of, like, abstract concept that we oftentimes have an intuitive sense around, the idea that we have different components that depend on each other, and it shows it to us visually on, like, a 2D plane. And that can be really helpful to get an understanding or an overview of a system. You mentioned that RGL uses Graphviz to generate some SVGs. A visual tool that I've been using to draw some of my dependency graphs has been mermaid.js. It has a syntax that's, like, a text-based syntax, but it's almost visual in that you have a piece of text and name of a node. And then, you'll draw a little ASCII arrow, you know, two dashes and a greater than sign to say this thing depends on, and then write another name, and just have a row, like, a bunch of entries to say; A depends on B. A also depends on C. C depends on D, and so on, and, like, build up that list. And then Mermaid will just generate that diagram for you. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I've used Mermaid a few times. One really helpful use that I had for it was diagramming out a bunch of React components that I had and wanting to understand the connections between them. And I think you can even paste the Mermaid syntax into your GitHub pull request description, and it'll render as the graph image. JOËL: Yeah, that's what's really cool is that Mermaid syntax has become embedded in a lot of other places in the past few years. So, it's really easy to embed graphs now into all sorts of things. You mentioned GitHub. It works in pull requests descriptions, comments, I think pretty much anywhere that Markdown is accepted. So, you could put one in your README if you wanted. Another place that I use a lot, Obsidian, my note-taking tool, allows me to embed graphs directly in there, which is really much nicer than previously; sometimes, when I wanted to express something as a visual, I would use some sort of drawing tool to do something and export an image, and then embed that in my note. But now I can just put in this text, and it will automatically render that as a diagram. And part of what's really nice about that is that then it's really easy for me to go and change that if I'm like, oh, but actually, I want to add one more connection in here. I don't have to re go back to, hopefully, a file that I've saved somewhere and, like, change an image file and re-export it. I just, you know, I add one line of text to my note, and it just works. STEPHANIE: That's awesome. Yeah, the ability to change it seems really useful. So, we've talked a little bit about tools for creating a visual aid for understanding our dependencies. And now that we have our graph, maybe we might have some concerning observations about what we see, especially when perhaps some of our dependencies are pointing back to each other. JOËL: Yes. So, I think you're referencing cycles, in particular. That would be the formal term for it. And those are really interesting. They happen in dependency graphs. And I would say, in many cases, they can be a bit of a smell. There's definitely situations where they're fine. But there are things that you look at, and you're like, okay, this is going to be a more complex kind of tricky bit of the graph to work with. Some cases, you just straight up can't have them. So, I want to say that the way RSpec lets are set up, you cannot write code that produces cycles. But you might have...I think Ruby allows classes to reference each other in such a way that it creates a cycle, and not all languages do that. So, Elm and F#, I believe, require that modules cannot reference each other. The fancy term for this is a dependent acyclic graph, or DAG, which basically just means that there are no cycles in that graph. STEPHANIE: Yeah. What you said about classes referencing each other is very interesting because I've definitely seen that. And then, if I have to go about changing something, maybe even it's just the class name, right? Now there's no way in which I can really make just one change. I have to kind of do it all in one go. JOËL: I think that's a common property of a cycle, and a graph is that changes that happen somewhere in that cycle often need to be all shipped together as one piece. You can't break it up into smaller chunks because everything depends on everything else. So, it has to be kind of boxed together and shipped as one thing. STEPHANIE: And you'd mentioned that cycles, you know, can be a bit of a code smell. And if the goal is to be able to break it up so that it is a little bit more manageable to work with, how would you go about breaking a cycle? JOËL: So, I think breaking a cycle is going to vary a little bit based on your problem domain. So, are you modeling a series of classes that are referencing each other? Is this a function call graph? Is this even, like, a series of tasks that you're trying to do? But typically, what you want to do is make sure that eventually, at some point, like, something doesn't loop back to referencing something higher up in your hierarchy. And so, oftentimes, it ends up being about what is allowed to know about what? Do you have higher-level concepts that can know and depend on lower-level concepts but not vice versa? And again, we are talking about this a little bit at the abstract level. But in terms of, let's say, different code modules, or classes, or something like that, commonly, you might say, well, we want some sort of layering where we have almost, like, more primitive types of classes at the bottom. And they don't get to know about anything above them. But the ones above that might be more complex that are composed of smaller pieces know about the ones below them. And you might have multiple layers kind of like that that all kind of point down, but nothing points up. STEPHANIE: That is a very common heuristic. [chuckles] I think you were basically just describing how I also understand creating React components, where you want to separate your presentational ones from your functional ones. And, yeah, it makes a lot of sense that as soon as you start adding that complexity of, you know, those primitive classes at the bottom, starting to, you know, point to things higher up or to know about things higher up, that is where a cycle may be accidentally introduced. JOËL: It's interesting just how many design principles that we have in software. If you dig into them a little bit, you find out that they're about decoupling things, and oftentimes, it's specifically breaking up cycles. So, one way that you might have something like this that actually has dependency in the name, the dependency inversion principle, where what you're effectively doing is you're taking one of those dependency arrows, and you're flipping it the other way. So, instead of A depending on B, you're flipping it. Now B depends on A, and that can be enough to break a cycle. STEPHANIE: So, one thing I've picked up from our conversations about dependency graphs is that oftentimes, you know, when you're trying to figure out where to start, you want to look for those areas or those nodes where there's nothing else that depends on it. JOËL: Yeah. I think you have those nodes that, if this were a tree, you would call them the leaf nodes. In the case of a graph, I'm not sure if that's technically correct, but they don't depend on anything. They're kind of your base case. And so, you can, you know, if it's a function, you can run it. If it's a file, you can load it; if it's a class, also you can load it up and not have to do anything else because it has no dependencies. And knowing that those are there, I think, can be really useful in terms of knowing an order you might want to execute something in. And this is really interesting for one of my favorite uses of a graph, which is breaking down a series of tasks that you need to do. So, commonly, you might say, okay, I have a large task I need to do. I break it down into a series of subtasks. And, you know, maybe I draw out, like, a bulleted list and, you know, task 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The problem is that they're not necessarily just a flat list. They all have, like, orders, like dependencies between each other. So, maybe one has to happen before 2, but it also has to happen before 3, which needs to happen before two, and, like, there's all these interconnections. And then, you find out that you can't ship them independently the way you thought initially. So, by building up a graph, you end up with something that shows you exactly what depends on what. And then, like you said, the parts that are really interesting where you can start doing work are the ones that have no dependencies themselves. Other things might depend on them, but they have no dependencies. Therefore, they can be safely built, shipped, deployed to production, and they can be done independently of the other subtasks. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I was also thinking about things that could be done in parallel as well. So, if you do have multiple of those items with no dependencies, like, that is a really good way to be able to break up that work and, yeah, identify things that are not blocked. JOËL: For a complex set of tasks, it's great to see, okay, these two pieces have no dependencies. We can have them be done in parallel, shipped independently. And then you can just kind of keep repeating that process. Because once all of the tasks that have no dependencies have been done, well, you can almost, like, remove them from the graph and see, okay, what's the new set of things that have no dependencies? And then, keep doing that until you've eventually done the whole graph. And that may sound like, oh okay, we're just kind of using a little bit of intuition and working through the graph. It turns out that this is a, like, actual, like, formal thing. When it comes to graphs, it's a traversal algorithm called topological sort is the fancy name for it, and it basically, yeah, it goes through that. It gives you a list of nodes in order where each node that you're given has no dependencies that have not been evaluated yet. So, it works from effectively to use our tree terminology, from the leaf nodes to the root, potentially roots plural, of the graph, and each step is independent. So that's a lot of, like, fancy terminology, and getting a little bit of, like, computer science graph theory into here. So, my, like, general heuristic is that graphs should be evaluated from the bottom up when you're trying to evaluate each piece independently. So, when you do that, you get to do each piece independently, as opposed to if you're evaluating from the top down. So, starting from the one thing that depends on everything else, well, it can't be shipped until all of its dependencies have been shipped. And all the transitional dependencies can't be shipped until their dependencies have been shipped. And so, you end up being not able to ship anything until you've built the entire graph. And that's when you end up with, you know, a 2,000-line PR that took you multiple weeks and might be buggy. And it's going to take a long time to review. And it's just not what anybody wants. STEPHANIE: I'm glad you brought this up because I think this is where I am really curious to get better at because oftentimes, when I am breaking down a complex task, it's quite hard for me to see all of the steps that need to happen. And so, you know, you maybe start out with that, like, top-level node, like, the task that needs to be done as you understand it immediately. And it's really hard to actually identify the dependencies and, like, the smaller pieces along the way. And because you're not able to identify that, you think that you do have to just do it all in one go. JOËL: Yeah, that sort of root node is typically the overarching task, the goal of what you want to do. And a common, I think, scenario for something like this would be, let's say, you're doing a Rails upgrade. And so, that root node is upgrade Rails. And a common thing that you might want to do is say, okay, let's go to the gem file, upgrade Rails, see what breaks, and then just keep fixing those things. That's working from the top down. And you're going to be in a long-running branch, and you're going to keep fixing things, fixing things, fixing things until you have found all the things but done all the things. And then you do a big bang upgrade that may have taken you weeks. As opposed to if you're working from the bottom up, you try to figure out, okay, what are all the subtasks? And that might take some exploration. You might not know upfront. But then you might say, okay, here, I can upgrade RSpec versus a dependency, or I need to change the interface of this class and ship all these pieces one at a time. And then, the final step is flipping that upgrade in the gem file, saying, okay, now I've upgraded Rails from 4 to 5, or whatever the version is that you're trying to do. STEPHANIE: I think you've really hit the nail on the head when it comes to trying to do something but not knowing what subtasks may compose of it and getting into that problem of, you know, having not broken it down, like, enough to really see all the dependencies. And, you know, maybe this is a conversation [chuckles] for another episode, but the skill of breaking up those tasks and exploring what those dependencies are, and being able to figure them out upfront before you start to just do that upgrade and then see what happens, that's definitely an area that I want to keep investing in. And I'm sure other people would be really curious about, too, to help them make their jobs easier. JOËL: I think one tip that I've learned that's really fun and that connects into all of this is sometimes you do end up with a cycle in your dependencies of tasks. A technique for breaking that up is a pattern that I have pitched multiple times on the show: the strangler fig pattern. And part of why it's so powerful is that it allows you to work incrementally by breaking up some of these cycles in your dependency graph. And one of the lessons that I've learned from that is that just because you have sort of an initial set of subtasks and you have a graph of them doesn't mean that you can't change them. If you're following strangler fig, what you're actually doing is introducing one or more new subtasks to that graph. But the way you introduce them breaks up that cycle. So, you can always add new tasks or split up existing ones as you get a better understanding of the work you need to do. It's not something that is fixed or set in stone upfront. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a really great tip. I think next time, what I really want to explore, you know, your heuristic of going from bottom up, yeah, sure, it sounds all fine and dandy. But how to get to a point where you're able to see everything at the bottom, right? And, like, when you are tasked, or you do start with the thing at the top, like, the end goal. Yeah, I'm sure that's something we'll explore [chuckles] another day. JOËL: On that note, shall we wrap up? STEPHANIE: Let's wrap up. Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeee!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.
Joël has been fighting a frustrating bug where he's integrating with a third-party database, and some queries just crash. Stephanie shares her own debugging story about a leaky stub that caused flaky tests. Additionally, they discuss the build vs. buy decision when integrating with third-party systems. They consider the time and cost implications of building their own integration versus using off-the-shelf components and conclude that the decision often depends on the specific needs and priorities of the project, including how quickly a solution is needed and whether the integration is core to the business's value proposition. Ruby class instance variables (https://www.codegram.com/blog/understanding-class-instance-variables-in-ruby/) Build vs Buy by Josh Clayton (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/build-vs-buy-considerations-for-new-products) Sustainable Rails (https://sustainable-rails.com/) Transcript: STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: My world has been kind of frustrating recently. I've been fighting a really frustrating bug where I'm integrating with a third-party database. And there are queries that just straight-up crash. Any query that instantiates an instance of an ActiveRecord object will just straight-up fail. And that's because before, we make the actual query, almost like a preflight query that fetches the schema of the database, particularly the list of tables that the database has, and there's something in this schema that the code doesn't like, and everything just crashes. Specifically, I'm using an ODBC connection. I forget exactly what the acronym stands for, Open Database connection, maybe? Which is a standard put up by Microsoft. The way I'm integrating it via Ruby is there's a gem that's a C extension. And somewhere deep in the C extension, this whole thing is crashing. So, I've had to sort of dust off some C a little bit to look through. And it's not super clear exactly why things are crashing. So, I've spent several days trying to figure out what's going on there. And it's been really cryptic. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that does sound frustrating. And it seems like maybe you are a little bit out of your depth in terms of your usual tools for figuring out a bug are not so helpful here. JOËL: Yeah, yeah. It's a lot harder to just go through and put in a print or a debug statement because now I have to recompile some C. And, you know, you can mess around with some things by passing different flags. But it is a lot more difficult than just doing, like, a bundle open and binding to RB in the code. My ultimate solution was asking for help. So, I got another thoughtboter to help me, and we paired on it. We got to a solution that worked. And then, right before I went to deploy this change, because this was breaking on the staging website, I refreshed the website just to make sure that everything was breaking before I pushed the fix to see that everything is working. This is a habit I've picked up from test-driven development. You always want to see your test break before you see it succeed. And this is a situation where this habit paid off because the website was just working. My changes were not deployed. It just started working again. Now it's gotten me just completely questioning whether my solution fixes anything. The difficulty is because I am integrating [inaudible 03:20] third-party database; it's non-deterministic. The schema on there is changing rather frequently. I think the reason things are crashing is because there's some kind of bad data or data that the ODBC adapter doesn't like in this third-party system. But it just got introduced one day; everything started breaking, and then somehow it got removed, and everything is working again without any input or code changes on my end. So, now I don't trust my fix. STEPHANIE: Oh no. Yeah, I would struggle with that because your reality has come crashing down, [laughs] or how you understood reality. That's tough. Where do you think you'll go from here? If it's no longer really an issue in this current state of the schema, is it worth pursuing further at this time? JOËL: So, that's interesting because it turns into a prioritization problem. And for this particular project, with the deadlines that we have, we've decided it's not worth it. I've opened up a PR with my fix, with some pretty in-depth documentation for why I thought that was the fix and what I think the underlying problem is. If this shows up again in the next few days, I'll have that PR that I can pull in and see if it fixes things, and if it doesn't, I'll probably just close that PR, but it'll be available for us if we ever run into this again. I've also looked at a few potential mitigating situations. Part of the problem is that this is a, like, massive system. The Rails app that I'm using really doesn't need to deal with this massive database. I think there's, you know, almost 1,000 tables, and I really only care about a subset of tables in, like, one underlying schema. And so, I think by reducing the permissions of my database user to only those tables that I care about, there's a lower chance of me triggering something like this. STEPHANIE: Interesting. What you mentioned about, you know, having that PR continue to exist will be really helpful for future folks who might come across the same problem, right? Because then they can see, like, all of the research and investigation you've already done. And you may have already done this, but if you do think it's a schema issue, I'm curious about whether the snapshot of the schema could be captured from when it was failing to when it has magically gotten fixed. And I wonder if there may be some clues there for some future investigator. JOËL: Yeah. I'm not sure what our backup situation is because this is a third-party system, so I'd have to figure out what things are like in the admin interface there. But yeah, if there is some kind of auditing, or snapshots, or backups, or something there, and I have rough, you know, if I know it's within a 24-hour period, maybe there's something there that would tell me what's happening. My best guess is that there's some string that is longer than expected or maybe being marked as a CHAR when it should be a VARCHAR, or maybe something that's not a non-UTF-8 encoded character, or something weird like that. So, I never know exactly what was wrong in the schema. There's some weird string thing happening that's causing the Ruby adapter to blow up. STEPHANIE: That also feels so unsatisfying [laughs] for you. I could imagine. JOËL: Yeah, there's no, like, clean resolution, right? It's a, well, the bug is gone for now. We're trying to make it less likely for it to pop up again in the future. I'm trying to leave some documentation for the next person who's going to come along, and I'm moving forward, fingers crossed. Is that something you've ever had to do on one of your projects? STEPHANIE: Given up? Yes. [laughter] I think I have definitely had to learn how to timebox debugging and have some action items for when I just can't figure it out. And, you know, like we mentioned, leaving some documentation for the next person to pick up, adding some additional logging so that maybe we can get more clues next time. But, you know, realizing that I do have to move on and that's the best that I can do is really challenging. JOËL: So, you used two words here to describe the situation: one was giving up, and the other one was timebox. I think I really like the idea of describing this as timeboxing. Giving up feels kind of like, defeatist. You know, there's so many things that we can do with our time, and we really have to be strategic with how we prioritize. So, I like the idea of describing this as a timeboxing situation. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I agree. Maybe I should celebrate every time that I successfully timebox something [laughs] according to how I planned to. [laughs] JOËL: There's always room to extend the timebox, right? STEPHANIE: [laughs] It's funny you bring up a debugging mystery because I have one of my own to share today. And I do have to say that it ended up being resolved, [chuckles] so it was a win in my book. But I will call this the case of the leaky stub. JOËL: That sounds slightly scary. STEPHANIE: It really was. The premise of what we were trying to figure out here was that we were having some flaky tests that were failing with a runtime error, so that was already kind of interesting. But it was quickly determined it was flaky because of the tests running in a certain order, so-- JOËL: Classic. STEPHANIE: Right. So, I knew something was happening, and any tests that came after it were running into this error. And I was taking a look, and I figured out how to recreate it. And we even isolated to the test itself that was running before everything else, that would then cause some problems. And so, looking into this test, I saw that it was stubbing the find method on an ActiveRecord model. JOËL: Interesting. STEPHANIE: Yeah. And the stubbed value that we were choosing to return ended up being referenced in the tests that followed. So, that was really strange to me because it went against everything I understood about how RSpec cleans up stubs between tests, right? JOËL: Yeah, that is really strange. STEPHANIE: Yeah, and I knew that it was referencing the stub value because we had set a really custom, like, ID value to it. So, when I was seeing this exact ID value showing up in a test that seemed totally unrelated, that was kind of a clue that there was some leakage happening. JOËL: So, what did you do next? STEPHANIE: The next discovery was that the error was actually raised in the factory setup for the failing tests and not even getting to running the examples at all. So, that was really strange. And digging into the factories was also its own adventure because there was a lot of complexity in the factories. A lot of them used hooks as well that then called some application code. And it was a wild goose chase. But ultimately, I realized that in the factory setup, we were calling some application code for that model where we had stubbed the find, and it had used the find method to memoize a class instance variable. JOËL: Oh no. I can see where this is going. STEPHANIE: Yeah. So, at some point, our model.find() returned our, you know, stub value that we had wanted in the previous test. And it got cached and just continued to leak into everything else that eventually would try to call that memoized method when it really should have tried to do that look-up for a separate record. JOËL: And class instance variables will persist between tests as long as they're on the same thread, right? STEPHANIE: Yeah, as far as I understand it. JOËL: That sounds like a really frustrating journey. And then that moment when you see the class instance variable, and you're like, oh no, I can't believe this is happening. STEPHANIE: Right? It was a real recipe for disaster, I think, where we had some, you know, really complicated factories. We had some sneaky caching issues, and this, you know, totally seemingly random runtime error that was being raised. And it was a real wild goose chase because there was not a lot of directness in going down the debugging path. I feel like I went around all over the codebase to get to the root of it. And, in the end, you know, we were trying to come up with some takeaways. And what was unfortunate was that you know, like, normally, stubbing find can be okay if you are, you know, really wanting to make sure that you are returning your mocked value that you may have, like, stubbed some other stuff on in your test. But because of all this, we were like, well, should we just not stub find on this really particular model? And that didn't seem particularly sustainable to make as a takeaway for other developers who want to avoid this problem. So, in the end, I think we scoped the stub to be a little more specific with the arguments that we wanted to target. And that was the way that we went forward with the particular flaky test at hand. JOËL: It sounds like the root cause of the problem was not so much the stub as it was the fact that this value is getting cached at the class level. Is that right? STEPHANIE: Yes and no. It seems like a real pain for running the tests. But I'm assuming that it was done for a good reason in production, maybe, maybe not. To be fair, I think we didn't need to cache it at all because it's calling a find, which is, you know, should be pretty quick and doesn't need to be cached. But who knows? It's hard to tell. It was really old code. And I think we were feeling also a little nervous to adjust something that we weren't sure what the impact would be. JOËL: I'm always really skeptical of caching. Caching has its place. But I think a lot of developers are a little too happy to introduce one, especially doing it preemptively that, oh well, we might need a cache here, so why not? Let's add that. Or even sometimes, just as a blind solution to any kind of slowness, oh, the site is slow; let's throw a cache here and hope for the best. And the, like, bedrock, like, rule zero of any kind of performance tuning is you've got to measure before and after and make sure that the change that you introduce actually makes things better. And then, also, is it better enough speed-wise that you're willing to pay any kind of costs associated to maintaining the code now that it's more complex? And a lot of caches can have some higher carrying costs. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a great point. This debugging mystery an example of one of them. JOËL: How long did it take you to figure out the solution here? STEPHANIE: So, like you, I actually was on a bit of the incorrect path for a little while. And it was only because this issue affected a different flaky test that someone else was investigating that they were able to connect the dots and be like, I think these, you know, two issues are related. And they were the ones who ultimately were able to point us out to the offending test if you will. So, you know, it took me a few days. And I imagine it took the other developer a few days. So, our combined effort was, like, over a week. JOËL: Yep. So, for all our listeners out there, you just heard that Stephanie and I [laughs] both went on multi-day debugging journeys. That happens to everyone. Just because we've been doing this job for years doesn't mean that every bug is, like, a thing that we figure out immediately. So, separately from this bug that I've been working on, a big issue that's been front of mind for me on this project has been the classic build versus buy decision. Because we're integrating with a third-party system, we have to look at either building our own integration or trying to use some off-the-shelf components. And there's a few different levels of this. There are some parts where you can actually, like, literally buy an integration and think through some of the decisions there. And then there's some situations where maybe there's an open-source component that we can use. And there's always trade-offs with both the commercial and the open-source situation. And we have to decide, are we willing to use this, or do we want to build our own? And those have been some really interesting discussions to have. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think you actually expanded this decision-making problem into a build versus buy versus open source because they are kind of, you know, really different solutions with different outcomes in terms of, you know, maintenance and dependencies, right? And that all have, like, a little bit of a different way to engage with them. JOËL: Interesting. I think I tend to think of the buy category, including both like commercial off-the-shelf software and also open-source off-the-shelf software, things that we wouldn't build custom for ourselves but that are third-party components that we can pull in. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's interesting because I had a bit of a different mental model because, in my head, when you're buying a commercial solution, you, you know, are maybe losing out on some opportunities for customization or even, like, forking it on your own. So, with an open-source solution, there could be an aspect of making it work for you. Whereas for a commercial solution, you really become dependent on that other company and whether they are willing to cater [laughs] to your needs or not. JOËL: That's fair. For something that's closed-source where you don't actually have access to the code, say it's more of a software as a service situation, then, yeah, you're kind of locked in and hoping that they can provide the needs that you have. On the flip side, you are generally paying for some level of support. The quality of that varies sometimes from one vendor to another. But if something goes wrong, usually, there's someone you can email, someone you can call, and they will tell you how to fix the problem, or they will fix it on their end. STEPHANIE: For the purposes of this conversation, should we talk about the differences, you know, building yourself or leaning on an existing built-out solution for you? JOËL: The project I'm working on is integrating with a Snowflake data warehouse, which is an external place that stores data accessible through something SQL-like. And one of the things that's attractive about this is that you can pull in data from a variety of different sources, transform it, and have it all stored in a kind of standardized structure that you can then integrate with. So, for pulling data in, you can build your own sort of ingestion pipeline, if you want, with code, and their APIs, and things. But there are also third-party vendors that will give you kind of off-the-shelf components that you can use for a lot of popular other data sources that you might want to pull. So, you're saying; I want to pull from this external service. They've probably got a pre-built connector for it. They can also do things like pull from an arbitrary Postgres database on some other server if that's something you have access to. It becomes really attractive because all you need to do is create an account on this website, plug in a few, like, API keys and URLs. And, all of a sudden, data is just flowing from one third-party system into your Snowflake data Warehouse, and it all just kind of works. And you don't have to bother with APIs, or ODBC, or any of that kind of stuff. STEPHANIE: Got it. Yeah, that does sound convenient. As you were talking about this, I was thinking about how if I were in the position of trying to decide how to make that integration happen, the idea of building it would seem kind of scary, especially if it's something that I don't have a lot of expertise in. JOËL: Yeah, so this was really interesting. In the beginning of the project, I looked into a little bit of what goes into building these, and it's fairly simple in terms of the architecture. You just need something that writes data files to typically something like an S3 bucket. And then you can point Snowflake to periodically pull from that bucket, and you write an import script to, you know, parse the columns and write them to the right tables in the structure that you want inside Snowflake. Where things get tricky is the actual integration on the other end. So, you have some sort of third-party service. And now, how do you sort of, on a timer maybe, pull data from that? And if there are data changes that you're synchronizing, is it just all append-only data? Or are you allowing the third-party service to say, "Hey, I deleted this record, and you should reflect that in Snowflake?" Or maybe dealing with an update. So, all of these things you have to think about, as well as synchronization. What you end up having to do is you probably boot up some kind of small service and, you know, maybe this is a small Ruby app that you have on Heroku, maybe this is, like, an AWS Lambda kind of thing. And you probably end up running this every so many seconds or so many minutes, do some work, potentially write some files to S3. And there's a lot of edge cases you have to think about to do it properly. And so, not having to think about all of those edge cases becomes really enticing when you're looking to potentially pay a third party to do this for you. STEPHANIE: Yeah, when you used the words new service, I bristled a little bit [laughs] because I've definitely seen this happen maybe on a bit of a bigger scale for a tool or solution for some need, right? Where some team is formed, or maybe we kind of add some more responsibilities to an existing team to spin up a new service with a new repo with its own pipeline, and it becomes yet another thing to maintain. And I have definitely seen issues with the longevity of that kind of approach. JOËL: The idea of maintaining a fleet of little services for each of our integrations seemed very unappealing to me, especially given that setting something like this up using the commercial approach probably takes 30 minutes per third-party service. There's no way I'm standing up an app and doing this whole querying every so many minutes, and getting data, and transforming it, and writing it to S3, and addressing all the edge cases in 30 minutes. And it's building something that's robust. And, you know, maybe if I want to go, like, really low tech, there's something fun I could do with, like, a Zapier hook and just, like, duct tape a few services together and make this, like, a no-code solution. I still don't know that it would have the robustness of the vendor. And I don't think that I could do it in the same amount of time. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I like the keyword robustness here because, at first, you were saying, like, you know, this looked relatively small in scope, right? The code that you had to write. But introducing all of the variables of things that could go wrong [laughs] beyond the custom part that you actually care about seemed quite cumbersome. JOËL: I think there's also, at this point, a lot of really interesting prioritization questions. There are money questions, but there are also time questions you have to think about. So, how much dev time do we want to devote upfront to building out these integrations? And if you're trying to move fast and get a proof of concept out, or even get, like, an MVP out in front of customers, it might be worth paying more money upfront to a third-party vendor because it allows you to ship something this week rather than next month. STEPHANIE: Yeah. The "How soon do you need it?" is a very good question to ask. Another one that I have learned to include in my arsenal of, you know, evaluating this kind of stuff comes from a thoughtbot blog by Josh Clayton, where he, you know, talks about the build versus buy problem. And his takeaway is that you should buy when your business is not dependent on it. JOËL: When it's not part of, like, the core, like, value-add that your business is doing. Why spend developer time on something that's not, like, the core thing that your product is when you can pay someone else to do it for you? And like we said earlier, a lot of that time ends up being sunk into edge cases and robustness and things like that to the point where now you have to build an expertise in a, like, secondary thing that your business doesn't really care about. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. I think this is also perhaps where very clear business goals or a vision would come in handy as well. Because if you're considering building something that doesn't quite support that vision, then it will likely end up continuing to be deprioritized over the long term until it becomes this thing that no one is accountable for maintaining and caring for. And just causes a lot of, honestly, morale issues is what I've seen when some service that was spun up to try to solve a particular problem is kind of on its last legs and has been really neglected, and no one wants to work on it. But it ends up causing issues for the rest of the development team. But then they're also really focused on initiatives that actually do provide the business value. That is a really hard balancing act that I've seen teams struggle with. JOËL: Earlier this year, we were talking about the book Sustainable Rails. And it really hammers home the idea of a carrying cost for the code, and I think that's exactly what we're talking about here. And that carrying cost can be time and money. But I like that you also mentioned the morale effects. You know, that's a carrying cost that just sort of depresses the productivity of your team when morale is low. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious if we could discuss some of the carrying costs of buying a solution and where you've seen that become tricky. JOËL: The first thing to look at is the literal cost, the money aspect of things. And I think it's a really interesting situation for the business models for these types of Snowflake connectors because they typically charge by the amount of data that you're transmitting, so per row of data that you're transmitting. And so, that cost will fluctuate depending on whether the third-party service you're integrating with is, like, really chatty or not. When you contrast that to building, building typically has a relatively fixed cost. It's a big upfront cost, and then there's some maintenance cost to go with it. So, if I'm building some kind of integration for, let's say, Shopify, then there's the cost I need to build up front to integrate that. And if that takes me, I don't know, a week or two weeks, or however long it is, you know, that's a pretty big chunk of time. And my time is money. And so, you can actually do the math and say, "Well, if we know that we're getting so many rows per day at this rate from the commercial vendor, how many weeks do we have to pay for the commercial one before we break even and it becomes more expensive than building it upfront, just in terms of my time?" And sometimes you do that math, and you're like, wow, you know, we could be going on this commercial thing for, like, two years before we break even. In that case, from a purely financial point of view, it's probably worth paying for that connector. And so, now it becomes really interesting. You say, okay, well, which are the connectors that we have that are low volume, and which are the ones that are high volume? Because each of them is going to have a different break-even point. The ones that you break even after, you know, three or four weeks might be the ones that become more interesting to have a conversation about building. Whereas some of the others, it's clearly not worth our time to build it ourselves. STEPHANIE: The way you described this problem was really interesting to me because it almost sounds like you found the solution somewhere in the middle, potentially, where, you know, you may try building the ones that are highest priority, and you end up learning a lot from that experience, right? That could make it easier or at least, like, set you up to consider doing that moving forward in the future if you find, like, that is what is valuable. But it's interesting to me that you kind of have the best of both worlds of, like, getting the commercial solutions now for the things that are lower value and then doing what you can to get the most out of building a solution. JOËL: Yeah. So, my final recommendation ended up being, let's go all commercial for now. And then, once we've built out something, and because speed is also an issue here, once we've built out something and it's out with customers, and we're starting to see value from this, then we can start looking at how much are we paying per week for each of these connectors? And is it worth maybe going back and building our own for some of these higher-volume connectors? But starting with the commercial one for everything. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I actually think that's generally a pretty good path forward because then you are also learning about how you use the commercial solution and, you know, which features of it are critical so that if you do eventually find yourselves, like, maybe considering a shift to building in-house, like, you could start with a more clear MVP, right? Because you know how your team is using an existing product and can focus on the parts that your business are dependent on. JOËL: Yeah, it's that classic iterative development style. I think here it's also kind of inspired by a strategy I typically use for performance, which is make it work before you try to make it fast. And, actually, make it work, then profile, then measure, find the hotspots, and then focus on making those things fast. So, in this case, instead of speed, we're talking about money. So, it's make it work, then profile, find the parts that are expensive, and make the trade-off of, like, okay, is it worth investing into making that part less expensive in terms of resources? STEPHANIE: I like that as a framework a lot. JOËL: A lot of what we do as programmers is optimization, right? And sometimes, we're optimizing for execution time. Sometimes we're optimizing for memory cost, and sometimes we're optimizing for dollars. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's really interesting because, with the buy solution, you know very clearly, like, how much the thing will cost. Whereas I've definitely seen teams go down the building route, and it always takes longer than expected [laughs], and that is money, right? In terms of the developer's time, for sure. JOËL: Yeah, definitely, like, add some kind of multiplier when you're budgeting out that build alternative because, quite likely, there are some edge cases that you haven't thought about that the commercial partner has, and you will have to spend more time on that than you expected. STEPHANIE: Yeah, in addition to whatever opportunity cost of not working on something that is driving revenue for the business right now. JOËL: Exactly. STEPHANIE: So, the direction of this conversation ended up going kind of towards, like, what is best for the team at, like, a product and company level. But I think that we make these decisions a lot more frequently, even when it comes to whether we pull in a gem or, you know, use an open-source tool or not. And I would be really interested in discussing more of that in another episode. JOËL: Yeah. That gets into some controversial takes, right? It's the evergreen topic of: do we build it ourselves, or do we pull in some kind of third-party package? STEPHANIE: Something for the future to look forward to. On that note, shall we wrap up? JOËL: Let's wrap up. STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeeee!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.
It's updates on the work front today! Stephanie was tasked with removing a six-year-old feature flag from a codebase. Joël's been doing a lot of small database migrations. A listener question sparked today's main discussion on gerunds' interesting relationship to data modeling. Episode 386: Value Objects Revisited: The Tally Edition (https://www.bikeshed.fm/386) RailsConf 2017: In Relentless Pursuit of REST by Derek Prior (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HctYHe-YjnE) REST Turns Humans Into Database Clients (https://chrislwhite.com/rest-contortion/) Parse, don't validate (https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-validate/) Wikipedia Getting to Philosophy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy) Transcript: JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, this week, I've been tasked with something that I've been finding very fun, which is removing a six-year-old feature flag from the codebase that is still very much in use in the sense that it is actually a mechanism for providing customers access to a feature that had been originally launched as a beta. And that was why the feature flag was introduced. But in the years since, you know, the business has shifted to a model where you have to pay for those features. And some customers are still hanging on to this beta feature flag that lets them get the features for free. So one of the ways that we're trying to convert those people to be paying for the feature is to, you know, gradually remove the feature flag and maybe, you know, give them a heads up that this is happening. I'm also getting to improve the codebase with this change as well because it has really been propagating [laughs] in there. There wasn't necessarily a single, I guess, entry point for determining whether customers should get access to this feature through the flag or not. So it ended up being repeated in a bunch of different places because the feature set has grown. And so, now we have to do this check for the flag in several places, like, different pages of the application. And it's been really interesting to see just how this kind of stuff can grow and mutate over several years. JOËL: So, if I understand correctly, there's kind of two overlapping conditions now around this feature. So you have access to it if you've either paid for the feature or if you were a beta tester. STEPHANIE: Yeah, exactly. And the interesting thought that I had about this was it actually sounds a lot like the strangler fig pattern, which we've talked about before, where we've now introduced the new source of data that we want to be using moving forward. But we still have this, you know, old limb or branch hanging on that hasn't quite been removed or pruned off [chuckles] yet. So that's what I'm doing now. And it's nice in the sense that I can trust that we are already sending the correct data that we want to be consuming, and it's just the cleanup part. So, in some ways, we had been in that half-step for several years, and they're now getting to the point where we can finally remove it. JOËL: I think in kind of true strangler fig pattern, you would probably move all of your users off of that feature flag so that the people that have it active are zero, at which point it is effectively dead code, and then you can remove it. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a great point. And we had considered doing that first, but the thing that we had kind of come away with was that removing all of those customers from that feature flag would probably require a script or, you know, updating the production data. And that seemed a bit riskier actually to us because it wasn't as reversible as a code change. JOËL: I think you bring up a really interesting point, which is that production data changes, in general, are just scarier than code changes. At least for me, it feels like it's fairly easy generally to revert a code change. Whereas if I've messed up the production database, [laughs] that's going to be unpleasant few days. STEPHANIE: What's interesting is that this feature flag is not really supported by a nice user interface for managing it. And so, we inevitably had to do a more developer-focused solution to remove these customers from being able to access this feature. And so, the two options, you know, that we had available were to do it through data, like I mentioned, or do it through that code change. And again, I think we evaluated both options. But what's kind of nice about doing it with the code change is that when we eventually get to delete those feature flag records, it will be really nice and easy. JOËL: That's really exciting. One thing that's different about kind of more mature projects is that we often get to do some kind of change management, unlike a greenfield app where you just get to, oh, let's introduce this new thing, cool. Oftentimes, on a more mature project, before you introduce the new thing, you have to figure out, like, what is the migration path towards that? Is that a kind of work that you enjoy? STEPHANIE: I think this was definitely an exercise in thinking about how to break this down into steps. So, yeah, that change management process you mentioned, I, like, did find a lot of satisfaction in trying to break it up, you know, especially because I was also thinking that you know, maybe I am not able to see the complete, like, cleanup and removal, and, like, where can someone pick up after me? In some ways, I feel like I was kind of stepping into that migration, you know, six years [laughs] in the making from beta to the paid product. But I think I will feel really satisfied if I'm able to see this thing through and get to celebrate the success of saying, hey, like, I removed...at this point, it's a few hundred lines of code. [laughs] And also, you know, with the added business value of encouraging more customers to pay for the product. But I think I also I'm maybe figuring out how to accept like, okay, like, how could I, like, step away from this in the middle and be able to feel good that I've left it in a place that someone else could see through? JOËL: So you mentioned you're taking this over from somebody else, and this has been kind of six years in the making. I'm curious, is the person who introduced this feature flag six years ago are they even still at the company? STEPHANIE: No, they are not, which I think is pretty typical, you know, it's, like, really common for someone who had all that context about how it came to be. In fact, I actually didn't even realize that the feature flag was the original beta version of the product because that's not what it's called. [laughs] And it was when I was first onboarding onto this project, and I was like, "Hey, like, what is this? Like, why is this still here?" Knowing that the canonical, you know, version that customers were using was the paid version. And the team was like, "Oh, yeah, like, that's this whole thing that we've been meaning to remove for a long time." So it's really interesting to see the lifecycle, like, as to some of this code a little bit. And sometimes, it can be really frustrating, but this has felt a little more like an archaeology dig a little bit. JOËL: That sounds like a really interesting project to be on. STEPHANIE: Yeah. What about you, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: So, on my project, I've been having to do a lot of small database migrations. So I've got a bunch of these little features to do that all involve doing database migrations. They're not building on each other. So I'm just doing them all, like, in different feature branches, and pushing them all up to GitHub to get reviewed, kind of working on them in parallel. And the problem that happens is that when you switch from one branch where you've run a migration to another and then run migrations again, some local database state persists between the branch switch, which means that when you run the migrations, then this app uses a structure.sql. And the structure.sql has a bunch of extra junk from other branches you've been on that you don't want as part of your diff. And beyond, like, two or three branches, this becomes an absolute mess. STEPHANIE: Oh, I have been there. [laughs] It's always really frustrating when I switch branches and then try to do my development and then realize that I have had my leftover database changes. And then having to go back and then always forgetting what order of operations to do to reverse the migration and then having to re-migrate. I know that pain very well. JOËL: Something I've been doing for this project is when I switch branches, making sure that my structure SQL is checked out to the latest version from the main branch. So I have a clean structure SQL then I drop my local database, recreate an empty one, and run a rake db:schema:load. And that will load that structure file as it is on the main branch into the database schema. That does not have any of the migrations on this branch run, so, at that point, I can run a rake db:migrate. And I will get exactly what's on main plus what gets generated on this branch and nothing else. And so, that's been a way that I've been able to kind of switch between branches and run database operations without getting any cross-contamination. STEPHANIE: Cross-contamination. I like that term. Have you automated this at all, or are you doing this manually? JOËL: Entirely manually. I could probably script some of this. Right now...so it's three steps, right? Drop, create, schema load. I just have them in one command because you can chain Unix commands with a double ampersand. So that's what I'm doing right now. I want to say there's a db:reset task, but I think that it uses migrate rather than schema load. And I don't want to actually run migrations. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that would take longer. That's funny. I do love the up arrow key [laughs] in your terminal for, you know, going back to the thing you're running over and over again. I also appreciate the couple extra seconds that you're spending in waiting for your database to recreate. Like, you're paying that cost upfront rather than down the line when you are in the middle of doing [laughs] what you're trying to do and realize, oh no, my database is not in the state that I want it to be for this branch. JOËL: Or I'm dealing with some awful git conflict when trying to merge some of these branches. Or, you know, somebody comments on my PR and says, "Why are you touching the orders table? This change has nothing to do with orders." I'm like, "Oh, sorry, that actually came out of a different thing that I did." So, yep, keeping those diffs small. STEPHANIE: Nice. Well, I'm glad that you found a way to manage it. JOËL: So you mentioned the up arrow key and how that's really nice in the terminal. Something that I've been relying on a lot recently is reverse history search, CTRL+R in the terminal. That allows me to, instead of, like, going one by one in order of the history, filter for something that matches the thing that I've written. So, in this case, I'll hit CTRL+R, type, you know, Rails DB or whatever, then immediately it shows me, oh, did you want this long command? Hit enter, and I'm done. Even if I've done, you know, 20 git commands between then and the last time I ran it. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a great tip. So, a few weeks ago, we received a listener question from John, and he was responding to an episode where I'd asked about what the grammatical term is for verbs that are also nouns. He told us about the phrase, a verbal noun, for which there's a specific term called gerund, which is basically, in English, the words ending in ING. So, the gerund version of bike would be biking. And he pointed out a really interesting relationship that gerunds have to data modeling, where you can use a gerund to model something that you might describe as a verb, especially as a user interaction, but can be turned into a noun to form a resource that you might want to introduce CRUD operations for in your application. So one example that he was telling us about is the idea of maybe confirming a reservation. And, you know, we think of that as an action, but there is also a noun form of that, which is a confirmation. And so, confirmation could be a new resource, right? It could even be backed at the database level. And now you have a simpler way of representing the idea of confirming a reservation that is more about the confirmation as the resource itself rather than some kind of append them to a reservation itself. JOËL: That's really cool. We get to have a crossover between grammar terms and programming, and being able to connect those two is always a fun day for me. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I actually find it quite difficult, I think, to come up with noun forms of verbs on my own. Like, I just don't really think about resources that way. I'm so used to thinking about them in a more tangible way, I suppose. And it's really kind of cool that, you know, in the English language, we have turned these abstract ideas, these actions into, like, an object form. JOËL: And this is particularly useful when we're trying to design RESTful either APIs or even just resources for a Rails app that's server-rendered so that instead of trying to create all these, like, extra actions on our controller that are verbs, we might decide to instead create new resources in the system, new nouns that people can do the standard 7 to. STEPHANIE: Yes. I like that better than introducing custom controller actions or routes that deviate from RESTful conventions because, you know, I probably have seen a slash confirm reservation [laughs] URL. And, you know, this is, I think, an interesting way of avoiding having too many of those deviating endpoints. JOËL: Yeah, I found that while Rails does have support for those, just all the built-in things play much more nicely if you're restricting yourself to the classic seven. And I think, in general, it's easier to model and think about things in a Rails app when you have a lot of noun resources rather than one giant controller with a bunch of kind of verb actions that you can do to it. In the more formal jargon, I think we might refer to that as RESTful style versus RPC style, a Remote Procedure Call. STEPHANIE: Could you tell me more about Remote Procedure Calls and what that means? JOËL: The general idea is that it's almost like doing a method call on an object somewhere. And so, you would say, hey, I've got an account, and I want to call the confirm method on it because I know that maybe underlying this is an ActiveRecord account model. And the API or the web UI is just a really thin layer over those objects. And so, more or less, whatever your methods on your object are, can be accessed through the API. So the two kind of mirror each other. STEPHANIE: Got it. That's interesting because I can see how someone might want to do that, especially if, you know, the account is the domain object they're using at the, you know, persistence layer, and maybe they're not quite able to see an abstraction for something else. And so, they kind of want to try to fit that into their API design. JOËL: So I have a perhaps controversial opinion, which is that the resources in your Rails application, so your controllers, shouldn't map one-to-one with your database tables, your models. STEPHANIE: So, are you saying that you are more likely to have more abstractions or various resources than what you might have at the database level? JOËL: Well, you know what? Maybe more, but I would say, in general, different. And I think because both layers, the controller layer, and the model layer, are playing with very different sets of constraints. So when I'm designing database tables, I'm thinking in terms of normalization. And so, maybe I would take one big concept and split it up into smaller concepts, smaller tables because I need this data to be normalized so that there's no ambiguity when I'm making queries. So maybe something that's one resource at the controller layer might actually be multiple tables at the database layer. But the inverse could also be true, right? You might have, in the example that John gave, you know, an account that has a single table in the database with just a Boolean field confirmed yes or no. And maybe there's just a generic account resource. But then, separately, there's also a confirmation resource. And so, now we've got more resources at the controller layer than at the database layer. So I think it can go either way, but they're just not tightly coupled to each other. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that makes sense. I think another way that I've seen this manifest is when, like you said, like, maybe multiple database tables need to be updated by, you know, a request to this endpoint. And now we get into [chuckles] what some people may call services or that territory of basically something. And what's interesting is that a lot of the service classes are named as verbs, right? So order, creator. And, like, whatever order of operations that needs to happen on multiple database objects that happens as a result of a user placing an order. But the idea that those are frequently named as verbs was kind of interesting to me and a bit of a connection to our new gerund tip. JOËL: That's really interesting. I had not made that connection before. Because I think my first instinct would be to avoid a service object there and instead use something closer to a form object that takes the same idea and represents it as a noun, potentially with the same name as the resource. So maybe leaning really heavily into that idea of the verbal noun, not just in describing the controller or the route but then also maybe the object backing it, even if it's not connecting directly to a database table. STEPHANIE: Interesting. So, in this case, would the form object be mapped closer to your controller resource? JOËL: Potentially, yes. So maybe I do have some kind of, like, object that represents a confirmation and makes it nicer to render the confirmation form on the edit page or the new page. In this case, you know, it's probably just one checkbox, so maybe it's not worth creating an object. But if there were multiple fields, then yes, maybe it's nice to create an in-memory object that has the same name as the resource. Similar maybe for a resource that represents multiple underlying database tables. It can be nice to have kind of one object that represents all of them, almost like a facade, I guess. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's really interesting. I like that idea of a facade, or it's, like, something at a higher level representing hopefully, like, some kind of meaning of all of these database objects together. JOËL: I want to give a shout-out to talk from a former thoughtboter, Derek Prior—actually, former Bike Shed host—from RailsConf 2017 called In Relentless Pursuit of REST, where he digs into a lot of these concepts, particularly how to model resources in your Rails app that don't necessarily map one to one with a database table, and why that can be a good thing. Have you seen that talk? STEPHANIE: I haven't, but I love the title of it. It's a great pun. It's very evocative, I think because I'm really curious about this idea of a relentless pursuit. Because I think another way to react to that could be to be done with REST entirely and maybe go with something like GraphQL. JOËL: So instead of a relentless pursuit, it's a relentless...what's the opposite of pursuing? Fleeing? STEPHANIE: Fleeing? [laughs] I like how we arrived there at the same time. Yes. So now I'm thinking of I had mentioned a little bit ago on the show we had our spicy takes Lightning Talks on our Boost Team. And a fellow thoughtboter, Chris White, he had given a talk about Why REST Is Not the Best and for -- JOËL: Also, a great title. STEPHANIE: Yes, also, a great title. JOËL: I love the rhyming there. STEPHANIE: Yeah. And his reaction to the idea of trying to conform user interactions that don't quite map to a noun or an obvious resource was to potentially introduce GraphQL, where you have one endpoint that can service really anything that you can think of, I suppose. But, in his example, he was making the argument that human interactions are not database resources, right? And maybe if you're not able to find that abstraction as a noun or object, with GraphQL, you can encapsulate those ideas as closer to actions, but in the GraphQL world, like, I think they're called mutations. But it is, I think, a whole world of, like, deciding what you want to be changed on the server side that is a little less constrained to having to come up with the right abstraction. JOËL: I feel like GraphQL kind of takes that, like, complete opposite philosophy in that instead of saying, hey, let's have, like, this decoupling between the API layer and the database, GraphQL almost says, "No, let's lean into that." And yeah, you want to traverse the graph of, like, tables under the hood? Absolutely. You get to know the tables. You get to know how they're related to each other. I guess, in theory, you could build a middle layer, and that's the graph that gets traversed rather than the graph of the tables. In practice, I think most people build it so that the API layer more or less has access directly to tables. Has that been your experience? STEPHANIE: That's really interesting that you brought that up. I haven't worked with GraphQL in a while, but I was reading up on it before we started recording because I was kind of curious about how it might play with what we're talking about now. But the idea that it's graphed based, to me, was like, oh, like, that naturally, it could look very much like, you know, an entity graph of your relational database. But the more I was reading about the GraphQL schema and different types, I realized that it could actually look quite different. And because it is a little bit closer to your UI layer, like, maybe you are building an abstraction that is more for serving that as that middle layer between your front end and your back end. JOËL: That's really interesting that you mentioned that because I feel like the sort of traditional way that APIs are built is that they are built by the back-end team. And oftentimes, they will reflect the database schema. But you kind of mentioned with GraphQL here, sometimes it's the opposite that happens. Instead of being driven kind of from the back towards the front, it might be driven from the front towards the back where the UI team is building something that says, hey, we need these objects. We need these connections. Can you expose them to us? And then they get access to them. What has been your experience when you've been working with front ends that are backed by a GraphQL API? STEPHANIE: I think I've tended to see a GraphQL API when you do have a pretty rich client-side application with a lot of user interactions that then need to, you know, go and fetch some data. And you, like, really, you know, obviously don't want a page reload, right? So it's really interesting, actually, that you pointed out that it's, like, perhaps the front end or the UI driving the API. Because, on one hand, the flexibility is really nice. And there's a lot more freedom even in maybe, like, what the product can do or how it would look. On the other hand, what I've kind of also seen is that eventually, maybe we do just want an API that we can talk to separate from, you know, any kind of UI. And, at that point, we have to go and build a separate thing [laughs] for the same data. JOËL: So we've been talking about structuring APIs and, like, boundaries and things like that. I think my personal favorite feature of GraphQL is not the graph part but the fact that it comes with a built-in schema. And that plays really nicely with some typed technologies. Particularly, I've used Elm with some of the GraphQL libraries there, and that experience is just really nice. Where it will tell you if your front-end code is not compatible with the current API schema, and it will generate some things based off the schema. So you have this really nice feedback cycle where somebody makes a change to the API, or you want to make a change to the code, and it will tell you immediately is your front end compatible with the current state of the back end? Which is a classic problem with developing front-end code. STEPHANIE: First of all, I think it's very funny that you admitted to not preferring the graph part of GraphQL as a graph enthusiast yourself. [laughs] But I think I'm in agreement with you because, like, normally, I'm looking at it in its schema format. And that makes a lot of sense to me. But what you said was really interesting because, in some ways, we're now kind of going back to the idea of maybe boundaries blurring because the types that you are creating for GraphQL are kind of then servicing both your front end and your back end. Do you think that's accurate? JOËL: Ooh. That is an important distinction. I think you can. And I want to say that in some TypeScript implementations, you do use the types on both sides. In Elm, typically, you would not unless there's something really primitive, like a string or something like that. STEPHANIE: Okay, how does that work? JOËL: So you have some conversion layer that happens. STEPHANIE: Got it. JOËL: Honestly, I think that's my preference, and not just at the front end versus API layer but kind of all throughout. So the shape of an object in the database should not be the same shape as the object in the business logic that runs on the back end, which should not be the same shape as the object in transport, so JSON or whatever, which is also not the same shape as the object in your front-end code. Those might be similar, but each of these layers has different responsibilities, different things it's trying to optimize for. Your code should be built, in my opinion, in a way that allows all four of those layers to diverge in their interpretation of not only what maybe common entities are, so maybe a user looks slightly different at each of these layers, but maybe even what the entities are to start with. And that maybe in the database what, we don't have a full user, we've got a profile and an account, and those get merged somehow. And eventually, when it gets to the front end, all we care about is the concept of a user because that's what we need in that context. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's really interesting because now it almost sounds like separate systems, which they kind of are, and then finding a way to make them work also as one bigger [laughs] system. I would love to ask, though, what that conversion looks like to you. Or, like, how have you implemented that? Or, like, what kind of pattern would you use for that? JOËL: So I'm going to give a shout-out to the article that I always give a shout-out to: Parse, Don't Validate. In general, yeah, you do a transformation, and potentially it can fail. Let's say I'm pulling data from a GraphQL API into an Elm app. Elm has some built-in libraries for doing those transformations and will tell you at compile time if you're incorrectly transforming the data that comes from the shape that we expect from the schema. But just because the schema comes in as, like, a flat object with certain fields or maybe it's a deeply nested chain of objects in GraphQL, it doesn't mean that it has to be that way in your Elm app. So that transformation step, you get to sort of make it whatever you want. So my general approach is, at each layer, forget what other people are sending you and just design the entities that you would like to. I've heard the term wish-driven development, which I really like. So just, you know, if you could have, like, to make your life easy, what would the entities look like? And then kind of work backwards from there to make that sort of perfect world a reality for you and make it play nicely with other systems. And, to me, that's true at every layer of the application. STEPHANIE: Interesting. So I'm also imagining that the transformation kind of has to happen both ways, right? Like, the server needs a way to transform data from the front end or some, you know, whatever, third party. But that's also true of the front end because what you're kind of saying is that these will be different. [laughs] JOËL: Right. And, in many ways, it has to be because JSON is a very limited format. But some of the fancier things that you might have access to either on the back end or on the front end might be challenging to represent natively in JSON. And a classic one would be what Elm calls a custom type. You know, they're also called tagged unions, discriminated unions, algebraic data types. These things go by a bajillion names, and it's confusing. But they're really kind of awkward and hard, almost impossible to represent in straight-up JSON because JSON is a very limited kind of transportation format. So you have to almost, like, have a rehydration step on one side and a kind of packing down step on the other when you're reading or writing from a JSON API. STEPHANIE: Have you ever heard of or played that Wikipedia game Getting to Philosophy? JOËL: I've done, I think, variations on it, the idea that you have a start and an end article, and then you have to either get through in the fewest amount of clicks, or it might be a timed thing, whoever can get to the target article first. Is that what you're referring to? STEPHANIE: Yeah. So, in this case, I'm thinking, how many clicks through Wikipedia to get to the Wiki article about philosophy? And that's how I'm thinking about how we end up getting to [laughs] talking about types and parsing, and graphs even [laughs] on the show. JOËL: It's all connected, almost as if it forms a graph of knowledge. STEPHANIE: Learning that's another common topic on the show. [laughs] I think it's great. It's a lot of interesting lenses to view, like, the same things and just digging further and further deeper into them to always, like, come away with a little more perspective. JOËL: So, in the vein of wish-driven development, if you're starting a brand-new front-end UI, what is your sort of dream approach for working with an API? STEPHANIE: Wish-driven development is very visceral to me because I often think about when I'm working with legacy code and what my wishes and dreams were for the, you know, the stack or the technology or whatever. But, at that point, I don't really have the power to change it. You know, it's like I have what I have. And that's different from being in the driver's seat of a greenfield application where you're not just wishing. You're just deciding for yourself. You get to choose. At the end of the day, though, I think, you know, you're likely starting from a simple application. And you haven't gotten to the point where you have, like, a lot of features that you have to figure out how to support and, like, complexity to manage. And, you know, you don't even know if you're going to get there. So I would probably start with REST. JOËL: So we started this episode from a very back-end perspective where we're talking about Rails, and routes, and controllers. And we kind of ended it talking from a very front-end perspective. We also contrasted kind of a more RESTful approach, versus GraphQL, versus more kind of old-school RPC-style routing. And now, I'm almost starting to wonder if there's some kind of correlation between whether someone primarily works from the back end and maybe likes, let's say, REST versus maybe somebody on the front end maybe preferring GraphQL. So I'd be happy for any of our listeners who have strong opinions preferring GraphQL, or REST, or something else; message us at hosts@bikeshed.fm and let us know. And, if you do, please let us know if you're primarily a front-end or a back-end developer because I think it would be really fun to see any connections there. STEPHANIE: Absolutely. On that note, shall we wrap up? JOËL: Let's wrap up. STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeee!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.
Joël has a fascinating discovery! He learned a new nuance around working with dependency graphs. Stephanie just finished playing a 100-hour video game on Nintendo Switch: a Japanese role-playing game called Octopath Traveler II. On the work front, she is struggling with a lot of churn in acceptance criteria and ideas about how features should work. How do these get documented? What happens when they change? What happens when people lose this context over time? Strangler Fig Pattern (https://shopify.engineering/refactoring-legacy-code-strangler-fig-pattern) Octopath Traveler 2 (https://octopathtraveler2.square-enix-games.com/en-us/) Empowering other departments (https://www.bikeshed.fm/388) Transcript: JOËL: You're the one who controls the pacing here. STEPHANIE: Oh, I am. Okay, great. Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: So long-time Bike Shed listeners will know that I'm a huge fan of dependency graphs for modeling all sorts of problems and particularly when trying to figure out how to work in an iterative fashion where you can do a bunch of small chunks of work that are independent, that can be shipped one at a time without having your software be in a breaking state in all of these intermediate steps. And I recently made a really exciting discovery, or I learned a new nuance around working with dependency graphs. So the idea is that if you have a series of entities that have dependencies on each other, so maybe you're trying to build, let's say, some kind of object model or maybe a series of database tables that will reference each other, that kind of thing, if you draw a dependency graph where each bubble on your graph points to other bubbles that it depends on, that means that it can't be created without those other things already existing. Then, in order to create all of those entities for the first time, let's say they're database tables, you need to work your way from kind of the outside in. You start with any bubbles on your graph that have no arrows going out from them. That means they have no dependencies. They can be safely built on their own, and then you kind of work your way backwards up the arrows. And that's how I've sort of thought about working with dependency graphs for a long time. Recently, I've been doing some work that involves deleting entities in such a graph. So, again, let's say we're talking about database tables. What I came to realize is that deleting works in the opposite order. So, if you have a table that have other tables that depend on it, but it doesn't depend on anything, that's the first one you want to create. But it's also the last one you want to delete. So, when you're deleting, you want to start with the table that maybe has dependencies on other tables, but no other tables depend on it. It is going to be kind of like the root node of your dependency graph. So I guess the short guideline here is when you're creating, work from the bottom up or work from the leaves inward, and when you're deleting, work from the top-down or work from the root outward or roots because a graph can have multiple roots; it's not a tree. STEPHANIE: That is interesting. I'm wondering, did you have a mental model for managing deleting of dependencies prior? JOËL: No. I've always worked with creating new things. And I went into this task thinking that deleting would be just like creating and then was like, wait a minute, that doesn't work. And then, you know, a few cycles later, realized, oh, wait, deleting is the opposite of creating when you're navigating the graph. And, all of a sudden, I feel like I've got a much clearer mental model or just another way of thinking about how to work with something like this. STEPHANIE: Cool. That actually got me thinking about a case where you might have a circular dependency. Is that something you've considered yet? JOËL: Yes. So, when you have a dependency graph, and you've got a circular dependency, that's a big problem because...so, in the creating model, there is no leaf node, if you will, because they both reference each other. So that means that each of these entities cannot be created on its own, the entire cycle. And maybe you've got only two, but maybe your cycle is, you know, ten entities big. The entire cycle is going to be shipped as one massive change. So something that I often try to do is if I draw a dependency graph out and notice, wait a minute, I do have cyclical dependencies, the question then becomes, can I break that cycle to allow myself to work iteratively? Because otherwise, I know that there's a big chunk that can't be done iteratively. It just has to be done all at once. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's really interesting because I've certainly been in that situation where I don't realize until it's too late, where I've started going down the path thinking that, you know, I could just remove this one thing, or make this one change, and then find myself suddenly, you know, coming to the realization, oh, this other thing is now going to have to change. And then, at that point, there's almost kind of like the sunken cost fallacy [laughs] a little bit where you're like, well, I'm already in it. So, why don't I keep going? But your strategy of trying to find a way to break that cyclica...that is two words combined. [laughs] I meant to say circular dependency [laughs] is the right way to avoid just having to do it all in one go. Have you had to break up a cycle like that before? JOËL: Yes. I do it on a semi-frequent basis. The fancy term here for what I'm looking for when I'm building out a dependency graph is a directed acyclic graph. That's a graph theory or a computer science term that you'll hear thrown around a lot, DAG. I often like to...when building out a series of tasks that might also form a graph because you don't just model entities in your system; you might model a series of tasks as a graph. If there's a cycle in the graph, typically, I can break that using something like the strangler fig pattern, which is a way to kind of have some intermediate steps that are non-breaking that then lead you to the refactor that you want. And I've used the strangler fig pattern for a long time, never realizing until later that, oh, what I'm actually doing is breaking cycles in my task dependency graph. STEPHANIE: Hmm. I'm curious if you have noticed how these cycles come to be because I almost imagine that they get introduced over time, where you maybe did start with a parent and then you, you know, had dependencies. But then, over time, somehow, that circular dependency gets introduced. And I'm wondering if part of figuring out how to break that cycle is determining how things were introduced, like, over time. JOËL: In my experience, this happens in a lot of different ways because I'm using dependency graphs like this to give myself a mental model for a lot of different kinds of things. So maybe I'm thinking in terms of database tables. And so those might get a circular dependency that gets added over time as the system grows. But I'm also using it sometimes to model maybe a series of tasks. So I take a large task, and I break it down into subtasks that are all connected to each other. And that doesn't tend to sort of evolve over time in the same way that a series of database tables do. So I think it's very context-dependent. But there are definitely situations where it will be like you said, something that kind of evolves over time. STEPHANIE: That makes sense. Well, I'm excited for you to get to deleting some potential code or database tables that are no longer in use. That sounds like a developer's dream [laughs] to clean up all that stuff. JOËL: It's interesting because it's...a move operation is effectively what's happening. So I'm recreating tables in another system, pointing the ActiveRecord to this new system, and then deleting the existing ones in the local database. So, in a sense, I'm kind of traveling up this dependency graph from the leaf nodes into the root and then back down from the root to the leaves as I'm creating and then deleting everything or creating in one system, and then going back and deleting in the other system. STEPHANIE: Got it. Okay, so not necessarily a net negative but, like you said, a move or just having to gradually replace to use a new system. JOËL: That's right. And we're trying not to do this as, you know, okay, we're going to take the system down and move 50 tables from one system to another. But instead, saying, like, you know, one at a time, we're going to move these things over. And it's going to be small, incremental change over the course of a couple of weeks. And they're all pretty safe to deploy, and we feel good about them. STEPHANIE: That's good. I'm glad you feel good. [laughs] We should all be able to feel good when we make changes like that. JOËL: It's going to make my Fridays just so much more low-key just, like, yeah, hit that deploy button. It's okay. So, Stephanie, what is new in your world? STEPHANIE: So this is not work-related at all. But I just finished playing a 100-hour video game on my Nintendo Switch. [laughs] I finished a Japanese role-playing game called Octopath Traveler II. And I have never really played a game like this before. I've not, you know, put in many, many hours into something that then had an end, like, a completion. So, at the end of this very long game that had a very, you know, compelling and engaging story and I was invested in all of these characters, and by the time the credits were rolling, I felt a little sad to be leaving this world that I have been in many evenings over the last couple of months. Yeah, I don't know, I'm feeling both a little sad because, you know like I said, I got really invested in this game, but now I'm also kind of glad to have some free time back in [laughs] my life because that has definitely been the primary, like, evening activity that I've been doing to relax. JOËL: It sounds like this game had a very, like, a particularly immersive world that really pulled you in. STEPHANIE: It did. It did. It has these eight, like, different characters that you follow, like, different chapters and all of their stories, and then they all kind of come together as well. And the world was huge in this game. There were so many little towns to explore. And I didn't realize I was a completionist type. But I found myself running around opening every chest, talking to every NPC, and making sure that I, you know, collected all of my items [chuckles] before moving on. I also finished all of the side quests, which is, I think, you know, how I managed to put in over 100 hours into it. But yeah, it was very immersive, and I really enjoyed it. I don't know if this will become a norm for me. I know there are some people who are, you know, JRPG diehards and play a lot of these kinds of games, but they're a real, like, time investment for sure. JOËL: Are there achievements for completing everything? STEPHANIE: Not that I can tell on the Switch. I do know that, like, on other systems, you can see your progress on having done all of the things there are to do. But I think it's actually kind of better for me to just play [laughs] to just, like, think that I've done it all but not really, like, have something that tells me whether or not I've done it because then I would feel a lot more neurotic, I think, about being able to let it go where I am now. [laughs] JOËL: Right. If we've got, like, an explicit checklist of things or a progress bar, then it feels like you got to get to all the things. STEPHANIE: Yeah, exactly. I think there are still, you know, a couple more things that I wrote down on my little checklist of tasks that I would want to do once I feel like I want to come back to the game. But for now, like I said, I watched the credits roll. I teared up a little bit, you know, thinking about and reminiscing on my adventure with these characters, and I'm ready to put it down for a bit. JOËL: Did I hear correctly that you made a checklist for this game of things you wanted to do? STEPHANIE: Yes, [laughs] I did. JOËL: That's amazing. I love that. STEPHANIE: Yeah, you know, there are just so many things almost kind of like work where I had to, like, break down some of my goals. I wanted to, like, hit a certain level. I wanted to, you know, make sure I defeat these bosses that would help me get to those levels. And yeah, I got very into it. It was definitely a big part of my life for a couple of months. I got it originally because I needed a game to play on my flight to Asia back when I went to Japan. And I'm like, oh, like, this looks, you know, fun and engaging, and it will distract me for my, you know, over 10-hour flight. Turns out it distracted me for many, many more hours over several months [laughs] since then. But I had a great time. So yeah, that's what's new for me. Again, it's something I'd never really done before. I will say though I am very behind on my reading goal as a result. [chuckles] JOËL: I feel like this is a classic developer thing to do is, like, use the tools that we're used to in our job and then apply them to other parts of our life. And now it's just like, okay, well, I made a Kanban board to track my progress in this video game. You know, or, in my case, I'm definitely guilty of having drawn a dependency graph for the crafting tree for some video game. So I feel you really strongly there. STEPHANIE: Yes, I'm nodding heavily in agreement. I think it just scratches the same kind of itch of, you know, achieving, like, little things and then achieving one big thing. JOËL: So, speaking of places that are nice to have checklists and, like, well-defined requirements, you and I were talking earlier, and you have recently found some frustration around having user stories be defined well on your current project. STEPHANIE: Yes. So I've been reflecting a little bit about my current project and noticing what I think I might call product smells; I'm not quite sure, just some things I'm seeing in our day-to-day workflow that is getting me thinking. And I'm curious to hear if you've experienced something similar. But I find myself being tasked with a ticket that is quite vague. And maybe this was written by a product owner, or maybe it was written by another developer. And it is not quite actionable yet, so I have to go through the process of figuring out what I'm really needing to do here. I think another thing that has been quite frustrating is, you know, maybe we do find out what we want to do. And, like, I'll go back into the ticket, write down the requirements that I gathered, and do the ticket. I'll ship whatever change was required, and then I'll hear back from someone in a meeting or either as a one-off request in Slack. And it'll be like, "Hey, like, actually, you know, we want this to be different." And maybe you previously said that "Oh, the value for something would be 30. But now we found out more information; it should be 20. And so could you, like, make that change?" And then I'm not really sure what the best way to document a change like that is because it, you know, maybe existed in the previous ticket, but now it has changed. And do I create a new ticket for this, or do I just go ahead and make the code change? Like, who would know this information that we're now carrying about 20 being the value for, let's say, like, days or not meaning something in the code that we're writing? And I guess I've just been really curious about how to make sure that this doesn't become the norm where a lot of these conversations are just happening, and, you know, the people who happen to be in them know that this change happened. But then later on, someone is asking questions about, like, hey, like, when did this change? Or I expected this to be 30. But is this, you know, behaving as expected? So that was [laughs] a bit of a nebulous way of describing just, like, this churn that I feel with being the executor of work. But then, like, a lot of these things changing above me or separate from me and figuring out how to manage that. JOËL: When you were describing this scenario where you've done the work, and then someone's like, "Oh, could we change this value from, like, 30 to 20?" I'm thinking in my mind of the sort of beam that a lot of our designers face where it's like, you know, they have a design. They work on it; they do it. And then show it to a client, and the client is like, "I love this design. But could we just shift this box over, like, one pixel?" Like, they're, like, tiny, tiny, little changes that are kind of requested for change after you've done, like, this big thing. And, oftentimes, those pile-up. It's like, you shift it one pixel. It's like, oh, actually, you know what? Why don't we do it two pixels? And then it's like never-ending cycles, sometimes of, like, minute little changes. STEPHANIE: Yeah. But the minute changes really add up into, I think, really different behavior than what you maybe had decided as a team originally. And in the process of changing and evolving, I don't really know where documentation fits in. I've been working on this project that had a pretty comprehensive product design doc, where they had decided upfront on, you know, how the application is going to behave in many different scenarios. But again, like, that has changed over time. And when I recently had to onboard someone new to this project, you know, we sent over this document, and we're like, yeah, you can, you know, feel free to peruse it. But it's actually quite outdated. And then, similarly, right now, since the features that I'm working on are going through QA, there's been a lot of back and forth about, I'm seeing this, but the doc said that Y is supposed to happen, and I'm not sure if that's a bug or not. And I or someone else has to respond with that context that we were holding in our head about when that change happened. JOËL: That's really interesting. And I think it varies a lot based off the size of the organization. In a smaller organization, you're probably doing a lot of the requirements gathering yourself. You're talking to all the stakeholders. You're probably doing the QA yourself, or you're walking somebody else through QA. Versus a large organization, there might be an entirely separate product team, and a separate QA team, and a separate dev team. And a danger that I've often seen is where all of these teams are just kind of tossing work over the fence. And all you're given is a, you know, a ticket of, like, execute on this. Basically, turn these specs into code. And then you do that, and then you toss it over the fence to the QA team. And they check does the code do these things? And there's so much context that can easily get lost from one step to another. That being said, I think a lot of devs find it frustrating to do some of the requirements gathering work. How do you feel in general about scoping out a ticket or doing follow-up conversations with the product team about, like, "Hey, your idea for the ticket is this. How do you feel about doing these things? Or what if we cut these things?" Are those conversations that you enjoy having? Is that a fun part of the developer role for you? Or do you kind of wish that, like, somebody else did all of that so that you could, like, go heads down just writing code? STEPHANIE: I think it depends. That's a great question. Actually, I have so many thoughts in response. So let me try to figure out where I want to go from here. But I think I used to not like it. I used to be stressed out by it, and sometimes I still am. But when I thought my role was purely executing, to receive a ticket that is a bit vague, you know, I might have been left feeling, like, stuck, like, not knowing where to go from there. But now that has changed a bit because I received some really helpful feedback from an old manager of mine who was kind of invested in my growth. And she really suggested learning to become more comfortable with ambiguity because that just becomes more and more your job, I think, as you progress in your career. And so now I at least know what information I need to go get and have, you know, strategies for doing so. And also knowing that it's my job, like, knowing that no one else might be doing it, and it might just be me so that I can therefore get this ticket done. Because, like you said, that problem of throwing the work over the fence to someone else, at some point, that doesn't work because everyone has too much on their plates. And you have to just decide to be the one to seek the information that you need. JOËL: I think one way that, as developers, we bring a lot of value is that we help to cut through a lot of that ambiguity. I think if we see our role as merely translating a requirements document into code, that's a very simplistic point of view of what a talented developer does. So, like you said, as we grow in our careers, we start dealing with less and less defined things. We often have to start defining the problems that we're given. And we have to have these conversations with other teams to figure out what exactly we want to do. And maybe better understand why is it that we want to do this thing. What is the purpose of it? How are we going to get there? And my favorite: Do we have to do all of these things to hit the minimum value of this goal? Can I split this into multiple tickets? I love breaking down work. If I can make the ticket smaller, I'm all about that. STEPHANIE: Yes. I'm well aware. It's interesting about what you said, though, is that, like, yes, that becomes, in some ways, our superpower. But, for me, where the pain comes in is when that's not part of the expectations, where I am maybe tasked with something that is not clear enough, and yet, the time that I need to find that clarity is not given the respect that it, I think, deserves to build a good product because the expectation is that I should already be making progress on this ticket and that it will be delivered soon. You know, in that situation, I wish I had been in the room earlier. I wish I had been part of the process for developing the product strategy, or even just, like, have come in earlier to be able to ask, you know, why are we building this? And, like, what are some of the limitations on the technical side that we have? Because often, I find that it is a little too...not necessarily too late, but it is quite down the road that we then have to have these conversations, and it doesn't feel good. JOËL: I think that's one of the powerful things that came out of the agile movement was the idea that you have these cross-functional teams, that you don't have a separate product team, a separate dev team, a separate QA team, a separate design team that are all these isolated islands. But instead, you say, okay, we have a cross-functional team that is working on this aspect of the product. And it will be some product people, some dev people, some designers kind of all working together and communicating with each other. I know, shocking concept. And even depending on the context, a big idea is that the client or the customer is a part of that team. So, when we at thoughtbot work with a client, especially when they are maybe a smaller client like a startup founder, we make sure that they feel like they are a part of the team. They are involved in various meetings where we decide things. They have input. You know, they're part of that feedback cycle that we build. But that can also be the case for a larger company where your internal stakeholders are kind of built-in to be sort of part of your team. STEPHANIE: I've seen so many different flavors of trying to do Agile [laughs] that it has lost a little bit of meaning for me these days. And maybe we've incorporated some aspects of it. But then that idea of the tight feedback loops and then a cross-functional team where everyone is communicating that part has gotten a little bit lost, at least on my project. And I imagine that this is common, and our listeners might be finding themselves in a similar situation where things are starting to feel a little more like handing off and a little more like waterfall. [laughs] I'm curious, though, if you found yourself being requested to make a change from what the original decision was, how would you go about documenting that or not documenting it? Where do you think the best place for that information about how this feature now is supposed to work where should that live? JOËL: Are you talking about where do we document that a decision was made to change the original requirements of a task? STEPHANIE: Yes. JOËL: In general, I think that should live on the ticket just because as long as the ticket is live, I think it's good to have all the context on that ticket for whoever's working on it to have access at a glance. Sometimes it's worth it to say, you know what? We don't want to just keep this ticket live for weeks or maybe months on end. Let's ship this ticket, and create a follow-up to make a change later, especially if it's a change that's less important where it's like, you know what? It would be nice to have if...but, again, like, scope creep is a real danger. And so, again, me with the aggressive breaking up of tickets, I love to say, "That's a great idea. It would make a great change, not part of this ticket." So oftentimes, those changes I will push them into another ticket. STEPHANIE: That's interesting. What about documentation beyond the current work? So I'm thinking about once, you know, a feature is delivered, how do people in the organization then know how this feature is supposed to work? Like moving forward as something that is customer-facing. JOËL: That can vary a lot by organization, I think because there's a couple of different aspects to this. You have maybe some internal-facing documentation; maybe some customer support people need to know about the way the interface has changed. And then you also have customer-facing documentation where maybe you want some sort of, you know, you want a blog post talking about the new feature or some kind of release notes or something like that to be shared with your customers. And compiling that might look very different than what you do for your internal service reps. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I like that. It's true that the customer documentation is really helpful. At least for, the product that I'm working on, it has very comprehensive documentation about how to use that for its customers. And that has been really helpful because, hopefully, that should be the truest [laughs] information out there. But sometimes, you know, I find myself in meetings where none of us really know what happens. For example, a question that was asked recently is our product has a free trial capability. But it was unclear what happens to all of the data that the customer is getting access to as a feature. Like, what happens to that data after the free trial ends? Like, if they then have purchased a license, do they still have access to their free trial data? If, you know, there's a lapse between then, does it just get deleted, or will it show up again? And no one really knew the answer to that. And I think that was another area that got my spidey senses tingling a little bit; I think because it reminded me of...there was a definition I read somewhere of legacy code that is basically when the person who has the most context about how a piece of code works and then they leave the company and that institutional knowledge no longer exists, like, that is legacy code. And I almost think that that also applies to product a little bit where a legacy product is something where no one quite knows what is supposed to happen, but it's still being used by users. JOËL: That's a really fun definition there. I think there's sort of two related questions that are slightly different here, which is, one, how does the code behave? So, what happens when someone's trial period expires? And it's quite possible that no one on the team knows what actually happens when that time expires. And then the second question is, what should happen when a trial expires? And it's possible, again, that the product team didn't think through any of the edge cases. They only went for the happy path. And so it's possible if that is also fully undefined and no one knows. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I like that distinction you made a lot because they definitely go hand in hand, where someone realizes that some weird edge case happened, and then suddenly, they're asking those questions. And, you know, we realized, like, oh, like, that just didn't have enough, like, intention or thought behind how it was coded. So, like, it really is; who knows, right? Just whatever seems to happen. And I think that this actually kind of reminds me of a previous episode we did about empowering other departments in the company because, ultimately, a lot of those questions about, like, how does this work? What happens? Ends up going to a developer who has to go and read the code and report back. And while, you know, we do have that power, it can also be a bit of a curse, I think. [laughs] JOËL: I think this is an area where, as developers, we're maybe particularly skilled. Because of the work that we do, our brains are kind of wired to think about all of the edge cases, and sometimes they can be really annoying. But I think there's a lot of value sometimes when maybe the product team comes to us with a maybe somewhat nebulously scoped ticket or a series of tickets for, let's say, a free trial period feature that only goes through the happy path. And then sometimes it's up to us to push back or to follow up and say, "Okay, great. We've got a bunch of tickets for a free trial period. Have you thought about what happens after a trial expires but the person hasn't converted to a paying customer?" And then, oftentimes, the answer is like, "Oh, no, we didn't think about that." And I think oftentimes, as developers, our job is to kind of, like, seek out a lot of those edge cases. And we have a lot of techniques and methodologies that we use to try to find edge cases, things like test-driven development, various modeling tools that we'll try to use to make sure that we don't just crash or do something bad in our code. But what should the actual behavior be? That's a conversation that we need to have. And hopefully, that's one that maybe the product team has already had on their own. But oftentimes, the benefit of having that cross-functional team is the ability to kind of have that back and forth and say, "Hey, what about this edge case? Have we thought about that? How do we want that to behave?" STEPHANIE: Yeah, that actually made me think about the idea of tech debt but almost at a product level, where, hey, it turns out that we have all of these things that we didn't quite think through, and it's now causing problems. But how much do we invest in revisiting it? Because, you know, maybe this feature is several years old, and it was working just okay enough for it to, you know, be valuable. But we're now discovering these things and, you know, like, do we invest in them? Or are we more focused on, you know, coming up with new things and new features for our customers? JOËL: That's a classic prioritization problem. It also kind of reminds me of the idea of an MVP. What are the actual, like, minimum set of features that you need in order to try out something or to ship something to customers? And, you know, maybe we don't need some special behavior if your trial account doesn't convert. Maybe we're okay [laughs] that you log in, and the app just crashes. Probably not, because we would probably want you to convert to a paying customer at some point. But maybe we're okay if you just get a screen that says, "You have no projects," when, in fact, you did have projects. It's just that you're no longer on the free trial. Again, for business reasons, probably we want a call to action there that says, "You have five projects. They are not available to you. Please pay to unlock your projects again." That probably converts better. But, again, now that is a business decision. And that becomes a prioritization question that the team as a whole gets to address. Sometimes it can also be some really fun prioritization things where if you're on a really tight schedule, you might ship some features live knowing that you have a time limit, but you don't have to necessarily ship other things. So let's say you've got a 30-day trial, and maybe you ship that before you've even implemented what the dashboard will look like after your free trial has expired, and that's fine because no one's going to hit that condition for 30 days. So now you've got 30 days to go out and handle that condition. And maybe that's okay because it allowed you to get to market a little bit faster, allowed you to cut scope, break those tickets, yes, and just move that much faster. But it does require discipline because now you're on the clock. You've got 30 days to fix that edge case or potentially face some unhappy customers. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think that's quite a funny way to handle it. It's really ruthless prioritization [laughs] there. But what you said was very interesting to me because I was thinking about how there is such a focus on new feature development and that being the thing that will attract customers or generate more money. But there is something to be said about investigating some of our old features of our existing system and finding opportunities there. And oftentimes, revisiting them will reduce the amount of pain [chuckles] that, you know, developers feel having to kind of keep track or have an eye on, like, where things are airing out, but then don't have the time to really invest in making it better or making that part of the product better. JOËL: I think that's a great opportunity then to have a conversation with other parts of the team. Typically, I think you have to convert some of those into more of a business case. So the business people in the company or the product people might not care about the sort of raw metrics that you see as a developer. Oh, we got an exception with a stack trace in this part of our app. What does that even mean? But if you say, hey, people who signed up for a free trial and then didn't immediately convert within 30 days who want to come back a month later and convert are unable to do so. And we've seen that that's about 10% of the people who signed up for a free trial. Well, now that's an interesting business question. Are we losing out on potentially 10% of customer acquisition? I'll bet the sales and marketing people care a lot about that. I'll bet the business people care a lot about that. The product people probably care a lot about that. And now we can have a conversation about should we prioritize this thing? Are these metrics that we should improve? Is this a part of our code that's worth investing in? STEPHANIE: Yeah, I like that because, in some ways, asking those questions about how does it work? Like, that is really an opportunity because then you can find out, and then you can make decisions about whether it's currently providing enough value as is or if there is something hiding under there to leverage. JOËL: And I think that's one of the other places where, as developers, we provide value to clients is that we can sort of talk both languages. We can talk product language. We can talk business language. But we can also talk code. And so when we see things like that in code, sort of translate that into, like, what are the business impacts of this code change? Which then allows everyone to make the best possible decisions for the mission of the organization that you're a part of. So we've talked about a variety of sort of patterns and anti-patterns that surround working through some of this churn on a product. I'm curious, Stephanie, for you, what's maybe one concrete thing that you've done recently that you've found has really helped you navigate this and maybe help reduce some of the stress that you feel as you navigate through this? STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think, for me, one of the worst things is when that discussion is had in a meeting or a [inaudible 35:45] and then is not put anywhere. And so, one thing I've been making sure to do is either asking the person who made the request to write it down, either on the ticket or in Slack. Or I will write it down, you know, I will document the outcomes of what we talked about and putting it in a public space so that people are aware. I think that small action has been helpful because we hold so much of this in our heads. And I've been finding that it ends up being hard for people to rotate onto different projects and, you know, get onboarded and up to speed effectively because there's so much knowledge and context transfer happening. But even just putting it in a place where maybe it's not relevant to everyone, but at least they see it. And then the next time that they're asked or maybe, like, do come around to working on this, they, like, have some fragment of a memory that they saw something about this. So that has been really helpful. It actually dovetails really nicely into what we were talking about with opportunities, too, because once it's out there, like, maybe someone else will see it and have an idea about how it could be better or that change not being what they expected, and they can weigh in a little more. So that's what I'm trying to do. And I think it's also nice to see how often that happens, right? If we're constantly seeing things changing because we have a written record of it, that could be helpful in bringing up and investigating further as to, like, why is this happening? Like, why do we experience this churn? And is that something we want to address? JOËL: Yeah, because an element that we haven't talked at all about is any sort of feedback cycle or retrospective, where we can talk about these things and having that written trail and saying, "Oh, we changed this decision five times in the past week, like, really churned there." Now maybe that prioritizes it to be an important thing to talk about and to improve for the next cycle. STEPHANIE: What I feel really strongly about is when, you know, each individual on a team is feeling this pain, but it not being known that it's actually a collective issue. Because maybe these things are happening in one-on-one conversations, and we don't realize that, like, oh, maybe there is something bigger here that we could improve on. And so the more eyes on it there are, the more visible it is, I think, that the easier it is to address. JOËL: I love that, the power of writing things down. On that note, shall we wrap up? STEPHANIE: Let's wrap up. Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeee!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.
Stephanie went to her first WNBA game. Also: Bingo. Joël's new project has him trying to bring in multiple databases to back their ActiveRecord models. He's never done multi-database setups in Rails before, and he doesn't hate it. Stephanie shares bits from a discussion with former Bike Shed host Steph Viccari about learning goals. Four elements stood out: Adventure (try something new) Passion (topic) Profit (from recent learnings) Low-risk (applicable today) = APPL Stephanie and Joël discuss what motivates them, what they find interesting vs. what has immediate business value, and how they advocate for themselves in these situations. They ponder if these topics can bring long-term value and discuss the impact that learning Elm had on Joël's client work. Elm (https://elm-lang.org/) Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby (https://www.poodr.com/) Design Patterns in Ruby (http://designpatternsinruby.com/) Quarter Life (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/579928/quarterlife-by-satya-doyle-byock/) Working Iteratively (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/working-iteratively) Transcript: JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: All right, I have a new-new thing and an old-new thing to share with you today. So the new-new thing is that I went to my first WNBA game [laughs] last week, which is also my third professional sports game ever, probably. I am not a sports person. But a rather new friend of mine invited me to go with her because they are fans, and so I was like, yeah, sure. I'll try anything once. And I went, and I had a great time. It was very exciting. I mean, I know the basic rules of basketball, right? Get the ball in the hoop. But I was very surprised to see how fast-paced it was. And, you know, I was like, wow, like, this is so much fun. There's so much going on, like, the music, you know, the crowd. It was very energizing. And then my friend actually told me that that was a pretty slow game, [chuckles] relative to how they normally go. And I was like, oh, wow, like, if that was slow, then I can't wait for a real competitive [laughs] game next time. So that's my new-new thing. I had a good time. Will do it again. I'm just, like, a 15-minute bike ride from the stadium for our team in Chicago. It's called The Sky. That's our WNBA team. So yeah, I'm looking forward to being basketball Stephanie, I guess. [chuckles] JOËL: That's really cool. How does the speed compare to other sports you've gone to see? STEPHANIE: I think this is why I was interested because I've really only seen baseball, for which I know very little. And that, I think, is, like, a much slower-paced kind of sport. Yeah, I have some memories of going to, like, college football games, which also, like, quite slow. I just remember standing around for a while. [laughs] So I think basketball might be the thing for me, at least in terms of engaging my interest. JOËL: You want something that actually engages you with the sport the whole time. It's not just a social event themed around occasionally watching someone do something. STEPHANIE: Yes, exactly. I also enjoyed the half-time performances, you know, there was just, like, a local dance team. And I thought that was all just very fun. And, yes, I had a lot to, you know, just, like, point to and ask questions about because there was just so much going on, as opposed to sitting and waiting, at least that was my experience [laughs] at other kinds of sports games. As for the old-new thing, now that it's summer, there is a local bar near me that does bingo every week. But it's not just normal bingo. It's called veggie bingo, which I realize is kind of confusing [chuckles] if you just, like, call it veggie bingo, but it's bingo where you win vegetables or, like, produce from local community gardens and other, you know, small batch food items. And I had a great time doing it last year. I met some new friends. It just became our weekly hangout. And so I'm looking forward to doing that again. And, I don't know, I'm just glad I have fun things to share about what's new in my world now that the weather is warm and I'm doing stuff again. I feel like there was one point in the winter where I was coming [chuckles] onto the show and sharing how I had just gotten a heated blanket in the middle of winter, and that was the most exciting thing going on for me. So it feels good to be able to bring up some new stuff. JOËL: Seasonality is a thing, right? And, you know, there are rhythms in life. And sometimes things are more fast-paced, sometimes they're a bit slower. That's really exciting. Did you take any produce home, or did you win anything when you went to play? STEPHANIE: I did. I won a big bag of produce the last time that I went. At this point, it was last season. But it was right before I was about to go on vacation. So I ended up -- JOËL: Oh no. STEPHANIE: [chuckles] Right. I ended up not being able to, you know, keep it in the fridge and just giving it away to my friends who did not win. So I think it was a good situation overall. That's my tip, is go to bingo or any kind of prize-winning hang out as a group, and then you can share the rewards. It's very exciting. Even if you don't win, you know, like, probably someone else at your table will win, and that is equally fun. JOËL: I think the closest I've been to that experience is going to play, like, bar trivia with some friends and then winning a gift card that covers our dinner and drinks for the evening. STEPHANIE: Yeah, yeah, that's great. I used to go to a local trivia around me too. The best part about bingo, though, is that it requires no skill at all. [laughs] I, yeah, didn't realize, again, how into these kinds of things I would be until I just tried it out. Like, that was...bingo is another thing I don't think I would have internally decided to go do. But yeah, my friends just have all these great ideas about fun things to do, and I will happily join them. So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: So I've recently started a new client project. And one of the really interesting things that I've been doing on this project is trying to bring in multiple databases to back our ActiveRecord models. This is a Rails app. I've never done multi-database setups in Rails before. It's been a feature since Rails 6, but this is my first time interacting with that system. And, you know, it's actually pretty nice. STEPHANIE: Really? It ended up being pretty straightforward or pretty easy to set up? JOËL: Yeah. There's a little bit of futzing around you have to do with the database YAML configuration file. And then what you end up doing is setting up another base class for your ActiveRecord models to inherit from. So, typically, you have that application record that you would inherit from for your primary database. But for other databases, if you want a model to be backed by a table from that system, then you would have a separate base class that all of those models inherit from, and that's pretty much it. Everything else just works. A bunch of your Rake tasks get a little bit different. So you've got to, like, configure your setup scripts and your test scripts and all that thing a little bit differently. But yeah, you can just query, do all the normal things you do with an ActiveRecord model, but it's reading from a different database. STEPHANIE: That's really cool that it ended up being pretty painless. And I'm thinking, for the most part, as a developer, you know, working in that kind of codebase; maybe they don't really need to know too much about the details of the other databases. And they can just rely on the typical Rails conventions and things they know how to do via Rails. Do you suspect that there might be some future where that might become a gotcha or something that someone has to debug a little further because of the multi-database setup? JOËL: There are some infrastructure things, but I think I'm handling all of them upfront. So like I said, configuring various setup scripts, or test scripts, or CI, that kind of thing to make sure that they all work. Once that's all done, I think it should pretty much just work. And people can use them like they would normal ActiveRecord models. The one gotcha is that you can't join models across two different databases. You can't use ActiveRecord to write a query that would try to join two tables that are in different databases because the SQL won't allow for that. So, if you're ever trying to do something like that or you have some kind of association where you're trying to do some special join, that would not work. So, if somebody attempts that, they might get an unexpected error. Other than that, I think it just keeps working as normal, and people can treat it more or less as if it's one database. STEPHANIE: That's interesting. How do you model relationships between tables on the two different databases, then? Like, how would that work? JOËL: I've not gotten that far yet. For some things, I imagine just it's two queries. I'm not sure if the ActiveRecord associations handle that automatically for you. I think they probably will. So you probably can get away with an association where one model lives in one database. Let's say your article lives in one database, and it has many comments that live in a different database. Because then you would make one query to load the article, get the article ID, and then you would do another query to the second database and say, hey, find all the comments with this article ID, which is already, I think, what ActiveRecord does in one single database. It is making two queries. It's just that now those two queries are going to be two different databases rather than to a single one. STEPHANIE: Interesting. Okay. I did think that maybe ActiveRecord did some fancy join thing under the hood. And when you mentioned that that wouldn't be possible when the two tables are on different databases, I was kind of curious about how that would work. But that makes sense. That would be really cool if it is, you know, that straightforward. And, hopefully, it just doesn't become too big of an issue that comes back to haunt someone later. JOËL: Right. So pretty much, if there is a situation where you were relying on a JOIN, you will now have to make two separate queries and then combine the results yourself. STEPHANIE: Right. I also want to give you kudos for doing all the good work of setting it up so that, hopefully, future developers don't have to think about it. JOËL: Kudos to the Rails team as well. It's nice to have that just kind of built into the framework. Again, it's not something I've needed in, you know, a decade of doing Rails, but then, you know, now that I have run into a situation where I need that, it just works out of the box. So that's been really nice. So, a couple of weeks ago, we talked about the fact that we were going through review season and that we had to fill out reviews for ourselves then also fill out peer reviews for each other. You had brought up a really interesting conversation you had about reaching out to other people and trying to get feedback on what kind of review or feedback would be helpful for them. STEPHANIE: I did, yeah. Though, I think in this case, the person writing that feedback actually reached out to me, but certainly, it goes both ways. Spoiler alert - that person was Steph Viccari, former [laughs] host of The Bike Shed. JOËL: So Steph also reached out to me with similar questions. And that spawned a really interesting conversation around personal goals and what it looks like, particularly when it comes to what to learn next in technology. We started discussing things, and I listed out some different things that I was interested in. And then just kind of out of nowhere, Steph just pulls out this, like, oh, I noticed these four elements. And I'm going to list them out here because it's really cool. So these four elements were adventure, so trying something new. Passion, so something that's really exciting to you. Profit something where you can leverage some recent things that you've done to get more value out of some work you've already done. And then finally, low risk, something that would be applicable today. And it just kind of turns out that this makes a funny little acronym: APPL. And apples are often a symbol of learning. So that was kind of a fun coincidence. STEPHANIE: I love when someone is able to just pull apart or to tease out pieces of, you know, something that you might have just, like, kind of dumped all of into a message or something, and then to get, like, a second eye to really pick out the themes is so valuable, I think. And I'm obsessed with this framework. I think we might have come across something new that could really be helpful for a lot of other people. JOËL: It's definitely...I think it shows capacity for a higher level of thinking when someone's able to just look at a bunch of concrete things and say, wait a minute; I'm seeing some larger themes emerge from what you're talking about. And I always really appreciate it when I'm having a conversation with someone, and they're like, "Hey, I think what I'm hearing is this." And you're like, "Whoa, you're totally right. And I did not even know that that's where I was going." STEPHANIE: Absolutely. I'd love to go through this acronym and talk about a few different things that we've learned in our careers that kind of correspond with each of these elements. JOËL: Yeah, that sounds great. So I think, you know, the first one here is adventure, trying something new. So, what's something where you tried something new or adventurous that you think was worthwhile? STEPHANIE: Hosting this podcast. [laughs] It was a huge adventure for me and a really big stretch, I think. And that's what the idea of adventure evokes for me is, like, maybe it's uncharted territory for you, and you might have some reservations about it. But, you know, obviously, the flip side of an adventure is how fun and exciting and just new and stimulating it can be. And so I think, yeah, like, when I first started doing this with you, and even when you first asked me, I was pretty nervous. I was really hesitant. It took me a long time to, you know, think it over. I was like, do I want to commit to something that I have never done before, and it's, like, a pretty longer-term commitment? And I'm really glad I did it. It's certainly been an adventure. It's, you know, got its ups and downs. You know, not every week do I feel like that went really well, like, that was a great episode. Sometimes I'm like, that was just an okay episode, [laughs] and, you know, that's fine too. But I feel like this was really important in helping me feel more confident in sharing my technical opinions, helping me feel more comfortable just kind of, like, sharing where I am and not feeling like I should be somewhere else, like, some other level or have already known something. Like, the point is for us to share the journey week by week, and that was something that was really hard for me. So being on this Bike Shed adventure with you has been very valuable for me. JOËL: Yeah, it's sharing these new things we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: Literally. Yes. What about you? Do you have something adventurous that you learned? JOËL: I think an important inflection point where I tried something new was when I learned the Elm programming language. So I had mostly done procedural languages back in the day. And then I got into Ruby, did a lot of OO. And then I got into Elm, which is statically-typed, purely functional, all these things that are kind of opposite of Ruby in some ways. But I think it shares with Ruby that same focus on developer happiness and developer productivity. So, in some ways, I felt really at home. But I had to learn just a whole new way of programming. And, one, it's cool. I have a new tool in my belt. And I think it's been a couple of years just learning how to use this language and how to be effective with it. But then afterwards, I spent a couple of years just kind of synthesizing the lessons learned there and trying to see, are there broader principles at play here? Are there ideas here that I can bring back to my work in Ruby? And then maybe even are there some ideas here that intersect with some theories and things that I know from Ruby? So maybe some ways of structuring data or structuring code from functional programming where some best practices there kind of converge on similar ideas as maybe some object-oriented best practices, or maybe some ideas from test-driven development converge on similar ideas from functional programming. And I think that's where, all of a sudden, I was unlocking all these new insights that made me a better Ruby developer because I'd gone on an adventure and done something completely out of left field. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. Do you remember what was hard about that when you first embarked on learning Elm? JOËL: All the things you're used to doing, you just can't do. So you don't have looping constructs in Elm. The only thing you can do is recursion, which, you know, it's been a long time since CS classes. And you don't typically write recursion in Ruby. So I had to learn a whole new thing. And then it turns out that most people don't write recursion. There's all these other ways of doing things that you have to learn. You have to learn to do folds or to use maps and things like that. Yeah, you're just like, oh, how do I do X in Elm? And you have to figure it out. And then maybe sometimes it turns out you're asking the wrong question. So it's like, oh, how do I do the equivalent of a for loop with array indexes in Elm to, like, iterate through a data structure? And it's like, well, kind of here's technically the way you could do that, but you would never solve a problem in that way. You've got to learn a new way of thinking, a new way of approaching problems. And I think it was that underlying new paradigm that was really difficult to get. But once I did get it, now that I have two paradigms, I think it made me a much more solid developer. STEPHANIE: Right. That sounds very humbling, too, to kind of have to invert what you thought you knew and just be in that, you know, beginner's mindset, which we've talked about a little bit before. JOËL: I think in some ways now being on the other side of it, it's similar to the insights you get from speaking multiple human languages, so being bilingual or trilingual or something like that where instead of just having assumptions about, oh, this is just how language works, because that's how your personal language works, now that you have more than one example to draw on, you can be like, oh, well, here's how languages tend to do things differently. Here's how languages are similar. And I think it gives you a much better and richer feeling for how languages work and how communication works. And similar to having multiple paradigms in programming, I think this has given me a much richer foundation now for exploring and building programs. STEPHANIE: That's really cool. I guess that actually leads quite well into the next element, which is passion. Because once you've tried some new things, you get the information of do I like this thing, or do I not like this thing? And then from there, you know, you gravitate towards the things you are passionate about to get a deeper understanding. And it becomes less about like, oh, just testing out the waters and like, knowing, hey, like, I constantly find myself thinking about this, like, let me keep going. JOËL: Yeah. Or sometimes, it's deciding what do I want to learn next? And you just pick something that's interesting to you without necessarily being like, oh, strategically, I think this is another paradigm that's going to expand my mind. Or this is going to make me, you know, help me get that promotion next quarter, purely based off of interest. Like, this sounds fun. STEPHANIE: That's really interesting because I think I actually came to it from a different angle, where one thing that I think was very helpful in my learning that came just, like, completely internally, like, no one told me to do this was reading books about design patterns. And that was something that I did a couple of years into my career because I was quite puzzled, I suppose, by my day-to-day experience in terms of wanting to solve a problem or develop a feature but not having a very good framework for steps to go about it, or not feeling very confident that I had a good strategy for doing it. It was very, for me, it felt very just kind of, like, throwing pasta to the wall and seeing what would stick. And I was really interested in reducing that pain, basically. And so that led me to read books. And, again, that was not something, like, someone was like, hey, I really think that you could benefit from this. It was just like, well, I want to improve my own experience. And, you know, some of the ones that I remember reading (And this was based off of recommendations from others kind of when I floated the idea.) was, you know, Sandi Metz's Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby. Design Patterns in Ruby by Ross Olsen. Those were just, like, purely out of interest. Yeah, I guess I'm curious, for you, what fun and passion look like. JOËL: Yeah, I think one thing that's a really fun side effect of passion learning is that I find that I tend to learn a lot faster and go a lot deeper, or I get more for every individual hour I put into learning just because passion or interest is such a multiplier. Similar to you, I think I went through a time where I was just gobbling up everything I could see on design patterns, and code structure, things like that. Yeah, I've always been really excited about data modeling in general and how to structure programs to make them easy to change while also not putting a high maintenance burden on it, learning those trade-offs, learning those principles, learning a lot of those ideas. I think that desire came out of some pain I felt pretty early on in my programming career, where I was just writing purely self-taught at this point from a few tutorials online. Code beyond a few hundred lines would just kind of implode under the weight of its own complexity. And so, like, I know that professional programmers are writing massively larger programs that are totally fine. So what am I missing? And so I think that sort of spurred an interest. And I've kind of been chasing that ever since. Even though I'm at the point where that is no longer a problem in my daily life, it is still an interest that I keep. STEPHANIE: Yeah. If I were to pull out another interest of yours that I've noticed that kind of seems in the same realm of, you know, you can just chase this forever, is working incrementally, right? And just all the ways that you can incorporate that into your day-to-day. And I know that's something we've talked about a lot. But I think that's really cool because, yeah, it just comes from just a pure desire on your own front to, like, see how far you can take it. JOËL: I think you pulled out something interesting there. Because sometimes, you have an interest in a whole new topic, and sometimes the interest is more about taking something I already know and just seeing can I take it to an extreme? What happens when I really go to the boundaries of this idea? And maybe I don't need to go there ever for a client project. But let me put up a proof of concept somewhere and try it out just for the fun of it to see can I take this idea, then push it to an extreme and see does it break at an extreme? Does it behave weirdly? And that is just an enriching journey in and of itself. Have you ever done, like, a...maybe not a whole learning journey but, you know, taken a few hours, or maybe even, like, some time on one of our investment Fridays to just explore some random idea and try it out? And it's like, huh, that was cool; that was a journey. And then maybe you move on to something next week because it's not like a big planned thing. But you're taking a few hours to dig into something totally random. STEPHANIE: I actually think I'm less inclined to do that than maybe you or other folks are. I find the things I choose to spend my time on do have to feel more relevant to me in the moment or at least in my day-to-day work. And I think that actually is another excellent transition into the last couple of elements in the APPL framework that we've now coined. The next being profit or, I guess, the idea of being valuable to you in your job in that moment, I suppose. Or I guess not even in that moment, but kind of connecting what you're learning to something that would provide you value. So I know you were talking about learning Elm, and now you're able to see all of the value that it has provided, but maybe at the time, that was a little bit less of your focus. But for me, I find that, like, a driver for how I choose to spend my time. Often it's because, yeah, for the goal of reducing pain. Being consultants, we work on a lot of different projects, sometimes in different frameworks, or languages, or new technologies. Like, you've mentioned having to, just now, on your new client project learning how to interact with different databases, and it sounds like older software that you might not have encountered before. And I think that ends up falling higher on my priority list depending on the timing of what I'm currently working on is, oh, like, you know, TypeScript is something that has, like, kind of come and go as my projects have shifted. And so when it comes back to working on something using it, I'm like, oh, like, I really want to focus on this right now because it has very clear value to me in the next three to six months, or however long. But I have also noticed that once I'm off of that project, that priority definitely recedes. JOËL: Yeah, I think that plays into that final element as well of the APPL, the low risk things that are applicable today that have value right now. Those tend to be things like, oh, I see that I'm going to be scheduled on a client that needs this technology next month. Maybe I should learn that, or maybe I should refresh this idea or go a little bit deeper because this is something new that I'm going to need. So, at some point, I knew that there was a Python project coming down the line. I was like, okay, well, maybe I'm going to spend a couple of Fridays digging into some Django tutorials and compare and contrast with Rails. STEPHANIE: The low-risk element is interesting to me because I found it to be a challenging balance to figure out how much time to invest in becoming really comfortable in a new technology. I find myself sometimes learning just enough to get what I need to get done. And then other times really feeling like, wow, like, I wish I knew this better because that would make my life easier, or I would just feel a lot better about what I'm doing. And kind of struggling with when to spend that time, especially when there's, you know, other expectations of me in terms of my delivery. JOËL: Yeah, that almost sounds like a contrast between technologies that fall in that low-risk bucket, like, immediately useful, versus ones that fall in the passion bucket that you're interested in taking deeply and maybe even to an extreme. STEPHANIE: That's really interesting. What I like about this list of themes that we've pulled out is that, like, one thing can fall into a number of different categories. And so it's really quite flexible. It actually reminds me of a book that I just finished reading. The book is called Quarterlife. And the thing that stuck out to me the most is the author, who is a psychotherapist; she has basically come up with two types of people, or at least two things, that end up being really big drivers of, like, human motivation and behavior. And that's stability types and meaning types, and the goal is to have a little bit of both. So you may be more inclined towards stability and wanting to learn the things that you need to know for your job, to do well in your role, kind of like we were talking about to reduce that pain, to feel a little more in control, or have a little more autonomy over your day to day and how you work. And then there's the seeking meaning, and when we talked about adventure and passion, it kind of reminded me of that. Like, those are things that we do because we want to feel something or understand something or because it's fun. And ironically, this list of four things has two that kind of fall into each category. And ultimately, the author, she, you know, was very upfront about needing both in our lives. And I thought that was a really cool distinction. And it was helpful for me to understand, like, oh yeah, like, in the early years of my career, I did really focus on learning things that would be profitable, or valuable, or low risk because those were the things that I needed in my job, like, right now. And I am now feeling stable enough to explore the meaningful aspects and feel excited by trying out things that I think I just wasn't ready for back in the day. But it actually sounds like you may kind of have a different leaning than I do. JOËL: That is really interesting. I think what was really fascinating as you mentioned those two sort of types of people. And, in my mind, now I'm immediately seeing some kind of two-dimensional graph, and now we've got four quadrants. And so are we leaning towards stability versus...was it adventure was the other one? Or meaning. STEPHANIE: Meaning, yes. JOËL: So now you've got, like, your quadrant that is high stability, high meaning, low stability, high meaning, like, all those four quadrants. And maybe these four things happen to fall into that, or maybe there's some other slightly different set of qualities that you could build a quadrant for here. One that is interesting, and I don't know how closely it intersects with this idea of stability versus meaning, is how quickly the things you learn become useful. So that low risk, like that L from APPL, those are things that are immediately useful. So you put a little bit of work learning this, and you can immediately use it on the job. In fact, that's probably why you're learning it. Whereas me going off and learning Elm is not because we've got any clients in the pipeline using Elm. It's purely for interest. Is it going to pay off? I think most learning pays off long-term, especially if it helps you build a richer understanding of the different ways software works or helps you have new mental models, new tools for doing things. And so I think, you know, 5, 6, 7 years later, learning Elm has been one of the highest payoff things that I've done to kind of take my coding career to the next level. That being said, I would not have seen that at the time. So the payoff is much more long-term. How do you kind of navigate when you're trying to learn something, whether you want something with a short-term payoff or a longer-term payoff? STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's so interesting. I wonder if there was maybe someone who could have helped you identify the ways that Elm could have possibly paid off. And I know, you know, you're looking back on it in retrospect, and it's easy to see, especially after many years and a lot of deep thinking about it. But kind of referring back to this idea of seeking meaning and that just being important to feeling happy at your job, like, maybe it was just valuable because you needed to scratch that itch and to experience something that would be interesting or stimulating in that way to prevent burning out or something like that. JOËL: Oh, I like that. So the idea that you're learning a thing, not specifically because you're expecting some payoff in the long term but because of the joy of learning, is reward in and of itself, and how that actually keeps you fresh in the moment to keep going on a career that might, you know, last 5, 10, 20, 30 years, and how that keeps you refreshed rather than like, oh, but, like, I'm going to see a payoff in five years where now, all of a sudden, I'm faced with a problem. And I can be like, ah, yes, of course, monads are what we need here. And that's a nice side effect, but maybe not the main thing you look for when you're going for something in that passion bucket. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. To go back to your question a little bit, I had mentioned that I was wondering if there was someone who could help point out ways that your interests might be useful. And I think that would be a strategy that I would try if I find myself in that conundrum, I suppose, of, like, being like, hey, like, this is really interesting to me. I'm not able to see any super immediate benefits, but maybe I can go find an expert in this who can share with me, like, from their experience, what diving deep into that topic helped them. And if that's something that I need to then kind of justify to a manager or just kind of explain, like, hey, this is why I'm spending my time doing this is because of this insight that I got from someone else. That would be, I think, a really great strategy if you find yourself needing to kind of explain your reasoning. But yeah, I also think it's, like, incredibly important to just have passion and joy in your work. And that should be a priority, right? Even if it's not immediately clear, the tangible or valuable to the company benefits in the current moment. JOËL: And I think what I'm hearing is that maybe it's a bit of a false premise to say there are some things that you follow for passion that only pay off in the long term. Because if you are in it for passion, then you're getting an immediate payoff regardless. You may also get an additional payoff in the long term. But you're absolutely getting some kind of payoff immediately as well. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think that's true for adventure because knowing what you don't like is also really valuable information. So, if you try something and it ends up not panning out for you, you know, I think some people might feel a little bit disappointed or discouraged. They think, oh, like, they kind of wasted time. But I don't know; I think that's all part of the discovery process. And that brings you closer and closer to, yeah, knowing what you want out of your learning and your career. JOËL: So I'm really curious now. This whole, you know, APPL framework came out of a very random conversation. Is this something that maybe you're going to take into your own sort of goal-setting moving forward? Maybe try to identify, like, okay, what is something adventurous that I want to do, something I want to do for passion, something that I think for profit, and then something low risk? And then maybe have that inform where you put some energy in the next quarter, the next year, whatever timeline you're planning for. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I thought about this a little bit before we started recording. But one very loose goal of mine...and this actually, I think, came up a little more tangibly after coming back from RubyKaigi and being so inspired by all of the cool open-source tooling and hearing how meaningful it was for people to be working on something that they knew would have an impact on a lot of people in their development experience. Having an impact is something that I feel very passionate about and very interested in. And the adventure part for me might be, like, dabbling a little bit into open-source tooling and seeing if there might be a project that I would be interested or comfortable in dipping my feet into. What about you? Do you have anything in the near or long-term future that might fall into one of these buckets? JOËL: So I do have a list of things. I don't know that I will pursue all of them or maybe any of them. But here's my kind of rough APPL here. So something adventurous, something new would be digging into the language Rust. Again, the idea is to try a completely new paradigm, something low-level, something typed, something that deals with a lot of memory, something that does well with concurrency and parallelism. These are all things that I've not explored quite as much. So this would be covering new ground. Something that is a passion, something that's interesting to me, would be formal methods, so I'm thinking maybe a language like TLA+ or Alloy. Data modeling, in general, is something that really excites me. These techniques that I think build on some of the ideas that I have from types but that go, like, to an extreme and also in a slightly different direction are really intriguing to me. So, if there's something that maybe I'm staying up in the evenings to do, I think that might be the most intriguing thing for me right now. Something that might be more profitable, I think, would be digging into the world of data science, particularly looking at Notebooks as a technology. Right now, when I need to crunch data, I'm mostly just doing spreadsheets. But I think there are some really cool things that we could do with Notebooks that come up in client work. I manage to do them when you're with a random command-line script or sometimes with Excel. But I think having that tool would probably be something that allows me to do that job better. And then, finally, something low-risk that I know we could use on a client project would be digging in more into TypeScript. I know just enough to be dangerous, but we do TypeScript all the time. And so, mastering TypeScript would definitely be something that would pay off on a client project. STEPHANIE: I love that list. Thank you for sharing. JOËL: Also, I just want to note that there are only four things here. It doesn't fully spell APPL because there's no E at the end. And so when I see the acronym now, I think it looks like a stock ticker. STEPHANIE: It really does. But I think it's pretty trendy to have an acronym that's basically a word or a noun but then missing a vowel so... JOËL: Oh, absolutely. Time to register that applframework.com domain. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I agree. I also love what you said. You called it a rough APPL. And that was very [laughs] evocative for me as well. And just thinking about an apple that someone has, like, bitten into a little bit [laughs] and has some rough edges. But yeah, I hope that people, you know, maybe find some insight into the kinds of learnings and goals that they are interested in or are thinking about. And using these themes to communicate it to other people, I think, is really important, or even to yourself. Maybe yourself first and then to others because that's how your co-workers can know how to support you. JOËL: That's really interesting that you are thinking of it in terms of a tool for communication to others. I think when I first encountered this idea, it was more as a tool of self-discovery, trying to better understand why I was interested in different things and maybe better understanding how I want to divide up the energy that I have or the time that I have into different topics. But I can definitely see how that would be useful for communicating with team members as well. STEPHANIE: On that note, shall we wrap up? JOËL: Let's wrap up. STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeee!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.
Joël's new work project involves tricky date formats. Stephanie has been working with former Bike Shed host Steph Viccari and loved her peer review feedback. The concept of truthiness is tough to grasp sometimes, and JavaScript and Ruby differ in their implementation of truthiness. Is this a problem? Do you prefer one model over the other? What can we learn about these design decisions? How can we avoid common pitfalls? [EDI](https://www.stedi.com/blog/date-and-time-in-edi](https:/www.stedi.com/blog/date-and-time-in-edi) [Booleans don't exist in Ruby](https://thoughtbot.com/blog/what-is-a-boolean](https://thoughtbot.com/blog/what-is-a-boolean) [Rails valid? method](https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Validations.html#method-i-valid-3F](https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Validations.html#method-i-valid-3F) Parse, don't validate (https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-validate/) Javascript falsiness rules (https://www.sitepoint.com/javascript-truthy-falsy/) Transcript: STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a little bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: So I'm on a new project at work. And I'm doing some really interesting work where I'm connecting to a remote database third-party system directly and pulling data from that database into our system, so not via some kind of API. And one thing that's been really kind of tricky to work with are the date formats on this third-party database. STEPHANIE: Is the date being stored in an unexpected format or something like that? JOËL: Yes. So there's a few things that are weird with it. So this is a value that represents a point in time, and it's not stored as a date-time value. Instead, it's stored separately as a date column and a time column. So a little bit of weirdness there. We can work with it, except that the time column isn't actually a time value. It is an integer. STEPHANIE: Oh no. JOËL: Yeah. And if you're thinking, oh, okay, an integer, it's going to be milliseconds since midnight or something like that, which is basically how Postgres' time of day works under the hood, nope, that's not how it works. It's a positional digit thing. So, if you've got the number, you know, 1040, that means 10:40 a.m. STEPHANIE: Oh my gosh. Is this in military time or something like that, at least? JOËL: Yes, it is military time. But it does allow for all these, like, weird invalid values to creep in. Because, in theory, you should never go beyond 2359. But even within the hours that are allowed, let's say, between 1000 and 1100, so between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m., a clock only goes up to 59 minutes. But our base 10 number system goes up to 99, so it's possible to have 1099, which is just an invalid time. STEPHANIE: Right. And I imagine this isn't validated or anything like that. So it is possible to store some impossible time value in this database. JOËL: I don't know for sure if the data is validated or not, but I'm not going to trust that it is. So I have to validate it on my end. STEPHANIE: That's fair. One thing that is striking me is what time is zero? JOËL: So zero in military time or just 24-hour clocks in general is midnight. So 0000, 4 zeros, is midnight. What gets interesting, though, is that because it's an integer, if you put the number, you know, 0001 into the database, it's just going to store it as 1. So I can't even say, oh, the first two digits are the hours, and the second two digits are the minutes. And I'm actually dealing with, I think, seconds and then some fractional part of seconds afterwards. But I can't say that because the number of digits I have is going to be inconsistent. So, first, I need to zero pad. Well, I have to, like, turn it into a string, zero pad the numbers so it's eight characters long. And then, start slicing out pairs of numbers, converting them back into integers, validating them within a range of either 0 to 23 or 0 to 59, and then reconstructing a time object out of that. STEPHANIE: That sounds quite painful. JOËL: It's a journey for sure. STEPHANIE: Do you have any idea why this is the case or why it was created like this originally? JOËL: I'm not sure. I have a couple of theories. I've seen this kind of thing happen before. And I think it's a common way for developers who maybe haven't put a lot of thought into how time works to just sort of think, oh, the human representation. I need something to go in the database. On my digital clock, I have four digits, so why not put four digits in the database? Simple enough. And then don't always realize that there's all these edge cases to think about and that human representations aren't always the best way to store data. STEPHANIE: I like how you just said that that, you know, we as humans have developed systems that are not quite, you know, the same as how a computer would. But what was interesting to me...something you said earlier about time being a fixed point. And that is different from time being a value, right? And so here in this situation, it sounds like we're storing time as a value, but really, it's more of the idea of, like, a point. JOËL: Interesting. What is the difference for you between a point and a value? STEPHANIE: I suppose a value to me...And I think we talked about this a little bit on a previous episode about value objects and also how we stored numbers, like phone numbers and credit card numbers and stuff like that. But a value, like, I might want to do math on. But I don't really want to do math on time. Or, specifically, if I have this idea of a specific point in time, like, that is fixed and not something that I could mutate and expect it to be the same thing that I was trying to express the first time around. JOËL: Oh, that's interesting because I think when it comes to time and specifically points in time, I sometimes do want to do math on them. And so, specifically, I might want to say, what is the time that has elapsed between two points in time? Maybe I have a start time and an end time, and I want to say how much distance is there between the two? If you use this time system where you're storing it as an integer number where the digits have positional values, because there's all those gaps between, you know, 59 and 99 that are not valid, math breaks down. You've broken math by storing it that way. So you can't get an accurate difference by doing math on that, as opposed to if you store it as a counter, which is what databases do under the hood, but you could do manually. If you just wanted to use an integer column, then you can do math because it's just a number of seconds since the beginning of the day. And you can subtract those from each other. And now you have these number of seconds between the two of them. And if you want them in minutes or hours, you divide by six here, 3600, and you get the correct response. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that is really interesting because [chuckles] in this situation, you have the worst of both worlds, it seems like. [laughs] JOËL: The one potential benefit is, I think, it's maybe more human-readable. Although, at that point, I would say if you're not doing math on it and you want something human-readable, you probably don't want an integer. You probably want a string. And maybe you even store it as, like, ISO 8601 time string in the database, or even just hour:minute:second split by a colon or whatever it is but just as a string. Now it's human-readable. You can still sort by it if you go from largest to smallest increment in your format. You can't do math, but then you weren't doing math on it anyway. So that's probably a nice compromise solution. But, ideally, you'd use a native, you know, time of day column or a date-time or something like that. STEPHANIE: For sure. Well, it sounds like something fun to contend with. [laughs] JOËL: One thing that was brought to my attention that I'd never heard about before is that potentially a reason it's stored that way is because of an old data format called EDI—I think it's Electronic Data Interchange—that dates from ages ago, you know, the '60s or '70s, something like that. Before, we had a lot of standards for data; this is how...an emerging standard that came for moving data between systems. And it has a lot of, like, weird things with the way it's set up. But if you're dealing with any sort of older data warehouses or older business systems, they will often exchange. And sometimes, you're going to store data in something that approximates this older EDI format. And, apparently, it has some weirdness around dates where it kind of does something like this. So someone was suggesting, oh, well, if you're interacting with maybe an older, you know, a lot of, like, e-commerce platforms or banking systems, probably airline systems, the kind of things you'd expect to be written in, let's say, COBOL... STEPHANIE: [laughs] JOËL: Have a system that's kind of like this. So maybe that wouldn't be quite as surprising. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that is really interesting. It just sounds like sometimes you're limited by the technology that you're interacting with. And I guess the one plus side is that, in your system, you can make the EDI work for you, hopefully. [laughs] Whereas perhaps if you are talking to some of those older technologies that don't know how else to convert date types and things like that, like, you just kind of have to work with what's available to you. JOËL: Yeah. And that's got me realizing that a lot of these older, archaic systems are still online and very much a part of our software ecosystem and that there's a lot of value in learning some software history so that I'm able to recognize them and sort of work constructively with them when I have to interact with that kind of system. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I really like that mindset. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, last week, we talked about writing reviews for ourselves and our peers. And one thing that happened in between the last episode and this one is Steph Viccari, former co-host of this podcast, who I've been working with really closely on this project of mine; she was writing a peer review for me. And one thing that she did that I really loved was she sent me a message and asked me a few questions about the direction of the review that I was wanting and what kind of feedback would be helpful for me. And some of the things she asked were, you know, "Is there a skill that you're actively working on? Is there a skill you'd like to start working on?" And, like, what my goals are for the feedback. Like, how can she tailor this feedback to things that would help my progression and what I hope to achieve? And then my favorite question that she asked was, "What else should I know but didn't think to ask?" And I thought that was a really cool way of approaching. You know, she's coming to this, like, wanting to be helpful, but then even still, like, there are things that she knows that I am kind of the expert on in my own career progression, and I really liked that. I think I'd mentioned last week that part of the feedback you want to be giving is, you know, something that will be helpful for that person, and centering them in it, instead of you is just a really awesome way to do that. So I was very appreciative that she asked me those questions. JOËL: That's incredibly thoughtful. I really appreciate that she sent that out to you. What did you respond for the is there something else I should know but didn't know to ask? STEPHANIE: Yeah. I mentioned that more and more, I'm realizing that I am not interested in management. And so what would be really helpful for me was to ground most of the feedback in terms of my, like, technical contributions. And also, that one thing that I'm thinking about a lot is how to be an individual contributor and still have an impact on team health and culture because that is something I care about. And so I wanted to share that with her because if there are things that she can identify in those aspects, that would be really awesome for me. And that can kind of help guide her away from a path that I'm not interested in. JOËL: I think having that kind of self-awareness is really powerful for yourself. But then, when you can leverage that to get better reviews that will help you get even further down the path that you're hoping to go, and, wow, isn't that just, like, a virtuous cycle right there that's just building on itself? STEPHANIE: Yeah, for sure. I think the other thing I wanted to share about what's new in my world that has been just a real boost to my mood is how long the days are right now because it's summer in North America. And yesterday was the summer solstice, and so we had the longest day of the year. The sun didn't set until 8:30 p.m. And I just took the opportunity to be outside. I took a swim in the lake, which was my first swim of the season, which was really special. And my friend had just a nice, little, like, backyard campfire hang out. And we got to roast some marshmallows and just be outside till the sunset. And that was really nice. JOËL: When you say the lake, is that Lake Michigan? STEPHANIE: Yes, I do mean Lake Michigan. [laughs] I forget that some people just don't have a giant lake next to them [laughs] that they refer to as the lake. JOËL: It's practically an inland sea. STEPHANIE: Yes, you can't see the other side of it. So, to me, it kind of feels like an ocean. And yesterday, when I was in the water, I also was thinking that I felt like I was just in a giant bathtub. [chuckles] JOËL: So I'm in New England, and most of the bodies of water here are not called lakes. They're called ponds. STEPHANIE: Really? JOËL: No matter the size. STEPHANIE: Oh. JOËL: I guess lakes is reserved for things like what you have that are absolutely massive, and everything else is a pond. STEPHANIE: That's so funny because I think of ponds as much smaller in scale, like a quaint, little pond. But that's a really fun piece of regional vocabulary. So one interesting thing happened on my client project this week that I wanted to get your input on because I've definitely seen this problem before, and still, it continues to crop up. But I was working on a background job that we were passing a Boolean value into as one of the parameters that we would then, you know, use down the line in determining some logic. And we, you know, made this change, and then we were surprised to find out that it continued to not work the way we expected. So we got some bug reports that we weren't getting into one of the branches of the conditional based on that Boolean value that we were passing in. And we learned, after a little bit of digging, that it turns out that those values are serialized because this job is actually saved in -- JOËL: Oh no. STEPHANIE: [chuckles] Yeah. It inherits from the ActiveRecord, actually, and is saved in our database. And so, in that process, the Boolean value got serialized into a string and then did not get converted [chuckles] back into a Boolean. And so when we do that if variable check, it was always evaluating to true because strings are truthy in Ruby. JOËL: Right. The string false is still truthy. STEPHANIE: A string false is still truthy. And we ended up having to coerce it into a Boolean value to fix our little bug. But it was just one of those things that was really frustrating, you know when you feel really confident that you know what you're doing. You're just writing a conditional statement. And it turns out the language beguiled you. [laughs] JOËL: I've run into similar bugs when I'm reading from environment variables because environment variables are always strings. But it's common that you'll be setting some kind of flag. So when you're setting the environment variable, you're setting something to true or false. But then, when you're reading it, you have to explicitly check if this environment variable double equals the string true, then do the thing. Because if you just check for the value, it will never be false. STEPHANIE: Right. And I kind of hate seeing code like that. I don't know; something about it just rubs me the wrong way because it just seems so strange, I suppose. JOËL: Is it just, like, those edge cases where you specifically have to do some kind of, like, double equals check on a value that feels like it should be a Boolean? Or do you kind of feel a bit weird about the concept of truthiness in general? STEPHANIE: I think the concept of truthiness is very hard to grasp sometimes. And, you know, when you're talking about that edge case where we are setting...we're checking if the string is the string true. That means that everything else is false, right? So, in some ways, I think it's just really confusing because we've expanded the definition of what true and false mean to be anything. JOËL: That's really interesting because now you have to pick. Are you checking against the string true, or are you negatively checking against the string false? And those are not equivalent because, like you said, now you're excluding every other string. So, is the string "Hello, World" put you in the false branch or the true branch? STEPHANIE: Who's to say? [laughs] I think a similar conundrum also occurs when we use predicate matchers in our tests. I think this is a gripe that I've talked about a little bit with others when we're writing tests and especially if we're writing a predicate method, and then that's what we're testing, right? We kind of are expecting a true or false value. And when our test expects something to be truthy rather than explicitly saying that we expect the return value to be true, that is sometimes a bit confusing to me as well because someone could theoretically change this method and just have it return "Hello, World," like you said, as a string, like, anything else. And that would still pass the test. JOËL: And it might even pass your code in most places. STEPHANIE: Right. And I suppose that's okay. Is it okay? I don't know. I'm not sure where I land on this. JOËL: I used to be a kind of hardcore Boolean person. STEPHANIE: [laughs] That's a sentence no one has ever [laughs] said. JOËL: I like my explicit trues and falses. I don't like the ambiguity of saying, like, oh, if person do a thing, it's, like, oh, what is person here? Is this a nil check? Is it explicitly false? Do you just want to know that this person is non-empty? Well, what exactly are you checking? So I like the explicitness of saying, oh, if person dot present, or if person dot empty, or if person dot nil. And I think maybe spending some time in some more strongly typed languages has also kind of pushed me a little bit in that direction, where it's nice to have something that is explicitly either just true or just false. And then you completely eliminate that problem of, like, oh, but what if it's neither true nor false, then what do we do for that branch there? And the answer is your compiler will reject that program or say, "You've written a bad program." And you never reach that point where there's a bug. I've slowly been softening my stance. A fellow thoughtbot colleague has written an article why there is no such thing as a Boolean in Ruby. Everything is just shades of gray and truthiness and falsiness. But from the perspective of a program, there is no such thing as a Boolean. And that really opened my eyes to a different perspective. I don't know that I fully agree, but I'm kind of begrudgingly acknowledging that Mike makes a good point. STEPHANIE: Yes, I read the blog post that he wrote about this exact problem. And I think it's called "Booleans Don't Exist in Ruby." And I think I similarly, like, came away with, like, yeah, I think I get it if I just suspend my disbelief, you know, hard enough. [laughs] But what you were saying about, like, liking the explicitness, right? And liking the lack of ambiguity, right? Because when you start to believe that Booleans don't exist, I think that really messes with your [laughs] head a little bit. And one takeaway that I got from that blog post, kind of like we mentioned earlier, is that there is such thing as false, and then everything else is true. And I guess that's kind of how Ruby operates. JOËL: Sort of, because then you have the problem of nil, which is also falsy. STEPHANIE: That's true, but nil is nothing. [laughs] JOËL: That's one of the classic problems as well when you're trying to do a nil check, or maybe some memoization, or maybe even, say, cache this value, or store this value, or initialize this value if it's not set. And assuming that doing nil is falsy, so you'll do some kind of, like, or equals, or just some kind of expression with an or in it thinking, oh, do this extra work if it's nil because then it will trigger the branch. But that all breaks down if potential for your value to be false because false and nil get treated the same in conditional code. STEPHANIE: Right. I think this could be a whole separate conversation about nil and the idea of nothingness. But I do think that, as Ruby developers, at least in the Ruby world, based on what I've seen, is that we lean on nil in ways that we maybe shouldn't. And we end up having to be very defensive about this idea of nil being falsy. But that's because we aren't necessarily thinking as hard about our return values and what our arguments are that; it ends up causing problems in evaluating truthiness when we're having to check those objects that could be nil. JOËL: In terms of the way we communicate with the readers of our code, and, as a reader, I generally assume that a Ruby method that ends with a question mark will return a true Boolean, either true or false. Is that generally your expectation as well? STEPHANIE: I want to say yes, but I've clearly experienced enough times where that's not the case that, you know, it's like, my ideal world and then reality [laughs] and having to figure out how to hold both of those things. JOËL: It's one of those things that's mostly true. STEPHANIE: I want to believe it because predicate methods and, like, the Ruby Standard Library mostly return Boolean values, at least to my knowledge. And if we all kind of followed that [laughs] pattern, then it would be clear. But I think there's a part of me that these days mostly believes it to be true that I will be getting a Boolean value (And, wow, even as I say this, I realize how confusing [laughs] this is starting to sound.) and that until I'm not, right? Until I'm surprised at some point. JOËL: I think there's two things I expect of predicate methods in Ruby. One is that they will return, like, a hard Boolean, either true or false. The second is that they are purely query methods; they don't do side effects. Neither of those are consistent across the ecosystem. And a classic example of violating that second guideline I have in my mind is the valid question mark method from Rails. And this really surprised me the first time I tripped into this because when you call that on an object, it doesn't just tell you whether or not the object is valid. It actually mutates the underlying object by populating the error messages' hash. So if you have an invalid object and you examine its error messages' hash, it will be empty until you call the valid question mark method. So sometimes, you don't even care about the return value. You're just calling valid to mutate the object so that you can access the underlying hash, which is that's weird code when you call a predicate method but then totally ignore the output. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that is strange because I have definitely seen it where we are calling the valid method to validate, and then we end up using the error messages that are set on that object later. I think that's tough because, in some ways, you do care about whether the object is valid or not. But then also, the error messages are helpful usually and when you're trying to use that method. The point is to validate it so that you can hopefully, like, tell the user or, like, the consumer of your system, like, what's wrong in validation. But it is almost, like, two separate things. JOËL: It is. And sometimes, it's really hard to split those two apart. So I'm not throwing shade at the Rails dev team here. Some of these design decisions are legitimately difficult to make. And what's most useful for the most people the most time is often a compromise. I think you brought up the idea of separating those two things. And I think there's a general principle here called command-query separation. That's, like, the fancy way of talking about what you were saying. STEPHANIE: One thing that I was just thinking about kind of when we initially picked off this conversation was the idea of how things outside the Ruby ecosystem or the Ruby world interact with what we're returning in terms of Boolean values. And so when I mentioned the object being serialized because of, you know, our database and, like, background job system, that's an entity that's figuring out what to do with the things that we are returning from Ruby. And similarly, when you're talking about environment variables, it's like, our computer system talking to now our language and those things being a bit different. Because when we, like, suspend our disbelief about what is truthy or falsy in Ruby, at least we're doing it in, like, the world of Ruby. And as soon as we have to interact with something else, like, maybe that's when things can get a little hairy because there's different ideas about truthiness there. And so I'm kind of also thinking about what we return in APIs and maybe, like, that being an area where some explicitness is more required. JOËL: Whenever I'm consuming third-party data, I'm a big fan of having some kind of transformation or parse step. This is inspired in part by the "Parse, Don't Validate" article, which I'll link in the show notes. So, if I'm reading data from a third-party API and I want it to be a Boolean, then maybe I should do the transformation myself. So maybe I check literally, is it the string true or the string false, and anything else gets rejected? Maybe I have...and maybe I'm a little bit more permissive, where I also accept capital T or capital F, and I have, like, some rules for transforming that. But the important thing is I have an explicit conversion step and reject any bad output. And so for something like an environment variable, maybe that would look like looking for true or false and raising if anything else is there. So that we try to boot the app, and it immediately crashes because, hey, we've got some, like, undefined, like, bad configuration that we're trying to load the app with. Don't even try to keep running. Hard crash immediately. Fix it, and then come back. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I like that a lot because the way we ended up fixing this issue with the background job that I mentioned was just coercing our string value into a Ruby Boolean in the job that we were then, like, running the conditional in. But really, what we should have done is have fixed that at a higher level and where we parse and deserialize, like, the values we're getting from the job to prevent this kind of in the future because right now, someone can do this again, and that's a real bummer. JOËL: I always love those deeper conversations that happen after you've had a bug that are like, how do we prevent this from happening again? Because sometimes that's where you have the deepest learnings or the most interesting insights or, you know, ideas for Bike Shed episodes. I'm really curious to contrast JavaScript's approach to truthiness to Ruby's because even though they both use the same idea, they kind of go about it differently. STEPHANIE: Tell me more. JOËL: So, in Ruby, an empty array and an empty string are truthy. JavaScript decided that empty things are falsy. And I forget...there's a whole table that shows the things that are truthy and falsy in JavaScript. I want to say zero is falsy in JavaScript but don't quote me on that, which can also lead to some interesting edge cases you have to think about. STEPHANIE: Okay, yes. This is coming back to me now. I think depending on what, you know, ecosystem or language or world I'm in, I have to just only be able to think about what is true in this world [laughs] and then do that context switching when I am working in something else. But yeah, that is a really interesting idea. Someone decided [laughs] that this was their idea of true or false. JOËL: I'm curious if you have a preference for sort of JavaScript's approach to falsiness where a lot more types of values are falsy versus Ruby, which said pretty much only nil and false are falsy. Everything else is truthy. STEPHANIE: Hmm, that is an interesting question. JOËL: Because in Ruby then or, I guess, in Rails, we end up with the present predicate method that is specifically checking for not only nil and false but also for empty array, empty string, those kinds of things. So, if you find yourself writing a lot of present matchers in your code, you're kind of leaning on something that's closer to JavaScript's definition of falsiness than Ruby's. But maybe you're making it more explicit. STEPHANIE: Right. In JavaScript, I see a lot of double bangs in lieu of those predicate methods. But I suppose by nature of having to write those predicate methods in Ruby, we're, like, really wanting something else, I think. And maybe...I guess it is just a question of explicitness like you're saying, and which I prefer. Is it that I need to be explicit to convey the idea that I want, or is it nice that the language has just been encoded that way for me? JOËL: Or maybe when you write conditionals, if you find yourself doing a lot of presence checks, do you find that you typically are trying to branch on if not null, not false, not empty more frequently than just if not null, not false? Because that's kind of the difference between Ruby's model and JavaScript's model. STEPHANIE: Hmm, the way you posed that question is interesting because it makes me think that sometimes it's quite defensive because we have to check for all these possible return values. We are unsure of what we are getting back. And so this is kind of, like, a catch-all for things that we aren't really sure about. JOËL: Yeah, I mean, that's the fun of dynamic programming languages. You never know exactly what you're going to get as long as things respond to certain methods. You really lean into the duck typing. And I think that's Mike's argument in his article that "Booleans Don't Exist" in that as long as something is responding to methods that you care about, it doesn't matter if you're dealing with a true Boolean or some kind of other value. STEPHANIE: Right. So I suppose the ideas of truthiness then are a little bit more dependent on how people are using the language though it seems like a chicken-and-egg situation to me. [laughs] JOËL: It is really interesting to me in terms of maybe thinking about use cases in my own code if I'm having to...if I'm writing code that leans on truthiness where I can say just, you know if user. But then knowing that, oh, that doesn't account for, like, an empty value. Do I then also need to add an extra check for emptiness? And maybe if I'm in a Rails project, I would reach for that present matcher where I wouldn't have to do that in JavaScript because I can just say, if user, and that already automatically checks for presence. So I'm kind of wondering now in my mind, like, which default would fit my use cases more? Or, if I go back to an older version of myself, I will say I don't want any of these defaults. They're all too ambiguous. I'm going to put explicitly if user dot nil question mark, if that's the thing that I'm checking for, or if user dot empty question mark because I want my reader to know what condition I'm checking. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that is interesting, this idea of, like, which mode do you find yourself needing to use more and if that is accommodated for you because that's just the more common, like, use case or problem. I think that's something that I will be thinking about the next time I write a conditional [laughs] because, like I was saying earlier, I think I end up just leaning on what someone else has decided for me in terms of truthiness and not so much how I would like it to work for me. JOËL: And sometimes we don't want to fight the language too much, you know if I'm writing Elm, that everything is hard Booleans. And I know I'm never going to get a nil in a place where I'd expect true or false because the compiler would prevent that from happening. I know that I'm not going to get an empty value, potentially. There's ways you can do things with a type system where you can explicitly say no empty values are even allowed at this point. And if you do allow them, then the type system will say, "Hey, you forgot to check for the empty case. Bad program. I'm rejecting that." And then you have to write that explicit branch for, oh, if empty versus if present. So I really appreciate that style of programming. But then, when you're in a language like Ruby where you're not dealing with explicit types on purpose, how do you shift that mindset so that you don't need to know the type of the value that you're dealing with? You only want to say, hey, in this context, here's the minimal interface that I want it to conform to. And maybe it's just the truthy or falsiness interface, and everything beyond that is not relevant. STEPHANIE: I think it's kind of wild to me that this idea of a binary that theoretically seems very clear turns out is actually quite confusing, ambiguous, philosophical, even. [chuckles] JOËL: Yeah. It's definitely...you can get into some deep, philosophical questions there, language design as well. One aspect, though, that I'm really curious about your thoughts is bringing new people in who are learning a language. It's really common for people who are learning a language for the first time, learning to code for the first time to write code that you and I would immediately know, like, that's not going to work. You can't add a Boolean and a number. You're just learning to code. You've never done that before. You don't know. And then how the language reacts to that kind of thing can help guide that experience. So, do you think that truthiness maybe makes things more confusing for newcomers? Or, maybe on the other side, it helps to smooth that learning curve because you don't have to be like, oh, wait, I have a user here. I can't put that in a condition because that's not a strict true or false. I'm going to coerce it, or I've got to find a predicate method or something. You can just be like, no, put it in. The interpreter will figure it out for you. STEPHANIE: Wow. That's a great question. I'm trying to put myself in the beginner's mindset a little bit and think about what it's like to just try something and the magic of it working. Because, like you said, the interpreter does it for you, or whatever, and something happens, and you're like, wow, like, that was really cool. And I didn't have to know all of the ins and outs of the types of things I was working with. That can be really helpful in just getting them, like, started and getting them just, like, on the ground writing code. And having that feeling of satisfaction that, like, that they didn't have to, you know, have to learn all these things that can be really scary to make their program work. But I do think it also kind of bites them later once they really realize [laughs] what is going on and the minute that they get that, like, unexpected behavior, right? Like, that becomes a time when you do have to figure out what might be going on under the hood. So two sides of the same coin. JOËL: What you're saying there about, like, maybe smoothing that initial curve but then it biting them later got me thinking. You know how we have the concept of technical debt where we write code in a way that's maybe not quite as clean today so we can move faster but that then later on we have to pay it back? And I almost wonder if what we have here is almost like a pedagogical debt where it's going to cost us a month from now, but today it helps us move faster and actually kind of get that momentum going. STEPHANIE: Pedagogical debt. I like that. I think you've coined a new term. Because I really relate to that where you learn just enough to do the thing now. But, you know, it's probably not, like, the right way or, like, the most informed—I think most informed is probably how I would best describe it—way of doing it. And later, you, yeah, just have to invest a little more into it. And I think that's okay. I think sometimes I do tend to, like, beat myself up over something down the line when I have to deal with some piece of less-than-ideal code that I'd written earlier. Like, I think that, oh, I could have avoided this if only I knew. But the whole point is that I didn't know. [laughs] And, like, that's okay, like, maybe I didn't need to know at the time. JOËL: Yeah, and code that's never shipped is of zero value. So having something that you could ship is better than having something perfect that you didn't ship. STEPHANIE: On that note, shall we wrap up? JOËL: Let's wrap up. STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeee!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.
Stephanie is joined by very special guest, fellow thoughtboter, Senior Developer, and marathon trainer Mina Slater. Mina and Stephanie had just been traveling together for two weeks, sponsored by WNB.rb for RubyKaigi in Matsumoto, Japan, and together, they recount their international adventure! RubyKaigi (https://rubykaigi.org/2023/) WNB.rb (https://www.wnb-rb.dev/) Understanding the Ruby Global VM Lock by observing it by Ivo Anjo (https://rubykaigi.org/2023/presentations/KnuX.html#day1) gvl-tracing (https://github.com/ivoanjo/gvl-tracing) Justin Searls' RubyKaigi 2023 live coverage (https://blog.testdouble.com/field-reports/ruby-kaigi/) Prioritizing Learning episode (https://www.bikeshed.fm/362) Transcript: STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn and today. I'm joined by a very special guest, fellow thoughtboter Mina Slater. Mina, would you like to introduce yourself to our audience? MINA: Yeah. Hi, everyone. I am Mina. I am a Senior Developer on Mission Control, which is thoughtbot's DevOps and SRE team. STEPHANIE: So, Mina, what's new in your world? MINA: Well, I start marathon training this week. So I hope that this conversation goes well and lasts you for three months because you're probably not going to see or hear from me all summer. STEPHANIE: Yes. That sounds...it sounds hard, to be honest, marathon training in the summer. When I was doing a bit more running, I always thought I would wake up earlier than I did and, you know, beat the heat, and then I never would, and that really, like, was kind of rough. MINA: Yeah, actually, I was thinking about my plans for today. I didn't wake up early enough to run in the morning. And so I was calculating, like, okay, by midday, it's going to be too hot. So I'm going to have to wait until, like, 6:00 p.m. [laughs] STEPHANIE: Yeah, yeah. Or, if you're like me, there's a very real chance that you just skip it altogether. [laughter] MINA: Well, I have a deadline, so... [laughs] STEPHANIE: That's true. When is your marathon race? MINA: This is actually the first year I'm doing two in a calendar year. So I'm doing Berlin in September. And then, three weeks after that, I'm going to run one in Detroit. STEPHANIE: Nice. At least you'll be ready. You'll, like, have done it. I don't know; it kind of sounds maybe a bit more efficient that way. [laughs] MINA: Theoretically. But, you know, ask me in October. I'll let you know how it goes. STEPHANIE: That's true. You might have to come back on as a guest. [laughs] MINA: Just to talk about how it went. [laughs] STEPHANIE: Yeah, exactly. MINA: So that's what's new with me. What's new in your world, Steph? STEPHANIE: So, a while back on a previous Bike Shed episode, I talked about joining this client team and, in their daily team syncs, in addition to just sharing what we were up to and what we were working on, we would also answer the question what's something new to us. And that was a space for people to share things that they learned or even just, like, new things that they tried, like food, or activities, or whatnot. And I really enjoyed it as a way to get to know the team, especially when I was new to that client project. And recently, someone on the team ended up creating a random question generator. So now the question for the daily sync rotates. And I've been having a lot of fun with that. Some of the ones that I like are, what made you laugh recently? What's currently playing on your Spotify or YouTube? No cheating. MINA: [laughs] STEPHANIE: And then, yesterday, we had what's for dinner? As the question. And I really liked that one because it actually prompted me to [chuckles] think about what I was going to do for dinner as opposed to waiting till 5:00 p.m. and then stressing because I'm already hungry but don't have a plan [chuckles] for how I'm going to feed myself yet. So it ended up being nice because I, you know, kind of was inspired by what other people mentioned about their dinner plans and got my stuff together. MINA: That's shocking to me because we had just come off of two weeks of traveling together. And the one thing I learned about you is that you plan two meals ahead, but maybe that is travel stuff. STEPHANIE: I think that is extremely correct. Because when you're traveling, you're really excited about all the different things that you want to eat wherever you are. And so, yeah, we were definitely...at least I was planning for us, like, two or three meals [laughs] in advance. MINA: [laughs] STEPHANIE: But, when I'm at home, it is much harder to, I don't know, like, be motivated. And it just becomes, like, a daily chore. [laughs] So it's not as exciting. MINA: I think I'm the same way. I just had a whole bunch of family in town. And I was definitely planning dinner before we had breakfast because I'm like, oh, now I have to be responsible for all of these people. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I just mentioned the questions because I've been really having fun with them, and I feel a lot more connected to the team. Like, I just get to know them more as people and the things they're interested in, and what they do in their free time. So, yeah, highly recommend adding a fun question to your daily syncs. MINA: Yeah, we started doing that on Mission Control at our team sync meetings recently, too, where the first person...we actually have an order generator that somebody on the team wrote where it takes everyone's first and last name and scramble them and then randomizes the order. So you kind of have to figure out where in the queue you are and who's coming up next after you. But the first person that goes in the queue every day has to think of an icebreaker question. STEPHANIE: That's kind of a lot of pressure [laughs] for a daily meeting, especially if you're having to unscramble names and then also come up with the icebreaker question. I personally would be very stressed [laughs] by that. But I also can see that it's...I also think it's very fun, especially for a small team like yours. MINA: Yeah, yeah, just seven of us; we get to know really well what letters are in everyone's names. But I was first today, and I didn't have an icebreaker question ready. So I ended up just passing. So that's also an option. STEPHANIE: That's fair. Maybe I'll link you to our random question generator, so you can find some inspiration. [laughs] MINA: Yeah, it's a ChatGPT situation. STEPHANIE: So you mentioned that you and I had just been traveling together for two weeks. And that's because Mina and I were at RubyKaigi in Matsumoto, Japan, earlier this May. And that's the topic of today's episode: Our Experience at RubyKaigi. And the really cool thing that I wanted to mention was that this was all possible because Mina and I were sponsored by WNB.rb, which is a global community of women and non-binary people working in Ruby. And I've mentioned this group on the show before, but I wanted to plug it again because I think that this was something really special that we got to do. WNB runs a lot of initiatives, like, meetups and panels supporting people to speak at conferences and book clubs. And, you know, just many different programming events for supporting women and non-binary Rubyists in their career growth. And they are recently beginning a new initiative to sponsor folks to attend conferences. And Mina, you and I were the first people to get to try this out and go to an international conference. So that was really awesome. It was something that I don't think I would have done without the support from WNB. MINA: And you almost didn't do. I think there was a lot of convincing [chuckles] that went on at the beginning to kind of get you to, like, actually consider coming with me. STEPHANIE: It's true. It's true. I think you had DMed me, and you were, like, so, like, RubyKaigi, like, eyeball emoji. [laughs] I was, I think, hesitant because this was my first international conference. And so there was just a lot of, like, unknowns and uncertainty for me. And I think that's going to be part of what we talk about today. But is there anything that you want to say about WNB and how you felt about being offered this opportunity? MINA: Yeah. When Emily and Jemma, the founders of WNB, approached us with this opportunity and this offer, I think I was...taken aback is not really quite the right words but, like, surprised and honored, really, I think it's a better word. Like, I was very honored that they thought of us and kind of took the initiative to come to us with this offer. So I'm really grateful for this opportunity because going to RubyKaigi, I think it's always something that was on my radar. But I never thought that...well, not never. I thought that I had to go as a speaker, which would have been, like, a three to five-year goal. [laughs] But to be able to go as an attendee with the support of the group and also of thoughtbot was really nice. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. That investment in our professional development was really meaningful to me. So, like you, I'm very grateful. And if any of our listeners are interested in donating to WNB.rb and contributing to the community's ability to send folks to conferences, you can do so at wnb-rb.dev/donate. Or, if you work for a company that might be interested in sponsoring, you can reach out to them at organizers@wnb-rb.dev. MINA: I highly recommend doing that. STEPHANIE: So, one of the questions I wanted to ask you about in terms of your RubyKaigi experience was, like, how it lined up with your expectations and if it was different or similar to what you were expecting. MINA: Yeah, I have always heard that when people talk about RubyKaigi as a conference and about its contents, the word that everyone uses to describe it is technical. I have already had sort of a little bit of that expectation going in. But I think my interpretation of the word technical didn't really line up with how actually technical it was. And so that was one thing that was different than what I had expected. STEPHANIE: Could you elaborate on what was surprising about the way that it was technical? MINA: Yeah. I think that when I hear technical talks and having been to some Ruby and Rails confs here in the States, when I hear about technical talks, it's a lot more content about people using the technology, how they use Ruby to do certain things, or how they use Rails to achieve certain goals in their day-to-day work or side projects. But it seems at RubyKaigi; it is a lot more about the language itself, how Ruby does certain things, or how interpreters implement Ruby, the language itself. So I think it's much more lower-level than what I was expecting. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I agree. I think you and I have gone to many of Ruby Central conferences in the U.S., like RubyConf and RailsConf. So that was kind of my comparison as well is that was, you know, the experience that I was more familiar with. And then, going into this conference, I was very surprised that the themes of the talks were, like you said, very focused on the language itself, especially performance, tooling, the history and future of Ruby, which I thought was pretty neat. Ruby turns 30, I think, this year. And one thing that I noticed a lot was folks talking about using Ruby to reflect on itself and the possibilities of utilizing those capabilities to improve our experience as developers using the language. MINA: Yeah. I think one of the things I was really fascinated by is...you had mentioned the performance. There were several talks about collecting how Ruby performs at certain levels. And I thought that that was quite interesting and things I had never thought about before, and I'm hoping to think about in the future. [laughs] STEPHANIE: Yeah. One talk that I went to was Understanding the Ruby Global VM Lock by Ivo Anjo. And that was something that, you know, I had an awareness of that Ruby has this GVL and certain...I had, like, a very hand-wavy understanding about how, like, concurrency worked with Ruby because it hasn't been something that I've really needed to know too deeply in my day-to-day work. Like, I feel a little bit grateful not to have run into an issue where I had to, you know, dive deep into it because it was causing problems. [laughs] But attending that talk was really cool because I liked that the speaker did give, like, an overview for folks who might be less familiar but then was able to get really deep in terms of, like, what he was doing workwise with improving his performance by being able to observe how the lock was being used in different threads and, like, where it might be able to be improved. And he shared some of his open-source projects that I'll link in the show notes. But, yeah, that was just something that I was vaguely aware of and haven't yet, like, needed to know a lot about, but, you know, got to understand more by going to this conference. And I don't think I would have gotten that content otherwise. MINA: Yeah, I agree. The talk that you are referencing is one of my favorite as well. I think, like you, kind of this vague idea of there's things going on under the hood in Ruby is always there, but to get a peek behind the curtain a little bit was very enlightening. I wrote down one of the things that he said about how highly optimized Ruby code can still be impacted and be slow if you don't optimize GVL. And he also shared, I think, some strategies for profiling that layer in your product, if that is something you need, which I thought was really cool. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think I had mentioned performance was a really big theme. But I didn't realize how many levers there were to pull in terms of the way Ruby is implemented or the way that we are able to use Ruby that can improve performance. And it's really cool to see so many people being experts at all of those different components or aspects of making Ruby fast. [laughs] MINA: Yeah. I think that part of the work that we do on Mission Control is monitoring performance and latency for our clients. And while I don't expect having to utilize some of the tools that I learned at RubyKaigi, I expect being aware of these things helping, I think, in the long run. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. Joël and I have talked on the show about this idea of, like, push versus pull learning. So push, being you consume content that may not be relevant to you right now but maybe will be in the future. And you can remember, like, oh, I watched a talk on this, or I read something about this, and then you can go refer back to it. As opposed to pull being, like, I have this thing that I don't understand, but I need to know right now, so I'm going to seek out resources about it. And I think we kind of landed on that both are important. But at Kaigi, especially, this was very much more push for me where there's a lot of things that I now have an awareness of. But it's a little different, I think, from my experience at Ruby Central conferences where I will look at the schedule, and I will see talks that I'm like, oh, like, that sounds like it will be really relevant to something I'm working through on my client project or, like, some kind of challenging consulting situation. And so the other thing that I noticed that was different was that a lot of the U.S. conferences are more, I think like business and team challenges-focused. So the talks kind of incorporate both a technical and socio-cultural aspect of the problems that they were solving. And I usually really like that because I find them very relatable to my day-to-day work. And that was something that was less common at Kaigi. MINA: Also, that I've never been to a conference that is more on the academic side of things. So I don't know if maybe that is more aligned with what Kaigi feels like. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's true. I think there were a lot of talks from Ruby Committers who were just sharing, like, what they've been working on, like, what they've been thinking about in terms of future features for Ruby. And it was very much at the end of those talks, like, I'm open to feedback. Like, look out for this coming soon, or, like, help contribute to this effort. And so it was interesting because it was less, like, here are some lessons learned or, like, here are some takeaways, or, like, here's how we did this. And more like, hey, I'm, you know, in the middle of figuring this out, and I'm sharing with you where I'm at right now. But I guess that's kind of the beauty of the open-source community is that you can put out a call for help and contributions. MINA: Yeah, I think they call that peer review in the academic circles. STEPHANIE: [laughs] That's fair. MINA: [laughs] STEPHANIE: Was there anything else that you really enjoyed about the conference? MINA: I think that one of my favorite parts, and we've talked about this a little bit before, is after hours on the second day, we were able to connect with Emori House and have dinner with their members. Emori House is a group that supports female Kaigi attendees specifically. I think it's that they, as a group, rent out an establishment or a house or something, and they all stay together kind of to look out for each other as they attend this very, I think, male-dominated conference. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I loved that dinner with folks from Emori House too. I think the really cool thing to me is that it's just community and action, you know, like, someone wanted to go to this conference and make it easier for other women to go to this conference and decided to get lodging together and do that work of community building. And that social aspect of conferences we hadn't really talked about yet, but it's something that I really enjoy. And it's, like, one of the main reasons that I go to conferences besides learning. MINA: Yeah, I agree. At the Ruby Central conferences, one of my favorite parts is always the hallway track, where you randomly meet other attendees or connect with attendees that you already knew. And like I mentioned, this dinner with Emori House happened on the second night. And I think by midday second day; I was missing that a little bit. The setup for RubyKaigi, I noticed, does not make meeting people and organizing social events as easy as I had been used to, and part of that, I'm sure, is the language barrier. But some places where I had met a lot of the people that I call conference friends for Ruby Central conferences had been at the lunch table. And Kaigi sets up in a way where they send you out with food vouchers for local restaurants, which I thought was really cool. But it doesn't make meeting people and organizing groups to go out together with people you don't already know a little more difficult. So meeting Emori House on the second night was kind of exactly what I had been missing at the moment. STEPHANIE: Yeah, agreed. I also really thrive off of more smaller group interactions like organically, you know, bumping into people on the hallway track, ideally. I also noticed that, at Kaigi, a lot of the sponsors end up hosting parties and meetups after the conference in the evenings. And so that was a very interesting social difference, I think, where the sponsors had a lot more engagement in that sense. You and I didn't end up going to any of those drink-ups, are what they're called. But I think, similarly, if I were alone, I would be a little intimidated to go by myself. And it's kind of one of those things where it's like, oh, if I know someone, then we can go together. But, yeah, I certainly was also missing a bit of a more organic interaction with others. Though, I did meet a few Rubyists from just other places in East Asia, like Taiwan and China. And it was really cool to be in a place where people are thinking about Ruby differently than in the U.S. I noticed in Japan; there's a lot more energy and enthusiasm about it. And, yeah, just folks who are really passionate about making Ruby a long-lasting language, something that, you know, people will continue to want to work with. And I thought that was very uplifting because it's kind of different from what the current industry in the U.S. is looking like in terms of programming languages for the jobs available. MINA: It's really energizing, I think, to hear people be so enthusiastic about Ruby, especially, like you said, when people ask me what I do here, I say, "Developer," and they say, "Oh, what language do you work in?" I always have to be kind of like, "Have you heard of Ruby?" [laughs] And I think it helps that Ruby originated in Japan. They probably feel a little bit, like, not necessarily protective of it, but, like, this is our own, and we have to embrace it and make sure that it is future-facing, and going places, and it doesn't get stale. STEPHANIE: Right. And I think that's really cool, especially to, you know, be around and, like, have conversations about, like you said, it's very energizing. MINA: Yeah, like you mentioned, we did meet several other Rubyists from, like, East Asian countries, which doesn't necessarily always happen when you attend U.S.-based or even European-based conferences. I think that it is just not as...they have to travel from way farther away. So I think it's really cool to hear about RubyConf Taiwan coming up from one of the Rubyists from Taiwan, which is awesome. And it makes me kind of want to go. [laughs] STEPHANIE: Yeah, I didn't know that that existed either. And just realizing that there are Rubyists all over the world who want to share the love of the language is really cool. And I am definitely going to keep a lookout for other opportunities. Now that I've checked off my first international conference, you know, I have a lot more confidence about [laughs] doing it again in the future, which actually kind of leads me to my next question is, do you have any advice for someone who wants to go to Kaigi or wants to go to an international conference? MINA: Yeah, I think I have both. For international conferences in general, I thought that getting a buddy to go with you is really nice. Steph and I were able to...like, you and I were able to kind of support each other in different ways because I think we're both stressed [laughs] about international travel in different ways. So where you are stressed, I'm able to support, and where I'm stressed, you're able to support. So it was really nice and well-rounded experience because of that. And for RubyKaigi specifically, I would recommend checking out some of the previous year's talks before you actually get there and take a look at the schedule when it comes out. Because, like we said, the idea of, I think, technical when people use that word to describe the content at RubyKaigi is different than what most people would expect. And kind of having an idea of what you're getting into by looking at previous videos, I think, will be really helpful and get you in the right mindset to absorb some of the information and knowledge. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. I was just thinking about...I saw in Ruby Weekly this week Justin Searls had posted a very thorough live blogging of his experience at Kaigi that was much more in the weeds of, like, all of the content of the talks. And also had tips for how to brew coffee at a convenience store in Japan too. So I recommend checking that out if folks are curious about...especially this year before the videos of the talks are out. I think one thing that I would do differently next time if I were to attend Kaigi or attend a conference that supports multiple languages...so there were talks in Japanese and English, and the ones in Japanese were live interpreted. And you and I had attended, like, one or two, but it ended up being a little tough to follow because the slides were a little bit out of sync with the interpretation. I definitely would want to try again and invest a little more into attending talks in Japanese because I do think the content is still even different from what we might be seeing in English. And now that I know that it takes a lot of mental energy, just kind of perhaps loading up on those talks in the morning while I'm still, you know -- MINA: [laughs] STEPHANIE: Fresh-faced and coffee-driven. [laughs] Rather than saving it for the afternoon when it might be a little harder to really focus. MINA: I think my mental energy has a very specific sweet spot because definitely, like, late in the afternoon would not be good for that. But also, like, very early in the morning would also not be very good for that because my coffee hasn't kicked in yet. STEPHANIE: That's very real as well. MINA: Do you think that there is anything that the conference could have done to have made your experience a little tiny bit better? Is there any support that you could have gotten from someone else, be it the conference, or WNB, or thoughtbot, or other people that you had gone with that could have enhanced this experience? STEPHANIE: Hmm, that's an interesting question. I'm not really sure because I was experiencing so many new things -- MINA: [laughs] STEPHANIE: That that was kind of, like, what was top of mind for me was just getting around even just, like, looking at all the little sponsor booths because that was, like, novel for me to see, like, different companies that I've never heard of before that I think when I asked you about expectations earlier, like, I actually came in with not a lot of expectations because I really was just open to whatever it was going to be. And now that I've experienced it once, I think that I have a little more of an idea of what works for me, what I like, what I don't like. And so I think it really comes down to it being quite a personal experience and how you like to attend conferences and so -- MINA: For sure. STEPHANIE: At the end of the day, yeah, like, definitely recommend just going if that opportunity is available to you and determining for yourself how you want that experience to be. MINA: Certainly. I think just by being there you learn a lot about what you like in conferences and how we like to attend conferences. On a personal level, I'm also an organizer with Ruby Central with their scholarship committee. And that's somewhere where we take new Rubyists or first-time conference attendees and kind of lower the barrier for them to attend these conferences. And the important part I wanted to get to is setting them up with a mentor, somebody who has attended one of these conferences before that can kind of help them set goals and navigate. And I thought that someone like that would...at RubyKaigi, being both our first times, might be useful. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's totally fair. One thing I do really like about the Ruby Central conferences is the social support. And I think you had mentioned that maybe that was the piece that was a little bit missing for you at this conference. MINA: Yeah. I know that someone had asked early on, I think, like, the night before the conference officially kicked off, whether there is a Slack or Discord space for all conference attendees so that people can organize outings or meals. And that is definitely something that at least the Ruby Central conferences have, and I imagine other conferences do too, that was missing at Kaigi as well. STEPHANIE: I'm wondering if you would go to Kaigi again and maybe be that mentor for someone else. MINA: I think so. I think I had different feelings about it when we were just leaving the conference, kind of feeling like some of these things that I'm learning here or that I'm being made aware of rather at RubyKaigi will come up important in the future, but maybe not right away. So then I was kind of walking away with a sense of, like, oh, maybe this is a conference that is important, but I might deprioritize if other opportunities come up. But then I started to kind of, like, jot down some reflections and retroing with myself on this experience. And I thought what you mentioned about this being the sort of, like, the push learning opportunity is really nice because I went in there not knowing what I don't know. And I think I came out of it at least being a little bit aware of lots of things that I don't know. STEPHANIE: Yeah, yeah. Maybe, like, what I've come away with this conversation is that there is value in conferences being different from each other, like having more options. And, you know, one conference can't really be everything for everyone. And so, for you and I to have had such a very different experience at this particular conference than we normally do, that has value. It also can be something that you end up deciding, like, you're not into, and then you know. So, yeah, I guess that is kind of what I wanted to say about this very new experience. MINA: Yeah, having new experiences, I think, is the important part. It's the same idea as you want to get a diverse group of people in the room together, and you come out with better ideas or better products or whatever because you have other points of view. And I think that attending conferences, even if not around the world, that are different from each other either in academia or just kind of, like, branching out of Ruby Central conferences, too, is a really valuable experience. Maybe conferences in other languages or language-agnostic conferences. STEPHANIE: Yeah, well said. On that note, shall we wrap up? MINA: Let's do it. STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.
What you'll learn in this episode: Why Google's search results page is more important than your website homepage Why the most successful law firms are involved in their marketing, even when they hire an outside agency How a firm's intake process can make or break their SEO efforts Why content marketing today is about quality, not quantity Why consistent Google reviews are the key to ranking higher About Stephanie Chew: Stephanie Manor Chew is award-winning law firm analyst andDirector of Sales and Head of the Elite Sales Team at Digital Law Marketing. For the last 16 years, she has been helping clients build credibility and increase their visibility online through the full lifecycle of digital initiatives. From custom search engine marketing and social media positioning, to targeted content and online reputation management, she makes sure that DLM clients get what they need, when they need it. Additional Resources: Digital Law Marketing Website Stephanie's LinkedIn Digital Law Marketing Facebook Transcript: Gone are the days when you could simply outsource everything to an SEO agency and expect results. To rank on Google today, law firms must take an active role in overseeing and executing their marketing plan. Stephanie Chew, Director of Sales at Digital Law Marketing, finds that the company's most successful clients collaborate with them to achieve the best possible outcome. She joined the Law Firm Marketing Catalyst Podcast to talk about why content is no longer king; why a firm's intake process is the most important part of lead generation; and how consistent Google reviews can boost your SEO efforts. Read the episode transcript here. Sharon: Welcome to the Law Firm Marketing Catalyst Podcast. Today, my guest is Stephanie Chew. She is the Director of Sales at Digital Law Marketing, and she's speaking to us from Annapolis, Maryland. The company is headquartered in Nashville but is basically a virtual firm and works all over the country. Digital Law Marketing encompasses a wide range of digital aspects today, and no law firm can live without them. From SEO to PPC to social media, a law firm can make a case for each of them, especially when they work together. Today, Stephanie is going to educate us on what's new in digital law marketing, where we should start and what we can't live without. Stephanie, welcome to the program. Stephanie: Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. Sharon: Stephanie, tell us your background. How did you end up doing this? You didn't tell your mother this is what you wanted to do where you were little, I don't think. Stephanie: It's funny; I always wanted to be in advertising in some respects. I was just telling my daughter this the other night when we were watching the Super Bowl. Watching the Super Bowl with my father, I was always so fascinated by the ads, and I always knew I wanted to do something around advertising and marketing. After college, I started with Trader Publishing Company, which is now Dominion Enterprises. It has changed hands a couple of times, but it's basically selling advertising space to car dealers. Then it turned into apartment communities, like for-rent magazines, things of that nature, and then that led me over to the SEO world, the website world. Then I started working with law firms in 2009, and I've been here ever since. Sharon: That's a long time with law firms. I can relate. I wonder what would have happened if I had been in advertising when SEO started. I'm involved in SEO, but I thought advertising was my dream job and quickly found it wasn't. What would you say that lawyers have to do differently in digital marketing? Stephanie: They have to be a part of the partnership. In the first part of my career, we would come in and help firms and companies by putting ads in newspapers or books, and the firm or the business really didn't have to do much. Now the most successful firms out there are involved with their marketing, maybe not as much as we are, but they're a pretty big part of it. More than they ever have been. For instance, getting reviews is incredibly important now, so the firm has to work to get reviews. We can make a firm tell Google how amazing the firm is. We can create an amazing website with wonderful content, great SEO strategy, but if the firm isn't getting reviews, they're not going to get business. Now, more so than it's ever been, the firm has to be behind the digital focus and be a part of what their partners are doing to help them become successful online. Sharon: That's interesting, because when I read a review, the first thing I look at is, “Is this a legitimate review or is something the company wrote?” I hadn't thought about how involved lawyers have to be, how involved everybody has to be. It's not just something done in the back room. Stephanie: Right. The firms that are the most successful online, the lawyers are actually asking for those reviews directly themselves. We've seen firms where they've hired people to get reviews for them. They're never as successful as the actual attorney asking for that review themselves. So, asking for those reviews is one thing we always push our firms to do because, like you said, you look at those reviews to see if they're real or not. Most people look first at the newest reviews, the most recent review that was posted, and then they look at the lowest review. Those are the two categories that people care the most about. So, it's important for the firm to be involved just as much as the marketing company to make sure your reputation is good too. Sharon: Do you explain that from the very beginning, that they have to be involved? Stephanie: Yes, and we will only work with firms that will be involved. We're very lucky that we're exclusive, so we only work with one firm per practice area per geographic location. If a firm isn't a partner with us, there's only so much we can do for them. But having that partnership, we are the best in what do. We like working with the best firms. It creates the best partnership for everybody's success. But yes, it's very important that they're also a part of their own success up front. Sharon: When you say success, is that lead generation? Is it just what they're doing? Stephanie: Yes, lead generation. Our goal is to help firms become visible online organically. Our main focus is search engine optimization, which is organic placement on search engines. We do paid ads, and we're very good at doing paid ads as well, but it's that organic placement that you get the most return from. The more rankings these firms have on the search engines, the more phone calls they're going to get and then hopefully the more cases they get. It really does work that way. We can track a ranking on the search engines, and then we track their phone and work with them to hear how many cases they're getting, and it really does work in that direction. Sharon: Social media and the paid stuff aside, do you encourage lawyers to write articles? Does this help? Stephanie: With our clients, we handle all of the writing because there are couple of different ways you have to write. Number one, you have to write to make sure you're the voice of the firm and it makes sense. You're writing about cases you're looking to get, but you also have to make sure you're writing so the search engines can recognize you. For instance, a very popular search phrase right now is “near me,” like “car accident attorney near me,” “car accident lawyer near me,” “dentist near me,” “best optometrist near me.” It's making sure you get those “near me” keywords in your content, making sure your content includes questions and answers, because a lot of people are asking questions of the search engines. We do have firms that like to write themselves. Attorneys are wonderful writers, but if they're not writing so the search engines can recognize what they're saying, it's not going to help them become more visible when it comes to these search phrases. It's a balance. We do all the writing for our clients with their approval, but if somebody does want to write here and there, we encourage that. We would just help with massaging the SEO and the content. Sharon: Would you massage the SEO or the stuff that makes them go higher in the rankings? If they have a website already, would you say, “It's wonderful, but we can go in and do some things”? What do you do? Stephanie: 99% of the time, we rebuild and redesign and develop the website first. The reason we do that is because a lot of how your website is built is how you're going to perform on the search engines. For instance, if you have a very slow website, Google does not like that. Your site speed is a factor if you're going to rank or not. So, we like to go in and clean up the website so we have a good product to work with to then help with SEO. From there, we write content, build out the content, create site maps, really get to know the firm, their voice, and figure out the types of cases they're looking for. Then we write content around that to help them rank on the search engines. Sharon: Are you called in when they say, “We're about to embark on a rebuild of our website”? It seems to me they already have one when they call you in. Stephanie: Sometimes that happens, where we start working with a firm and they just rebuilt their website, and we have to give them the bad news of “I'm really sorry, but this website isn't going to perform.” We wouldn't take on that client because we want to set up the proper expectations of success for our clients. If you have a marketing company tell you, “Oh no, that's O.K. Your website's slow, but we could still work with it,” that would be a red flag because it won't work as well as it could if you redid the site. It happens sometimes. Sharon: Going back to the “near me,” I don't even enter that, but that comes up as a choice to click on. Stephanie: Yeah, that's usually right. Sharon: That's interesting. What do you mean by content writing? Is that what you mean when you're making sure the content— Stephanie: When it comes to content, you have the content pages on the website. Some of the most popular content pages on a law firm's website would be their practice area pages. You might have a page on wrongful death. You might have a page on car accidents. You might have a page on personal injury. Then each one of those pages includes content. The type of content on that page could be question and answer, could be including those words “near me.” Google pulls from that content to determine how you're going to rank based on the way the person is searching. You'll see a lot of times where Google does an instant answer. If they're asking a question, “what is the statute of limitations in the state of California for a wrongful death case,” a law firm's content page could answer that question, so they'll bring it up as the first result. There's also blogging. You want to make sure you're blogging on a regular basis. In the past, it was as much content as you could put on there. The phrase “content is king” is gone. That used to be the way we spoke when you would push content, push content, push content. Now, it's more about the quality of content versus the quantity of content. It's making sure it's good content that's enriched with the types of cases you're looking for, and written well so the search engines recognize you as an expert on that topic with experience and expertise in the discussion. Google will see that and help you rank better based on the content and what you're saying. Sharon: Is that per lawyer? Let's say on the home page of the website you have banners or badges that say, “We're the best.” Or is it in the bio? Stephanie: It would be in a practice area page. When somebody does a search for a car accident lawyer, let's say, Google wants to provide them with the most specific information they're looking for. So, they'll more likely pull up a car accident page from your website and show that over your home page. Your home page should be a summary of everything you do, and then the content pages are more specific on each practice area. When somebody does find you, they're going to find that practice page usually over your home page, but all of your content should include things that are easily identifiable for Google. Sharon: I always laugh when I see a bio that says they specialize in 20 different things, because how many can you specialize in? What would you do? Would you put everything the firm does? What would you do in order to come up? Stephanie: With a bio, you really want to focus on that attorney and what they've done and that's it. When it comes to the actual practice area pages, that's where you would focus on that practice area. Then maybe you could put in a little sentence or two about which attorney does that, if that makes sense. There are ways of doing it. It's not necessarily a right answer or a wrong answer. It depends on the firm, the market, the practice area. But there are ways you can incorporate that being specific to the attorney and what their expertise is versus what the whole firm does on the bio page, if that makes sense. Sharon: It does make sense. Should you put successes like, “We won a case that was really hard to win for $10,000 and John Smith did it”? Stephanie: Oh yeah, verdicts and settlements pages and verdicts and settlements in general are some of the most visited areas on the websites. People want to see numbers. There are some markets where they might not be allowed to put verdict and settlement numbers on their website, or the firm doesn't feel like it's appropriate to do that. But by the way, law firms that put their numbers on their websites get more attraction than the ones that don't. Sharon: The big question is do people choose a personal injury firm because they like the lawyer? It's a nice, touchy-feely firm versus one that's won all of these big numbers but they might not like as much. How do you choose? What's more important? Stephanie: That's a good question. Again, it comes back to the person choosing and what's important to them on why they're choosing, but if you don't have the big numbers, you definitely want to talk about what you've done. A lot of people want to feel that they can relate to that attorney. I always say talk as much as you can about things you've done to help other people. If I had a case that was specific and I read that that attorney has helped other people with the same thing I have, I'm more likely to work with them regardless of what the numbers are because I feel like they could help me. If you don't have those big numbers, you want to discuss what you've done because people will be able to relate to that. We're also big believers in putting personal information into those bios. Talk about your hobbies, talk about your children, because people relate to things. There are so many situations where I've heard that this attorney got a case because somebody saw they had the same hobby, they went rafting or whatever it was, and their son had passed away, or that they were calling him because he had the same alma mater. Obviously that is a big one people gravitate toward. Outside of politics—I would stay away from writing anything related to politics—the more information you can humanize yourself with, it's going to help people connect with you better and they'll end up hiring you. Sharon: That's interesting. I've heard that both ways. I tend to relate to people, so I would like to know more about them. That's interesting that you should put it in your bio. Are you usually called in the beginning or are they already underway? Why are you called in? Tell us about your business. That's several questions, sorry. Stephanie: That's O.K. Usually we're called in when a firm is looking to take their law firm to that next step and they're looking for more cases. They're not showing up online. They're not getting phone calls. They're not getting cases online. A lot of times, we're called in to firms that have worked with referrals for pretty much their whole law career. They're always getting referrals, and they're tired of paying those referral fees to other attorneys. They'd like to generate cases themselves from the internet. Then we would be brought in to help them analyze what's going on in their market and what their current web presence is. Then we can put together a plan to get them to where they need to be to generate more calls that generate the cases they're looking for. It's usually somebody that wants to make more money off the internet in some way, like they're tired of paying referral fees and/or they're looking for more visibility and better-quality cases. We hear that a lot; that we help firms create better-quality cases over anything else. Sharon: Better quality meaning larger cases, bigger numbers? Stephanie: It could be anything. It could be that it's a firm that did a bunch of slip and fall cases and now they're getting bigger and better quality personal injury cases. It's medical malpractice firms that used to get a lot of junk calls and now they're getting quality calls, things like that. We're really good at SEO, and we're really good at creating more rankings for somebody organically. Usually when somebody finds a firm organically, they tend to be better qualified, quality leads. Sharon: Do you keep your eye on the changes in the Google algorithm? Stephanie: Yeah, we have a SEO specialist that works with digital marketing. We're all senior level, too. I always like to mention that because our SEO specialists are also very recognized in their SEO space. We have one Google Product Expert that works for us. She's one of 50 in the world. She's outstanding. We also have a Google Local Search expert who's been nationally recognized. They're the ones that keep up with the trends and how things are changing, and then we push that down to all of our firms. We're constantly moving in different directions with content and with SEO strategies based on the changes in the Google algorithm and changes in how we as human beings search. It is ever-changing. If you looked back 10 years ago from today, it's totally different to what we're doing. Even a year ago, it's a different strategy than what we were doing. Sharon: That sort of leads me to the next question. When I search, you have to skip like 10 sponsored ads. Is it possible to be high organically? Stephanie: Absolutely. It's interesting because Google has put a lot of emphasis on their paid ads. They have a newer ad called the Local Services Ad. It's been around for two years now, but those are the ones where there are pictures at the top of the page. They're considered Google screened, but they're driven by reviews and making sure that somebody answers the phone and other things in your budget. But the biggest driver of those is how frequently you're getting reviews, which is interesting that Google is doing that. So, there are different types of advertising they're doing, and they're pulling in an organic element with those reviews. Below that you have your pay-per-click, which is the paid advertising for Google Ad Words, and then you have your local. But yes, local SEO is still the sweet spot of getting calls. The firms we see, the majority of the calls come in through that local SEO space. Sharon: When you say you only take one practice area and one geographic area, do you have a map divided up? What do you call a geographic area? Stephanie: It depends on the marketplace, but a lot of it has to do with where the office is located. For instance, we have a state where the firm has 10 office locations throughout the state. Well, they're the only personal injury firm in that state because they have so many offices, so we're not going to work with anybody else. It comes down to who their competitors are. Our whole thing is we're not going to work with your competition. If it's too close for comfort, we go to our clients first and have them tell us if it's O.K. if we work with them, yes or no based on the competition, and we will or we won't. We do not cross that line at all. We are 100% exclusive, and that's why. We only have a handful of clients per state because it's all we want. We don't want to be the biggest SEO company out there. We want to be the best, and we feel that we are. Sharon: What do you do if you're in a room of lawyers, whether it's partners or not, and they say, “Reviews aren't a problem. Sally in marketing handles the reviews”? What do you do then? Stephanie: It depends. Maybe Sally in marketing really does do a great job and she is getting multiple reviews a week. That would be awesome. We wouldn't have a problem with that at all. But if Sally in marketing hasn't gotten a review for six months, we can see that. We can say, “Oh, that's great, but the best thing for firms is to get consistent reviews on a regular basis. Two to three reviews a week would be ideal.” We can show that they're responding to them, that they're engaging with that list, and we really push that. We've had situations where we have gotten firms top ranked—I keep trying to say first page, but there are no pages anymore when it comes to Google. It's about rank. You can't even scroll. So, we could get somebody at the top of the rank of the search engine, but if their reviews aren't good, nobody's going to call them. We've done our job, but nobody's going to call you if your reviews aren't good. It's a two-way street. We coach our firms. We encourage them. We do a lot with intake. We can audit phone calls and help them figure out how people are handling their calls. It's a lot of coaching and encouraging and trying to do our best to get them to do their part, too. Sharon: I think you just preempted my next question. You can have wonderful numbers, but if they fill out the intake form and nobody sees it— Stephanie: Yeah, if they're not answering the phone. We see this a lot. We'll do audits with some of the most successful firms in lots of different situations. I'll never forget there was a catastrophic injury/medical malpractice firm, and a lady called very upset saying that her daughter was just diagnosed with cerebral palsy, and the woman's like, “I don't know if we do that. Hold on. Let me check. Yeah, we do that.” Now the confidence is shot. There's no way. These are not the people to hire. Intake is such a big part of these firms. It's probably the most important part that our lawyers aren't paying attention to right now. Not all our firms, but in our industry in general. We're doing a lot with our clients to help them with that, but in our industry as a whole, I feel like intake is probably the area that can be improved the most. Sharon: People don't talk about that enough, I think. They talk about how much money everybody is spending on SEO and organic, but not about when the calls come in, where they were sent or what happens. Stephanie: It's really a salesperson on that line if you think about it. As you said, firms are spending thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of dollars a month in marketing, but who's answering that phone? All your dollars are going out the window when you don't have the right person. They usually want to cut costs on those types of positions, when really it should be handled as a sales organization. Some of the more sophisticated PI firms, those large firms that are coming into different markets, are handling those as sales calls. It's changing. I've seen firms do a great job, but I do think that's one of the first things that is overlooked. Hopefully it's coming to light now. More firms are starting to do better at it, but you've got to take care of all the parts. Sharon: There are a lot of parts. I was laughing when you said content is king because that's what people used to say. There was a time, a long time ago, when you could tell somebody, “Just write a lot about what you do and you'll be O.K.,” but that's long gone. Stephanie: Yeah, it's gone now. Sharon: Would you say that a website is the hub of everything a person is doing when they're doing paid ads and SEO? Stephanie: I probably would have used to say that, but what I would say now is if you do a search for the firm's name on Google, that is the new homepage. Whatever you see that comes up there is what I would be more concerned about than even the homepage of your website. The reason I say that is because if you do a search—let's say you're a car accident lawyer and somebody finds you by doing a search for car accident lawyers. They are going to see your presence on Google pop up first. Sometimes they'll go directly to your website; sometimes they'll look at your reviews before even looking at your website; sometimes they'll look at where you are before doing that. There's a lot of information they can find out before even getting to your website. If somebody does a Google search of your firm name, on the right-hand side of that search is usually where you'll see the Google information and Google reviews, but on the left-hand side is all those other directories out there, which could have bad reviews. That shows up before somebody even gets to your homepage. It used to be that your website is the hub of everything. It's still incredibly important, and maybe it still is the hub, but when it comes to your reputation, you really need to see what Google has on your firm. What is your brand telling people before they even get to your website? What are all these directories saying? What are all these reviews saying about you? Sharon: What are you seeing with all the sponsored ads? I just happened to look at your website, and there are about five sponsored ads before you even get to yours. What do you do? Is that part of it? Stephanie: If you were to google Digital Law Marketing, there are other law marketing companies that will bid on our name to show up ahead of us. That happens. Or somebody could be bidding on digital marketing or terms like that, but people can see that they're sponsored or paid ads. You can see that right there. Most people, if they're looking for the real website, will pass those and go directly to the organic. Now, some people search differently. Some people would click on the first one they see, but users are becoming a lot more sophisticated than they ever have been, so they understand what an ad is. Sometimes ads are the best result. Google has also done a good job with the ad program so that sometimes the best information you're finding is in the ads. It depends, but it's hard to get away from those ads. One thing you could do as a business is bid on your name. For instance, we bid on Digital Law Marketing, so we're one of the first that pops up when somebody does type in our name. But you do want to make sure you're aware of what is on the internet about your brand. Sharon: It seems like the world has changed so much as a marketing person who's interested in everything you're talking about. For the firm to be at the top and on social media and everywhere, you need a bunch of experts. They need their own team. You can't be an expert in everything or just a lawyer who's interested in marketing. Stephanie: You're absolutely right. We touch on social media, but there's so much more you could be doing with social media. There are so many different avenues and elements of everything. You could have, like you said, a whole team. You hire a company like ours to manage the website, the SEO, the paid ads. Then you have somebody that does social media video, optimization and things of that nature. Then you get somebody that just does PR. PR companies and SEO companies work really well together because it creates good results when they do. There are so many different things. It's not just hiring one person and they can do everything. Sharon: But the marketing person or the lawyer who's interested should also be auditing calls or at least know what's happening. Stephanie: Yeah, and there are so many different tools now. We use something called dynamic call tracking where you can record every call. We're constantly spot checking and listening to our clients' calls to make sure the leads are being handled properly once we bring them to the law firm. If they don't, they're not going to see the success of their marketing dollars. Sharon: Have you ever had to make changes because of the dynamic call tracking? Stephanie: Yeah, we've had to. We've actually had to not renew agreements with clients. In almost 10 years with Digital Law Marketing, we've only lost a handful of clients, and two of those we actually let go ourselves. The reason we let them go is because they weren't helping themselves and they weren't helping to be a partner. At the end of the day, nobody would be successful. Lots of times we have these hard conversations with firms and say, “O.K., this what we found out. We did an audit and 40% of the calls aren't being answered.” The firms are very receptive to it, and they make changes quickly. That's why they hire us, because they know we'll help them with making those decisions. We've had lots of hard conversations with firms, but if firms aren't willing to help themselves, it's hard for us to help them. Sharon: I presume you've been in the position where you've come in to replace another SEO firm. Stephanie: Oh, yeah. Sharon: How long should a law firm wait to see results? Stephanie: Good question. We ask all of our clients at Digital Law Marketing to give us one year of SEO. After that, it's month to month. We don't renew clients because if you don't want to be with us after a year, then we're probably not the right fit. But we don't lose clients because we can show you within a year what we've been able to do for you. If it's not us, then try somebody else. I would definitely give it a year. Just yesterday, I had a call from somebody who was frustrated because their marketing company had been working for three months and the results weren't showing up. I'm like, “You really need to give them longer than three months. Give them a good year. I'm not going to say you're going to be at the height of your performance in a year, not at all, but you will see progression.” We tell people all the time, “We'll be able to show you in the first 90 to 120 days how you're ranking better, how you're getting more phone calls.” We continually show that progression because it takes years to get really good visibility on search engines. You're telling Google who you are over a long, consecutive period of time of building your brand, but you will see progression quickly. You're just not going to see ultimate results for some time. Sharon: You must have lot of people say, “A whole year? You want me to wait a whole year before I start to evaluate?” Stephanie: People have figured it out now. It used to be more of a challenge five years ago, but people have figured it out. SEO takes a while. With paid ads you can see a return a little quicker, but it's still not as quick as it used to be. With paid advertising, we tell everybody to give it at least three to four months. There are so many people that are doing paid advertising, so it takes a little longer. It used to be that you were able to see results in a day, but it's different the way things are working now. It just takes time, but if you're consistent and you're doing the right thing over a consistent period of time, you will see the right results with the right company. You have to make sure you trust who you're working with, too. Sharon: That's probably a big factor. One of the last questions, if you can tell us, is about how people find you. Do they only find you because of a web search, or do they find you other ways? How do they find you? Stephanie: The law firm? Sharon: Yeah, how do your clients find you, so they call you versus another company? Stephanie: They could do a web search and find us that way. We are Diamond Sponsors of the American Association for Justice, the AAJ. It's a national organization. We're also sponsors of the National Trial Lawyers. We do travel a couple of times a year to conventions and meet new firms. A lot of our clients come from other clients because our clients tell our story a lot better than anybody else. On our website, we have a bunch of FAQs and testimonials from our clients, but they can look us up on Google, social media and through our website. We have a form on there so we can do free SEO audits for firms. We'd love for them to fill that out and see if it's something we can help firms with. We are working with firms all over the country, but we do have markets available, so we'd love to hear from anybody that's interested in not having to hire a company again. A lot of times, people come to us and say, “I'm tired of switching companies every year or every two years.” Our clients don't have to do that anymore. So, come to us and you don't have to continually look further. Sharon: That's a big point of differentiation. For everybody listening, we'll make sure to have the website link and any other links. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it, Stephanie. Stephanie: Thank you for having me, Sharon. It was fun. Sharon: Thanks. Stephanie: Take care.
Stephanie has a win and a gripe from her client project this week. In a previous episode, Joël talked about his work exploring how to model dependent side effects, particularly D&D dice rolls. He went from the theoretical to the practical and wrote up a miniature D&D damage dice roll app that you put in a few inputs. Then it will roll all the dice necessary and tell you did you successfully hit your target and, if so, how much damage you did. Together, they discuss how they think about fulfillment at work and what brings them fulfillment as developers. Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/) Joël's DnD dice roll app production (https://dnd-damage-roller.netlify.app/) site and repo (https://github.com/JoelQ/dungeons-and-dragons-damage-calculator) Engineering Management for the Rest of Us (https://www.engmanagement.dev/) The Five Love Languages (https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/click-here-happiness/202009/what-are-the-5-love-languages-definition-and-examples) Transcript: JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So I have a win, I suppose, and a gripe from my client project this week that I would love to share. So my win is that I've been working in React lately. And I might have mentioned this on a previous episode, but it's been a few years for me. So I'm kind of catching up on the new, hot tooling, you know, whatever is popular in that world these days, and having to read a lot of documentation to figure out how to use it and just in general, I think being a little bit outside my comfort zone. And I was working on an existing React component that was untested, and I had to change and extend some functionality in it. And we're also a little bit on a deadline. So there's like a little bit of pressure on the team to be delivering. And so when I got this ticket, I was like, okay, I am seeing this existing component that looks also a few years outdated. It's using some of the older technology that we've kind of moved on from. And I was just like, oh, I really should write tests for this before I go in and change some things just to feel confident that my changes don't break anything because it was pretty gnarly. But I was not in the mood for it. [laughs] And this was like two or three days ago. I was just very grumpy. And I was like, oh man, why do I have to do it? [laughs] I kind of wanted to just get into making the changes so I could deliver on this work. So, spoiler, I did not write the tests that day and just kind of went ahead with the changes. But then, the next morning, I woke up, and I was feeling inspired. I was like, I made those changes, but I'm actually not feeling that confident about it. So let me go back and try to write some tests. And I got to use the new tools I had been looking into, and that was part of my hesitation too. I was like, oh man, this is like a really old component. And I don't want to use the older ones that we're using for testing. But how is it going to play with the newer testing tools that we're using? And so there was just like a lot of, I think, barriers to me feeling excited about writing those tests. But with my renewed energy, I did it. And I feel very happy about it and proud of myself. Yeah, that's my little win. JOËL: That's a roller coaster of a journey there. That sort of deception when you find out that there are no tests for this and somebody else's problem has kind of become your problem. But then you decide you don't want it to be your problem, you know, kick it down the road for somebody else. And then you feel good about yourself, and you decide to backfill the test anyway. And you get that confidence, and now everything's better for everybody. That is quite the journey. STEPHANIE: Exactly. I listened to another podcast recently where they coined this term called tantrum logic, which is basically the idea that when you're kind of grumpy or something happens, and you're like, man, I don't want to do any of this, like, if I can't do it my way, then I don't want to do it at all. [laughs] And just the idea that the way you're thinking about the issue at hand may not be totally grounded in reality. And I think I needed that reset and just a good night's sleep and going to do something else to come back and be like, actually, I do want to write those tests, even if it will be challenging. I'm in a better mind space for it. Mind space? Headspace? [laughs] Headspace for it. And I overcame the tantrum logic. JOËL: A good night's sleep is just such a powerful tool for resetting. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I agree. Shout out to sleep. [laughs] It turns out that it can really have a positive effect on how you feel. JOËL: By the way, this is not an advertisement. We are not sponsored by sleep. We just both love it and recommend it. STEPHANIE: [laughs] To get into my gripe a little bit, so you and I are on the same client project we've mentioned before on the show. And I think I even talked a little bit about receiving a new computer from our client to do our client work on. So now I have many devices at home. And we had also chatted previously about a note-taking app that we both use called Obsidian. And one of the reasons that I really like it is because it's all local storage. So your notes are not being uploaded to the cloud or whatever. But that does make it hard to use on multiple, I mean, not just hard, impossible to use [laughs] on multiple devices unless you pay for it. They have a sync offering where you can use it on multiple devices. And I think it's also encrypted in a certain way. Anyway, sometimes I'll be working on my client laptop and have some idea or thought that I really want to note down, but I don't have Obsidian installed on this machine, and it's not synced to my other Obsidian. And I have just been kind of annoyed about having to go open another computer to write a thought down if I want to document it. And I'm curious how you deal with this problem. JOËL: So the downside of Obsidian not being a cloud product is that you don't just get that sync for free. The upside of it just being markdown files on your hard drive is that you can use any other product or tool that you want to manipulate these files. So I have my Obsidian vault, which is just the term for the directory where it keeps all of these files in a Dropbox directory. And so I have it sync across multiple machines just by being signed into my Dropbox account. STEPHANIE: That's smart. And that sync is pretty smooth for you? You don't have any issues with updating it in one spot and seeing those changes in another? JOËL: I have not had issues with that. Of course, I'm not jumping between machines within 30 seconds of each other. Generally, I'm also connected to the internet. So I haven't had a situation where I make a change to a machine not connected to the internet, and then later on, I edit an old version on a different machine that is connected to the internet, and now we have conflict. I've not run into that problem. STEPHANIE: Okay, cool. That sounds good. It's funny you mentioned that because it's just the other day, off-mic; you and I were on a call doing a little bit of pairing. And you were on both machines at the same time [laughs] because we had to use one for our call. And then you were looking something up on your client computer as well. And the thought of you just using two computers at once was very amusing to me. JOËL: It's the ultimate hacker move in...I was going to say bad, but that's maybe a little bit too judgmental, but yeah, in classic, I feel like police shows, things like that. STEPHANIE: I do have one more thought about note-taking that we haven't talked about before. But I'm really curious, how do you deal with thoughts you have on the road during a time you don't have a device on you? Do you go and write that down somewhere, or what do you do with those? JOËL: I have an absolutely awful solution, which is I add it to my mental stack and hope it doesn't overflow before I get to a computer. STEPHANIE: That's really funny because I used to do something similar where if I had a to-do list or something like that in my head, I would remember the number of items on my list to try to cue me into remembering what those items were. The worst thing that would happen is I would remember that I had three things on my to-do list but could only remember two. And so I had to just [laughs] deal with my existential anxiety about knowing that there was something else that I had forgotten about but could not remember [laughs] for the life of me what it was. JOËL: So I do that trick sometimes for my grocery list if I don't want to write it down. I'll just be like, oh yeah, go to the grocery store, make sure there are five items in my basket when I check out. And similar to you, sometimes I have that problem. I had a light-bulb moment the other day, which is that this trick is actually an example of hashing content. STEPHANIE: [laughs] JOËL: So if you're ever hashing the contents of a file and then wanting to compare if another file is the same and you check the hashes are the same. In a sense, you're kind of hashing your grocery list and your shopping cart and trying to see do they both hash to the same value? Now, a good hashing algorithm has an infinitesimally low chance of a collision. Counting the number of items in your list or cart has a fairly high chance of a collision. You could have a cart and a list that both have five items, but they're not the same items. Yet this comparison would still make you think that they're the same. STEPHANIE: This is a very funny metaphor to me. I think the other issue is that as a human and not a computer, I do not have the mental storage space to then also remember what algorithm [laughs] I'm using to hash my to-do list. JOËL: The algorithm is the count function. STEPHANIE: [laughs] True, true, a more sophisticated algorithm then. [laughs] JOËL: Yes, which is why I keep using this not very safe, but it's good enough. STEPHANIE: Sometimes, we just need to be good enough. So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: So, in a previous episode, I think we talked about some work I was doing exploring how to model dependent side effects, particularly D&D dice rolls. So this week, I went from the theoretical to the practical and wrote up a miniature D&D damage dice roll app that you put in a few inputs, and then it will roll all the dice necessary and tell you did you successfully hit your target, and if so, how much damage did you do? And it takes into account all these edge cases. STEPHANIE: Cool. That's so exciting because I think we mentioned last time how that would be a really interesting exercise to write up that code. Did you get any insight from doing that? JOËL: I think a lot of the insight that I got came from the initial diagramming phase. And I think coding it out really solidified the things that I had learned from the diagramming. Of interest here is that there are effectively or potentially four separate dice-rolling phases that can happen. First, you're rolling to see can you hit your target? And depending on the situation, you're rolling one or two dice. And then after that, you're rolling to see if you do hit, how much damage you do. And you're either rolling one set of dice, or you might be rolling two sets of dice if you happen to do a critical hit. So I think that the diagram that I had clearly showed these are four sets of randomness that have to happen and then how they relate to each other. These two are dependent on each other; these two are independent. I think one thing that was really interesting that I learned from the code is that for something like a dice roller, you usually don't want to see just the result. Because if I just have a button that says how much damage did I do, and then I get a number back that says, "You did zero damage," or "You did three damage," as a person, that's not very satisfying. And I don't know that I fully trust it. I want to see all the intermediate results. So I want to see, oh, did I roll two different dice for that initial two-hit? What were the numbers? And then I can say, okay, well, I need to roll above a five or roll above a 10. And I rolled these two dice, and they were both under 10. That makes sense why I didn't hit. Or I rolled one of them above and one of them below, but I was rolling with disadvantage, which means I have to take the lower of the two numbers. So I could have hit, but I didn't. So I think that is really fun as a user to see the intermediate steps. But also, as a developer, it helps me to be confident that the code I wrote works the way I expect it to. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's really neat. I think what I love about this is that you took something that, in some ways, could be really simple, right? And the implementation could have been just the first thing that you thought of, but you thought very deeply about it and made the dice roller that you wanted in the world. [laughs] I'm curious. Can anyone go check out this repo on the internet? JOËL: Yes. So we can link to the repo in the show notes. And also, the dice roller itself is up online at dnd-damage-roller.netlify.app. And we can link that as well for anybody who wants to go and check it out. STEPHANIE: Awesome. JOËL: I think my goal in this is it's more of a learning exercise. I don't think the world needs another D&D dice roller. There are better ones built into more comprehensive tools. But it was fun for me to work on this, to explore some ideas, and to dig into randomness. I've always had a fascination with random rolls. 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I'm curious about how you think about fulfillment at work in general and what brings you fulfillment as a developer. JOËL: Fulfillment is really interesting because I think it's a really kind of personal question. It probably varies a little bit from person to person. But there are probably also some aspects that are global to everyone. I know we've talked about things like psychological safety in the past. And if you don't have things like that, that baseline, it's going to be hard to feel fulfilled. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I agree. I am thinking of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and in some ways, fulfillment is kind of the tip of the pyramid. If you are feeling safe and like you belong and get enough sleep, like we mentioned earlier, you can reach towards getting into what really feels fulfilling and gives you purpose in life. JOËL: I love that you brought up Maslow's pyramid because like you said, that top part is self-actualization. So you need all those lower layers before you can actually reach the point of true fulfillment on the job. One thing I recently realized about myself is how I tend to approach projects that are in a difficult place. I find a lot of fulfillment in sort of relative change. It doesn't matter if a project is in a bad place as long as the project on a week-by-week basis is moving in the right direction. It might still be in a bad place, but is it better than last week? And was I a part of making that better? That makes me feel good. STEPHANIE: Yes. I have always really admired your optimism around that and how you share even small wins. You're really good about that, actually, and celebrating that. And it's interesting to learn that it's like that process itself that has a lot of meaning for you. Because I think I'm a little bit different in the sense that I have an ideal version of working in my head, and if we're not there, even if we are making some incremental progress week to week, I think I struggle. Sometimes I feel frustrated or stressed because I think that we're just not where I want to be. And I've definitely been thinking about harnessing some of that optimism and celebration that you have around, just making things better a little bit at a time. JOËL: And I think we should be clear that this is not the way one has to be; this is just how I tend to feel on projects. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. JOËL: I know there are plenty of people who feel most fulfilled when they're on projects where things are mostly good. And then it's not about incremental improvement in the product, but maybe it's shipping a lot of features and feeling like they're moving very quickly. Maybe it's that feeling of speed that gives them fulfillment rather than the feeling of incremental progress. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. I think what is helpful for me in hearing about this from you and just from others (I love talking to other people and learning about what motivates them.) is seeing what else is possible outside of my own little universe inside my head and doing the self-reflection to be like, okay cool, this works for Joël, but maybe this doesn't work for me. But having the input from other people lets me discover more about myself in that way. JOËL: That is incredibly powerful. I love that. I think in a variety of aspects of my life, but especially when it comes to fulfillment in software and at work, talking to other people, seeing how they relate to a project or to a particular task, and, like you said, getting to see their perspectives that are sometimes totally different than mine. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. So you just mentioned one aspect of how you find fulfillment when a project is maybe in a tougher spot than usual. I'm curious if you can recall a time that you've been the most fulfilled at work. JOËL: Most fulfilled. I think one of the most fulfilling projects I did was several years ago. We built a dashboard for just exploring a lot of data from medical studies. And so the researchers would upload some time series data for things like heart rate, or skin electro-sensitivity, a bunch of other things, along with a video. It was a kind of an interview-style situation. They were doing a session with a patient. And we would then sync all of these data streams up. We would sync it up to the video, and then you could kind of explore the data. There were scrubbers, so you could kind of scrub through the video, and it would scrub through the time series data all at the same time in sync. You could scrub through the time series data. It would sync the video kind of like bidirectional. You could zoom in on the data. The idea is this is a high-level kind of exploratory tool. And you could then find the interesting bits of data that you could then do more quantitative analysis on. So you could then find a part of the stream and say, this is the interesting part. Clip from 10:55 to 11:10 in the stream, on all streams, and then export just that data in a zip file. And then I'm going to put that through a bunch of math and figure out, oh, is there a correlation between these moments? STEPHANIE: So what about that project was really exciting or fun for you? JOËL: I think the client was incredibly fun to work with. There was like an energy and excitement. This was part of their, I think, Ph.D. thesis. And they were really excited. They were incredibly knowledgeable, just delightful to work with. I think this was a fun...so we built this from scratch. It was a greenfield app. I think it had a lot of interactivity. It had a lot of visuals. It was one of the first projects I got to work on that used Elm. I think all those things combined to just make it a really fun project to work on. It was also a fairly short project. So we had a very kind of tight deadline. We were very pragmatic with absolutely everything on there. Like, what can we do to get this done quickly? Is this feature worth the time? It was kind of a classic MVP product. And I think it was one of the most fun things I've built. STEPHANIE: Cool. I'm also hearing there was probably some creative aspect of it that was really fulfilling for you, like exploring a lot of new things. Like, you said, you were working with Elm for the first time. And the project itself sounds very different from some of our other more typical consulting engagements and also the collaboration aspect. Like, you mentioned the tight deadline, which compelled you all to work really closely together to make this really cool thing in that short amount of time. JOËL: Exactly. Yeah, it was like a three or four-week project that I look back on really fondly. Like, oh, that was a good time with those two colleagues and that client, and we did a thing. It was really cool. STEPHANIE: That's awesome. JOËL: I think it's really interesting that just hearing that story, you're immediately picking up on, like, oh, I see elements of creativity and exploration. Do you have kind of an internal system that you use to analyze projects that you're on to be like, oh, this is a project I'm enjoying because of this element or that? Because you seem very self-aware around these types of things. STEPHANIE: I'm glad you asked that because I think I was trying to reflect back to you some of the things that I picked up about what you were sharing. I have been reading a book, surprise, surprise. JOËL: What? You read? STEPHANIE: I read. [laughs] It's called "Engineering Management for the Rest of Us" by Sarah Drasner. And I am not an engineering manager, and I don't necessarily know if I even want to be. But I really enjoy reading management books to better understand how to manage myself or how to be a person who is managed. And one of the things she talks about is understanding an individual's values and how those things end up being what motivates them and also likely what brings fulfillment. And so after I learned about the value of values, I started thinking, okay, what is it that I am motivated by? And really reflecting on when I have felt really good about work and also when I felt challenged or unhappy at work and what things were missing during that time. So the things that I have realized that I am very motivated by are human connection. I love spending quality time with people, and that is probably why I enjoy pairing so much. But also, in my one on ones with my manager, I really enjoy that time just being time for us to share space and get to know each other and talk. It doesn't necessarily need to be going through agenda items or a status report or even necessarily talking about my project. JOËL: So you mentioned that you value quality time with others. Is that a reference to "The Five Love Languages" concept? STEPHANIE: It is. It is. I think I also made a bit of a connection there too because what I like in my personal relationships also obviously applies to work. JOËL: Yeah, it's how you feel appreciated, how you feel fulfilled. And just for our listeners who may not have read this book, I think the concept is that there are five ways that people like to receive appreciation. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think receive and both express appreciation and love. And quality time is one of them. JOËL: Yeah, yeah. And the other four, if I remember correctly, are acts of service, words of affirmation, physical touch. STEPHANIE: Gift-giving is the last one. Yeah, so that was a fun reflection on my part in being able to just know what makes me feel good. And then it also helps me communicate with other people how to work with me. I think that is super important. I love when people share with me what, I mean, I mentioned this earlier, just what drives them and how they like to be appreciated so that I can do my best to try to offer them that. And I guess this actually is a good transition into the next value of mine that really drives me. I was thinking about this because I mentioned just now that I was learning some new React tools, new to me, anyway. And I'm like, yeah, I like learning. But then I was like; I don't know if I like learning the way other people like learning in the sense that it's not the knowledge itself or the process of learning itself that drives me but learning as a tool to better understand myself. So I think personal development is very important to me. And that feels different from how other people might value learning. JOËL: Interesting. So you might be excited to learn a new React testing tool but not because you're chasing the latest, shiny tech but more because you feel like the process of learning this testing tool helps you learn something new about yourself. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think that sounds right. One of the tools specifically...we're using MSW Mock Service Worker for mocking network requests in Jest. And I was able to use information about testing in Rails and Ruby and apply that to this new tool. And I got to kind of revel in the fact that I could use previous learnings to apply in this new context, and that was really cool to me. So it wasn't necessarily the tool itself or even the process of learning but kind of realizing that I was capable of applying one thing to this less familiar thing. JOËL: So kind of that realization that, hey, you're now far enough in your career, and you have enough experience. You have a broad base of knowledge that all of a sudden, you realize, wait a minute, I'm not starting from scratch anymore. I can apply lessons learned in the past to learn this new thing and make that easier. And that's a really validating feeling. STEPHANIE: Exactly. That was really cool to me, and I felt really good afterwards. I think this week at work has been very uplifting because I've been having all these little mini-revelations if you will. JOËL: I love that. I love that so much. STEPHANIE: So, one thing that I think is very easily conflated with fulfillment is the idea of success. And I kind of want to talk about the distinction between success and fulfillment. Does that bring up any thoughts for you? JOËL: Yes. I think the two are often entangled, but they're definitely not the same thing. It is possible to be fulfilled on a project that is not successful. And it's also possible to be on a successful project and yet not feel fulfilled. But oftentimes, the two go together because when things are going well on a project, they're probably also going well in a lot of other ways, and you might be feeling fulfilled as long as general parameters fit in, right? If values line up, things like that. I know for me I value quality and excellence and doing work that I'm proud of. So I think if I were working at a place that was doing kind of low-quality, low-cost work where it's just like, you know what? You want cheap and low-quality? Come to us. We'll just get it done quick and cheap. And yeah, it's not going to be great, but you get what you pay for. There's a reason this part of the market exists, and it's a totally valid way to build software. But I would not feel fulfilled there, even though maybe the clients are absolutely happy with the work that's being done. So I think that would be a situation where there is success, but I might not feel personally fulfilled. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because I think I really struggled in the beginning of my consulting career with equating client happiness with success. And I'm now just starting to kind of unlearn that a little bit and realizing that success means different things to different people. So even if we talk about thoughtbot for just a second, one of thoughtbot's values as a company is seeking fulfillment in everything that we do. And so even though, like you said, the client might be totally happy, for thoughtbot, that may not be a successful client engagement if you, Joël, as the developer staffed on that project, didn't find fulfillment. Because what's success for us here is that we are fulfilled in the project itself. And that was really helpful because, in some ways, I'm like, well, who cares? Who else cares besides me that I'm fulfilled? And to be like, oh, yeah, actually, what our collective success means is that I'm fulfilled, and you're fulfilled. That was really important to me and one thing that I really appreciate about working here. JOËL: Fulfillment comes partly from our environment, from maybe the project that we're working on, our colleagues, but also comes to a certain extent from ourselves. And to a certain extent, we can drive that ourselves as well. And I think that first step is a certain amount of self-awareness and self-understanding. You are clearly a master at this. What are some things that you do to drive that self-understanding, to build maybe a sense of how you become fulfilled, and identifying those values that make you feel fulfilled on a project? STEPHANIE: Listen, [laughs] I don't know if I would call myself a master at this, only that I'm very actively working on it in my life right now, in therapy, but also in talking to other people about this because, yeah, sometimes it has caused me a lot of turmoil. I'll be really stuck in a rut or feeling a lot of burnout, and that, ironically, actually motivates me to be like, how can this be different? And oftentimes, that means I have to look inward. But you and I had a conversation last week off-mic that was really helpful for me because I was feeling really bummed about my client work and it not going the way that I thought it would. And your insight helped me think about the project a little differently and think about metrics of success differently. For that project, I could not expect that project to look exactly like all of my past experiences. And success for those projects were not the same for this project. So yeah, talking to others, I highly recommend that. JOËL: I guess you mentioned that you read a lot of management books and a lot of books geared towards managers for discussing things like how to set up a one-on-one. Those are almost like...they're not really therapy, but they kind of lean a little bit towards that sometimes and trying to create fulfillment for your direct reports. So maybe seeing it from the other side helps you build understanding. STEPHANIE: Yeah, actually, that's totally a great call out because I highly recommend reading books about [laughs] management, even if you're not interested in management. Only because there's no guarantee that you'll have a good manager who can do all those things for you, so if you can equip yourself for doing those things, then you are likely to have a better workplace experience, in my opinion. JOËL: And I guess the obvious one that we have not talked about is if you do have a good manager, have these conversations with them. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. JOËL: Part of their job is to help you be more fulfilled. And they should be having conversations to maybe help you discover those ways that you are feeling fulfilled at work and how to get there. Here's one aspect that we have not talked about that I'm curious to explore a little bit: recognition. STEPHANIE: Ooh. Yeah, that's a good one. JOËL: How important is it for you to feel recognized, either by your colleagues or by the more official org structure? STEPHANIE: This is a great question. I do value recognition from people I trust. So I think we were talking about sometimes client projects are not successful, but you tried your best, and you did do valuable work. And you might not hear that from the client. They might think differently. But if a trusted co-worker can provide that validation for you, oftentimes, I find that more helpful. JOËL: That's an interesting distinction. And I think recognition has a very different weight depending on the source it's coming from. If it's somebody you look up to, and they just give you a shout-out or something, I'm riding that high all day long. STEPHANIE: Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. How do you like to receive recognition? JOËL: Hmm. So at thoughtbot, we have an internal system where we can give shout-outs to each other. They're called high fives. And they get shared directly to the team Slack channel. And it's a small thing, but I really appreciate it when somebody calls out like, "Hey, I appreciated this thing that you did," or "This is the thing that had an impact on me," or "I appreciated the thing that you shared." Those things make me feel really great. It's a small thing. It takes 30 seconds to do. But I really appreciate that. And it's something that I am looking to more intentionally do more of because it's fun to receive recognition, but it's also really valuable to give recognition. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I'm with you. I am also trying to be intentional about being even more generous with my positive feedback for others. And I think there's also some degree of recognition and validation to give to yourself. JOËL: Self-validation. STEPHANIE: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm definitely trying to do more of that. Because if I'm doing work that lines up with my values, I want to be able to pat myself on the back for it, even if no one else will do it for me. [laughs] JOËL: What does that look like? You're like standing in the mirror and saying, "Good job?" STEPHANIE: [laughs] JOËL: Do you have maybe a document where you kind of list the things that you feel proud of, even if nobody else has noticed? What does that look like for you? STEPHANIE: Ooh, yeah, a brag document. I think some folks at thoughtbot have recommended doing that. For me, it's going and getting myself a treat. JOËL: Oh, I like that. STEPHANIE: So maybe like a latte the next morning or going to get just a sweet thing. Yeah, that's my way of doing it. JOËL: So we've talked about self-recognition, recognition from colleagues. I think another element is recognition from management or the company that you're working at. That can be just praise. But oftentimes, I think when you're looking at recognition from something a little more corporate, it has a more kind of concrete aspect to it. And maybe that is come yearly evaluation time; there's a raise that recognizes the fact that you've done good work. I know for me, last year, I got a big promotion. And I felt like I had been performing at a level that was kind of pretty far above and beyond the title that I had. And getting that promotion, in some ways, was very much kind of validation and recognition of the fact that I had been performing at that high level. STEPHANIE: Yeah, it sounds like the acknowledgment for the expanded work that you've been doing was really motivating for you. JOËL: Yeah. It's interesting you mentioned that acknowledgment is really motivating because it really is, and sometimes the reverse is also true. You feel discouraged or unmotivated because the good work that you're doing is not recognized. Are you familiar with the idea of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation? STEPHANIE: Yeah, I am. Being motivated by something externally, like someone offering a promotion, or a raise, or whatever, versus it coming from yourself. JOËL: Yeah. And I think for many people, you're probably not purely motivated by one or the other. There are some things where you're motivated by your own internal values, as we mentioned earlier, and some things where you're motivated by incentives offered at work. And that balance will probably shift over time and in different moments. But having a little bit of both can be really, really powerful. If you can be living up to your values and then get rewarded for it, that's kind of peak fulfillment right there. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's the sweet spot. Yeah, I wish that for everyone in the world. [laughs] On that note, shall we wrap up? JOËL: Let's wrap up. [laughs] STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeee!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.
thoughtbot had an in-person Summit in the UK! Joël recalls highlights. Stephanie is loving daily sync meetings on a new project. The idea of deleting code has been swimming around in Stephanie's brain recently because she's been feeling nervous about it. Together, Joël and Stephanie explore ways of gaining confidence to delete code while feeling good about it. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medium=website). Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Thoughtbot summit video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d7gUq5J-ck) Gather Town (https://www.gather.town/) Sustainable Rails episode (https://www.bikeshed.fm/368) Chelsea Troy on deleting features (https://chelseatroy.com/2021/01/21/reducing-technical-debt/) Unused (https://unused.codes/) elm-review-unused (https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/jfmengels/elm-review-unused/latest/) Transcript: STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And today, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: I just got back from a few days in the UK, where thoughtbot has been having an in-person Summit, where we've brought people from all over the company together to spend a few days just spending time with each other, getting to know each other, getting to connect in person. STEPHANIE: That sounds like it was a lot of fun. I've been hearing really great things about it from folks who've come back. Unfortunately, I couldn't make it this year. I got sick a little bit beforehand and then ended up not being able to go. But it sounds like it was a lot of fun just to get together, especially since we're now a remote company. JOËL: Yeah, I'm really sorry you weren't able to make it there. It would have been amazing to do a Bike Shed co-hosts get-together. STEPHANIE: I know. In the same room, maybe even record. What a concept. [laughs] JOËL: So thoughtbot is a fully remote company, and so that means that getting a chance to have people to come together and build those in-person connections that you don't get, I think, is incredibly valuable. I was really excited to meet both the people that I work with and that I see on my screen every day and people who I don't talk to as often because they're working on different teams or different departments even. STEPHANIE: What was one highlight of the time you spent together? JOËL: I'll give a couple of highlights, one I think is more on the activity side. We went bouldering as a group. This was a really popular activity. We were trying to sign up people for it, and it was so popular we had to make two groups because there were too many people who were interested. And it was really fun. There are people with a whole variety of skill levels. Some people, it was their first time, some people had been doing it for a while. And just getting together and solving problems was a lot of fun. STEPHANIE: Yes, I saw that. That was one of the things I was really looking forward to doing when I was still thinking that I was going to go. And it's cool that it had opportunities for both beginners and people who have been doing it before, which I think, if I recall correctly, Joël, you are a boulderer yourself back home. So that's pretty neat that you were able to, yeah, I don't know, maybe share some of that experience IRL too. JOËL: Yeah, yeah, I think it's great because people were able to help each other. Sometimes you have a different perspective down on the ground than you do up on the wall. And then, in my case, because I've done it a lot, I know a little bit of actual climbing technique. And so I can give some tips on, like, oh, if you're stuck and you don't know how to get past a particular point, or you don't know how to start a particular climb, or your arms are getting tired halfway up, here's maybe a small change you can make that would make things easier for you. STEPHANIE: Honestly, that also sounds like a really good metaphor for pair programming, [laughs] like, looking at things from different perspectives, you know, someone who's on the wall? I don't know what the lingo is. But it's the equivalent of someone driving in coding, the navigator having a little more perspective and being able to point out things that they might not see that's right in front of them. JOËL: I love that metaphor. Now I'm going to think of that both when I pair and the next time I climb. STEPHANIE: I love it. JOËL: I think climbing, when I do it, it's always more fun with a friend, specifically for what you were saying. I climb alone sometimes, but as much as possible, I'll reach out to another friend who climbs and say, "Hey, let's climb together." And then we can alternate on the same route even. STEPHANIE: That's cool. I didn't realize that it could be such a social activity. JOËL: It is very much a social activity, and I think that's part of the fun of it. It's challenging physically but also mentally because it's a puzzle that you solve. But then also, it's a thing that you do with friends. I think another aspect that was a highlight for me was getting a chance to connect with people from other teams, other departments within thoughtbot. I think one thing that was really nice when we were located in an office is that over lunch, or just at the water cooler, or whatever, you would connect with people who were in other teams and who were in different departments. So I might talk to people in People Ops, or in marketing, in operations just sort of in the natural course of the day in a way that I think I don't do quite as much of now that we're more remote. And I tend to talk more with other developers and designers on my team. So I think that was really great to connect with people from other teams and other departments within the company. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I know what you mean. I think I really miss the spontaneous, organic social interaction that you get from working in an office. And I think we've maybe talked about remote work on the podcast before, or previous co-hosts Steph and Chris have also talked about remote work. But it definitely requires a lot more intention to manifest those connections that otherwise would have been a little more organic in person. And so, while you all were at an in-person summit in the UK, there was also a virtual summit hosted for folks who weren't able to travel this time around, and I really appreciated that. I got to spend a day just connecting with other people in Gather Town, which is a web app that's like a virtual space where you have little avatars, and you can run around and meet up with people into virtual meeting rooms on this map. [laughs] I'm not really sure I'm describing it well, but it's very cute. It is almost like a little video game. It's like a cross between a video game and video conferencing [chuckles] software. But yeah, I think I just really appreciated how inclusive thoughtbot has been doing remote work where, like, yes, we really value these in-person gatherings, and we understand that there is a bit of magic that comes from that, but also making sure that no one's left out. And at the end of the day, not everyone can make it, but we were still able to hang out and socialize amongst ourselves in a different way. JOËL: Agreed. I think that inclusivity is part of what makes thoughtbot such a great place to work at. STEPHANIE: Speaking of inclusivity, I mentioned a few weeks ago that I joined a new project recently and had been going through the onboarding and hopping into all these new meetings. One thing that I've really enjoyed about this new client team that I'm on is that in their daily sync meetings, we all share what we're working on. But we also all share something that's new to us, which is a little bit meta because we do that on this podcast. [laughs] But each person just shares maybe something they learned at work but also usually something just totally not work related like a new show that they're watching. There's another person on my team who learns a lot of things from YouTube videos. And so he's always telling us about the new thing he learned about, I don't know, like mushrooms or whatever, or AI [laughs] through YouTube. And yeah, someone else might show a sweater that they just knit themselves. And it's been a very easy way to get to know people, especially when you're meeting a whole new team. And yeah, I've been enjoying it a lot. It's made me feel very welcome and like I know them as people outside of work. JOËL: I love that. Yeah, they're more than just people you're shipping code with. You're able to build that connection. And it sounds like that helps smooth the...maybe we can say the social aspect of onboarding. Because when you onboard onto a project, you're not just onboarding onto a series of codebases and tools; you're also onboarding onto a team, and you need to get to know people and build relationships. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. MID-ROLL AD: Debugging errors can be a developer's worst nightmare...but it doesn't have to be. Airbrake is an award-winning error monitoring, performance, and deployment tracking tool created by developers for developers that can actually help cut your debugging time in half. So why do developers love Airbrake? It has all of the information that web developers need to monitor their application - including error management, performance insights, and deploy tracking! Airbrake's debugging tool catches all of your project errors, intelligently groups them, and points you to the issue in the code so you can quickly fix the bug before customers are impacted. In addition to stellar error monitoring, Airbrake's lightweight APM helps developers to track the performance and availability of their application through metrics like HTTP requests, response times, error occurrences, and user satisfaction. Finally, Airbrake Deploy Tracking helps developers track trends, fix bad deploys, and improve code quality. Since 2008, Airbrake has been a staple in the Ruby community and has grown to cover all major programming languages. Airbrake seamlessly integrates with your favorite apps to include modern features like single sign-on and SDK-based installation. From testing to production, Airbrake notifiers have your back. Your time is valuable, so why waste it combing through logs, waiting for user reports, or retrofitting other tools to monitor your application? You literally have nothing to lose. Head on over to airbrake.io/try/bikeshed to create your FREE developer account today! JOËL: So you've been...is it two weeks in a new codebase? Have you gone and deleted any code yet? STEPHANIE: I wish. I am glad you asked this question because this has been a topic that has been swimming around in my head a little bit lately because this new client codebase it's very big and it's quite old. Like, I've been seeing code from 10 years ago. And it's been a really challenging codebase to get onboarded into, actually, because there's so much stuff. In fact, I recently learned that some of their model specs are so big that they have been split out into up to seven different files to cover specs for one model. [laughs] So that has been a lot to grapple with. And I think in my journeys working on a starter ticket, I've just stumbled upon stuff that is very confusing. And then I might follow that thread only to realize that, like, oh, this method that I spent 20 minutes trying to grok turns out it's not actually used anywhere. JOËL: That's a lot of dead code. STEPHANIE: It is a lot of dead code, but I am also not quite feeling confident enough to delete it because I'm new, because I have no idea what consequences that might have. So, yeah, the idea of deleting code has just kind of been swimming around in here because ideally, we would be able to, but, for some reason, I don't know, at least for me, I feel very nervous about it. So it hasn't been something that I've reached for. JOËL: That's a great question because I think in maybe Ruby, in particular, it's not always obvious if code is being used or not. When you do find yourself deleting code, how do you gain the confidence that it was safe to delete that? STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a good question. In the past, when I've done it successfully, I'll probably post a Slack message or something and being like, hey, I noticed this code is not being used anywhere, or I'd like to delete it because why, like, I don't know, because it's been misleading me because it's just not providing any value. And then kind of give it like a day or two, and if no one speaks up about it, then I will usually go ahead. And obviously, get some code review, hopefully, get some other eyes on it just to make sure that whatever assumptions I made were valid, and then go for it. And then just watch [laughs] the deployment afterwards and make sure that there are no new errors, you know, no new complaints or anything like that. And, yeah, I think that has been my process, and I've definitely found success doing that. But I have also experienced a bad result [laughs] from doing that where one time, on my last client project, we were refactoring the signup flow. And we realized that after you signed up, you were redirected to this blank page for like 10 seconds or something. It was completely empty. There was nothing on it except a spinner, I think. [laughs] And then it would then redirect you to the dashboard of the app. And we were like, oh, we can definitely delete this. We have no idea what this is doing. We don't want to try to refactor this as part of the effort that we were doing. And so we deleted it, only to find out later from the marketing team that they had been using that page for something Google Analytics related, and we had to revert that change. And it was a real bummer because I think when we removed it, we felt good about that. We were like, oh yes, deleting code, awesome. And then having to bring it back without a clear plan of how to actually fix the problem that we were trying to solve was a bit of a bummer. JOËL: So, as programmers, we're hired to write code. Why does it feel so good to do the opposite of that, to delete code? STEPHANIE: That's a great question. I actually want to know what you think about this, but before that, I wanted to plug this Slack channel that we have at thoughtbot called Dead Code Society, where people can post their PR diffs showing more red than green, so more lines removed than lines added. And I have been really enjoying that Slack channel. It's very delightful. [laughs] But, Joël, do you have any thoughts about why it feels so good to delete code? JOËL: There are probably a few different reasons. Especially when it's not your own code, you're often not attached to it. There's often, I think, the sense when you go into an existing codebase you're just like, oh, everything's just bad, and I don't understand it. And those other coders who wrote this didn't know how to do their job and kind of be the curmudgeon character. So it just kind of feels good to remove that and maybe rewrite it yourself. I would say that's not a good mindset to go in for deleting code. I think there are positive ways where it is actually a good thing. STEPHANIE: That's fair. Just removing code because you would write it differently is not necessarily a net positive. [laughs] JOËL: But I think...so when I initially asked the question, I said, "We're hired to write code." And I think that's a bit of a false assumption built into the question. We're not hired to write code. We're hired to solve problems, to build solutions. And as much as code can be an asset in solving problems, it's also a liability. And code has varying maintenance costs that are typically not low. They vary from expensive to very expensive. And so any chance we get to remove some of that, we're removing some of the carrying costs, to use a term that we discussed a few episodes back when we talked about sustainable Rails. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. One thing that I remember you sharing about the client project that we're both on in the past is they have a very cumbersome test suite. And in some situations, you have wanted to advocate for deleting some of those tests. JOËL: Deleting tests is a really, I think, spicy take because you're trying to get better test coverage. And if your test coverage isn't great, you don't want to lose any of that. So there's definitely a loss aversion there, and we might need it later. At the same time, tests have a cost, cost to run, cost to maintain. And if they're not providing a lot of value, then the cost of keeping them around might be higher than any kind of benefit they're giving you. And I think a classic case of this is tests that have either been marked pending in the codebase with an exit or something like that or that have been marked in your CI server as muted; just ignore failures from this test. Because now you're still having to maintain, still having to execute these tests. They're costing you time, but they're giving you zero benefit. And they're just taking up space in your codebase, making it harder to read. So if you can't get these tests back into the point where they're actually executing, and you're caring about the output, then you probably don't need those tests, and they can be removed. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's fair. I'm thinking about the perspective of someone who does not want to delete those tests. I think in the past, I've seen it and even felt it myself as someone who probably wrote the tests, kind of hoping for some ideal world where I will finally have time to go back to that test. And I already put a lot of effort into trying to make it work, and I want to make it work. I want to have the value of that test. And it's kind of like a sunk cost fallacy a little bit where it's like, I already spent however much time on it that it must have some kind of value. Because just hearing that someone else wants to delete the test can kind of hurt a little bit. [laughs] And it's tough. I do think that it's easier for someone with an outside perspective to be like, "Hey, this test is costing more than the value that it's providing." But yeah, I can see why people might have a little bit of pushback JOËL: Sometimes, the value of a test is also in the journey rather than the destination. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a good point. JOËL: So if you're practicing TDD, maybe you use some tests to help you drive out some functionality, help you come up with a design that you want to do. But maybe once you've actually created the design, the test that helped you get there is not actually that useful. I've heard some people will do this by writing a lot of more system tests-like tests that are very integration-heavy, that have a lot of edge cases that you might not care to test at that level, at that granularity. And so they use those to help drive a little bit of the implementation and then remove them because they're not providing that much value relative to their cost anymore. STEPHANIE: I think that's a really good point. The tests that you write for implementation can have value to you as a developer, but that's different from those tests having value to the business when you commit them to a codebase and incorporate them as part of CI and a CI that everyone else has to run as well. So yeah, I think in that case, the context definitely matters. And hopefully, you can feel good about the value that it provided but then also have that eye towards, okay, what about the business, and what values does the business have? JOËL: Yeah, and accept that the test did the job that it was supposed to do. It got you to where you needed to be, and it completed its purpose. And now it's ready to move on. STEPHANIE: Another thing that I recently read about deleting code...and this was from Chelsea Troy. She advocates for regularly evaluating features in an app and deciding whether they're providing enough value to justify keeping around and maintaining for developers as well. And I thought that was really interesting because I don't know if that's something that I'd really considered before that sometimes an app might outgrow some features, or they might not be worth keeping around because of the problems or the maintenance costs that they carry into the future. JOËL: That's fascinating because I think you're taking the same analysis we were talking about tests and then kind of like bringing it up now to the product level. Because now, we're not just talking about deleting code; we're talking about deleting functionality that a product might have. STEPHANIE: I think the challenge there is that the effects of the carrying cost of a feature is not necessarily felt by the business stakeholders, or product folks, or people operating at a higher level, but it is felt by developers. If there's a bug that's come up from this old feature, and oh, I have never seen this feature before, and now I have to spend a day learning about what this thing is before I can fix the bug. It did feel like a radical idea that maybe developers can play a part in advocating for some features to be retired, that is, you know, maybe separate from how products thinks about those things. JOËL: I think in order to be able to make those decisions or really just to be part of those conversations, the dev side needs to be really integrated with the product team and with larger business objectives. And so then you can say, look, if we take a week of one developer's time to provide the support this feature needs and we have one customer paying $20 a month for it, that's not a good business prospect. Now, is this strategically an area that we're trying to grow? And so yeah, we're doing it for one customer, but we're hoping to get 100 by the end of the year, and then it will be worth it. Then yes, maybe we keep that feature around. If this is the thing, like, we experimented for a few weeks five years ago, and then it's just kind of hang around as a legacy thing that this one person knows about and uses, then maybe it's worth saying, look, this has a high business cost. It might be worth sunsetting that feature. But it's a conversation that everybody needs to be involved in. STEPHANIE: Yeah, yeah. I like the idea of it being something more proactive versus, I don't know, something that I think I've seen at other orgs and just in general as a person who uses digital products, like, a feature or a product, just kind of dying. And probably the organization just wasn't able to find a team to continue to support it, and it just kind of kept being this burden. And then, eventually, it just was something that they had to let go. But then, at that point, you had already spent all of that time, and effort, and energy into figuring out what to do with this thing. Whereas the approach that Chelsea is advocating for is more realistic, I think, about the fate of [laughs] software products and features. And as a developer, I would get that feeling of deleting [laughs] code that is so satisfying. And I'm just not burdened by having to deal with something that is not providing value, like cumbersome tests. [laughs] JOËL: I think it's always the fundamental thing that you have to go back to when you're talking about deleting code, or features, or anything is that sort of cost-benefit analysis. Does this thing provide us any value? And if so, does that value outweigh the cost of the work we need to do to maintain it? And in the case of dead code, well, it's probably providing zero value, but it's imposing a cost, and so we want to remove it. In the case of a test that is not muted or pending, then maybe it does provide some value. But if it's really brittle and constantly breaking, and it's costing us many hours of fixing time, then maybe it's not. If we can't find a way to fix it and make it more valuable because sometimes it's the other option, then it might be worth considering deleting it. Have you ever, on a codebase, taken some time to actually seek out code that could be deleted as opposed to just sort of stumbling onto it yourself? STEPHANIE: That's a good question. I think I have not just explored a codebase just looking for stuff to delete, but I have...maybe if you had something under a feature flag and you no longer needed the flag because it was released to everyone, you know, going back to delete it because you specifically made a ticket to make sure that you went back and cleaned that up. I do really appreciate the tracking of that work in that way and just making sure you're like, hey, I want to avoid a situation where this becomes dead code. And even just making a card for it is putting that intention out there. And hopefully, someone, if not yourself, we'll take that on because it's important. JOËL: Yeah, kind of proactively trying to make sure that the work that you've done doesn't become dead code, that it gets pruned at the appropriate moment. STEPHANIE: What about you? I'm curious from your perspective as an individual contributor when you are just moving through a codebase, and you see something suspiciously [laughs] looking like dead code what you do with it. JOËL: I often like to split out a small PR just to remove that if it's not too much work and it's semi-related to what I'm doing. I'd like to give a shout-out to two tools that can help detect or confirm that something is dead code. One is Unused, written by former thoughtboter Josh Clayton. It uses, I think, Ctags under the hood to track all the tokens in an app and then tries to determine are there tokens that are orphaned, that are isolated, and are not used? And it can then build you a report. And that can be good if you're doing a code audit of a codebase or if you're looking to confirm that a piece of code that you're working on might not be, like, is it actually used or not? Another one is elm-review-unused, which is a plugin for elm-review which is Elm's linter, kind of like RuboCop. And what's really nice there is because it reads the AST, and Elm functions don't have side effects. You know that if something is not reachable from the main function that, it is completely safe to remove. You've run the script, and it will delete a bunch of functions for you that are unused, and it's 100% safe. And it is very thorough. It finds all of the dead code and just removes it. It's practically just a...it's not a button because it's a script that you run but that you can automate to run on commit or whatever on the CI. But yeah, that's an amazing experience to just have it auto clean-up for you all the time. STEPHANIE: That's really cool. I like that a lot. I think that would be really nice to incorporate into your development workflow, like you said, that it's part of the linting system and just keeping things tidy. JOËL: Yeah, I think it's a little bit harder to have something that's quite as thorough for a Ruby or Rails app just because it's so dynamic, and we've got all this metaprogramming. But yeah, maybe this would be a thing where you would want to run something like Unused or some other linting tool every now and then to just check; hey, do we have any dead code that can be removed? STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is totally a little bit different because we're just talking about tools, but I'm also thinking of red flags on a team level where I have definitely asked in a Slack channel, "Hey, I've never seen this feature before. What does it do?" and just crickets. [laughs] And even the product folks that I'm working with, they're like, "I don't know. It predates me," that being a bit of a smell, [laughs] if you will, to reevaluate some of those things. And those flags can exist on many different levels. JOËL: That's always terrifying because you're like 80% sure that this is dead code, but there's like a 20% chance that this powers the core of the app, but nobody's touched it in 10 years. STEPHANIE: Yeah, it is very scary. [laughs] JOËL: Hopefully, your test suite is good enough that if you comment out that function and then you run your test suite, that it just all goes red, and you know that that's actually needed for something. STEPHANIE: Yeah, though I think sometimes you might remove a piece of dead code, and there are some issues afterwards, and you find out, and you just revert it, and it's fine. At the end of the day, there are a lot of safeguards in place, and we've all done it. And so I think normalizing it is also very important in that it's okay if sometimes you make a mistake there. JOËL: Stephanie is giving you permission to go and delete that code today. Ship it to production, and if something breaks, it's okay. STEPHANIE: [laughs] JOËL: You can revert it. Hopefully, your company is set up where reverting commits from production is a cheap and easy thing to do, and life goes on. So I'm curious, Stephanie, have you ever gone into GitHub and checked your stats on a project to see if you're more red than green or what that ratio is for you on a given project? STEPHANIE: I have. Actually, someone else did on my behalf because I was posting a lot in that Dead Code Society Slack channel. And they then shared a screenshot of my overall contributions to a repo, and it was more red than green. I felt pretty good about myself. [laughs] JOËL: All right. Net negative but in a positive kind of way. STEPHANIE: In a positive way. [laughter] JOËL: On that note, shall we wrap up? STEPHANIE: Let's wrap up. [laughs] Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeee!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.
Stephanie is joined today by a very special guest, Andrea Goulet. Andrea founded Empathy In Tech as part of writing her book Empathy-Driven Software Development (https://empathyintech.com/). She's also the founder of the community Legacy Code Rocks (https://www.legacycode.rocks/) and the Chief Vision Officer of two companies: Corgibytes (https://corgibytes.com/) and Heartware (https://www.heartware.dev/) (which provides financial support to keep Empathy In Tech running). Stephanie has strong opinions about the concept of "Makers and Menders" that the Corgibytes folks have written/spoken about, especially around those personas and gender stereotypes. Andrea joins Steph to evolve the conversation and add nuance to the discussion about legacy code/maintenance in our community. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medium=website). Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Makers and Menders from Corgibytes (https://corgibytes.com/blog/2015/08/14/makers-vs-menders/) Empathy in Tech (https://empathyintech.com/) Legacy Code Rocks (https://www.legacycode.rocks/) Forget Technical Debt — Here's How to Build Technical Wealth (https://review.firstround.com/forget-technical-debt-heres-how-to-build-technical-wealth) Equal Partners by Kate Mangino (https://bookshop.org/p/books/equal-partners-improving-gender-equality-at-home-kate-mangino/18336353) Sustainable Web Development Episode (https://www.bikeshed.fm/368) Transcript: AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn., And today I'm joined by a very special guest, Andrea Goulet. Hi, Andrea. ANDREA: Hello, thanks for having me. STEPHANIE: So here on The Bike Shed, we like to start by sharing something new in our world. Could you tell us a bit about yourself and anything new going on for you? ANDREA: Yeah, so I have a background in strategic communications, and then kind of made a windy journey over to software. And so, for the past 13 years, I've been focused on modernizing legacy systems. And legacy is kind of a loose term; something you write today can be legacy. But essentially, we kind of help modernize any kind of software, any language, any platform, any framework. And so, over the course of doing that, in the work that I did before I came to software, I had a very technical understanding of empathy and communications and had just done a lot of that. And I just noticed how much that mattered in creating healthy and sustainable codebases. So now I'm kind of taking that experience, and I've got a book contract called "Empathy-Driven Software Development." So I've been working on just diving into a lot of the really deep research. So that's been kind of my focus for the past two years. And it's been really surprising because there were things that were positioned as truths, and then it's like, wait a second, neuroscience is completely upending everything. So it's been a fun learning journey. And I'm excited to share some of the things that I've learned over the years, especially [laughs] in the past two years with this book. So that is the new thing with me. And it's...I was telling you before it just feels like a constant new thing. Anybody who's written a book...it's the hardest thing I've ever done, so... [laughs] STEPHANIE: Yeah, that sounds tough but also kind of exciting because you're learning so many new things that then kind of shape how you view the world, it sounds like. ANDREA: Yeah. Yeah, it really does. And I think I really like diving into the details. And I think what started this was...my business partner, Scott, at the time, really embodied the stereotypical 2010 software developer down to the scruffy beard and dark-rimmed glasses. And what I found incredibly interesting was he had this belief of I'm good with machines, but I'm bad with people. And he just had this really deeply ingrained. On the flip side, I had this belief of, oh, I'm good with people, but I'm bad with machines. I'll never learn how to code. And I found that really interesting. And personally, I had to go through a journey because we went on...it was the first time either of us had ever been on a podcast. So this was about ten years ago. And at the end of the podcast, Scott was the only one on there. And he said, you know, the person asked about his origin story and about our company Corgibytes. And he was like, "Yeah, you know, Andrea is amazing. She's our non-technical founder." And by that time, I had been coding next to him for like three years. And I was like, why the heck would you call me non-technical? And I just felt this...what is it that I have to do to prove it to you? Do I have to actually go get a CS degree? I know I'm self-taught, but does that mean that I'm not good enough? What certificates do I need? Do I need to sit down next to you? Do I need to change my lifestyle? Do I need to look like you? So I was really upset [laughing] and just thinking through, how dare you? How dare you label me as non-technical? And Scott is very quiet and patient, great with people, I think. [laughs] And he listened and said, "I use the words that you use to describe yourself. When we were in a sales meeting right before that phone call, I paid attention to how you introduced yourself, and I pretty much used the same words. So when you call yourself technical, I will too." That shattered my world. It shattered my identity because then it put the responsibility of belonging on me. I couldn't blame other people for my not feeling like I didn't belong. That journey has just been so profound. This is what I see a lot of times with empathy is that we have these kinds of self-identities, but then we're afraid to open up and share. And we make these assumptions of other people, but, at the same time, there's real-world evidence. And so, how do we interpret that? In addition to this, Scott...like, part of the reason I called myself non-technical was because all of the people I saw who were like me or had my background, that's the word that was used to describe someone like me. And when I would go to a conference, you know, I have a feminine presentation. And this was ten years ago. My very first conference was 300 software developers, and there were probably about 295 men. And I was one of five women in the room. And because I looked so different and because I stood out, the first question that anybody would ask me, and this was about 30% to 40% of introductions, was, "Are you technical or non-technical?" And I had to choose between this binary. And I was like; I don't know. Am I technical? Like, is it a CEO that can code? I don't know. But then I have this background. And so I would just default to, "No, I guess I'm non-technical," because that's what felt safe because that's what they assumed. And I just didn't know, and I didn't realize that I was then building in this identity. And so then, as part of trying to create a warm and inclusive organization, we did one of the unconscious bias surveys from Harvard. And what astonished me when I did that myself was that I didn't have a whole lot of bias, like, there was some. But the most profound bias was against women in the workplace, and it stood out a big one. I was like, how is it that I can be someone who's a fierce advocate, but then that's my own bias against people like me? What the heck is going on? So really exploring all of this. And I think Scott and I have had so many different conversations over the years. We actually ended up getting married. And so we have a personal reason to figure a lot of this stuff out too. And when we start to have those conversations about who am I and what's important to me, then all of a sudden, we can start creating better code. We can start working together better as a team. We can start advocating for our needs. Other people know what we need ahead of time. And we're not operating out of defensiveness; we're operating out of collaboration and creativity. So the book and kind of everything is inspired by my background and my lived experience but then also seeing Scott and his struggles, too, because he had been told like, "You're a geek. Stay in the computers. Stay in the code. You're not allowed to talk to customers because you're bad at it," and flat out was told that. So how do we overcome these labels that people have put on us, and then we've made part of our own identity? And which ones are useful, and then which ones are not? Because sometimes labels can create a sense of community and affinity and so how do we know? And it's complicated, but the same thing, software is complicated. We can take skills like empathy and communication. We can look at them schematically and operationalize them when we look at them in kind of detail. So that's what I enjoy doing is looking under the hood and figuring out how does all this stuff work? So... [laughs] STEPHANIE: I did want to respond to a few things that I heard you say when you're talking about going to a conference and feeling very much in the minority. I went to my first RailsConf in 2022, my first RailsConf in person, and I was shocked at the gender imbalance. And I feel like every time I used the women's restroom; I was looking around and trying to make a connection with someone and have a bit of a kinship and be like, oh yes, you are here with me in this space. And then we would have a conversation and walk out together, and that felt very meaningful because the rest of the space, you know, I wasn't finding my people. And so I feel that very hard. I think this is also a good time to transition into the idea of makers and menders, especially because we have been talking about labels. So you all talked about this distinction between the different types of work in software development. So we have greenfield work, and that is writing code from scratch, making all the decisions about how to set up an application, exploring a whole new domain that hasn't been codified yet. And that is one type of work. But there's also mender-type work, which is working in existing applications, legacy code, refactoring, and dealing with the complexity of something that has stood the test of time but may or may not have gotten a lot of investment or care and bringing that codebase back to life if you will. And when I first heard about that distinction, I was like, yes, I'm a mender. This is what I like to do. But the more I thought about it, I started to also feel conflicted because I felt pain doing that work as well. ANDREA: Oh, interesting, yeah. STEPHANIE: Especially in the context of teams that I've been on when that work was not valued. And I was doing maintenance work and fixing bugs and either specifically being assigned to do that work or just doing it because I knew it needed to be done and no one else was doing it. And that had caused me a lot of frustration before because I would look around and be on a team with mostly White men and be like, why aren't they picking up any of this work as well? And so I was thinking about how I both felt very seen by the acknowledgment that this is work, and this is valid work, and it's important work, but also a little bit confused because I'm like, how did I get here? Did I pigeonhole myself into doing this work? Because the more I did it, the better I got at it, the more comfortable and, to whatever degree, enjoyed it. But at the same time, I'm not totally sure I was given the opportunity to do greenfield work earlier in my career. That could have changed where my interests lie. ANDREA: Yeah, it is. And it's funny that you mentioned this because I actually I'm a maker. But yeah, I created this community, and I'm known for this thing. And I had a very similar experience to how do I exist as someone who's different in this kind of community? And I think part of it is, you know, there's a great quote by George Box, who is a statistician, and he says, "All models are wrong; some are useful." And I think that's kind of the whole idea with the maker-mender is that it is a signal to be like, hey, if you like fixing stuff...because there is so much shame, like, that's what we were responding to. And Scott had the opposite problem of what you have experienced, where he was only allowed to work on greenfield work. They were like, "No, you're a good developer. So we want you working on features. We won't let you fix the bugs. We won't let you do the work that you like doing." And so that's why he wanted to create Corgibytes because he's like, "This work needs to be done." I am so personally passionate about this. And when we were having these conversations 13 years ago, I was talking to him about product/market fit and stuff like that. And I was like, "You like fixing software, and there's a lot of software out there to be fixed." I just was very, very confused as to why this kind of existed. And we had been told flat out, "You're never going to find anybody else like Scott. You're never going to be able to build a company around people who find a lot of joy in doing this work." And I think that this comes down to identity and kind of the way that Legacy Code Rocks was built too. A lot of the signaling that we put out there and the messaging and stuff really came from Scott's feeling of, like, I want to find more people like me. So being in the women's bathroom and like, how do I find more menders? Or how do I find people...because we were walking through a Barnes & Noble, and it was like a maker fest, maker everything. And he's like, "I don't have a community. There's nowhere for me to go to create these meaningful connections," exactly like you were saying. "I have maybe two people in my network." And then we were at a conference in 2015. We were at the large agile conference. And it was one of the first ones that I've been to that had a software craft track. And we met like 20 people who were really, like, I just saw Scott light up in a way that I hadn't seen him light up because he could geek out on this level that I hadn't seen him do before. And so when I asked, like, "How do you guys stay in touch afterwards?" And they're like, "Oh no, we don't. We don't know how to build a community." And it's like, well, okay, well, we can get that started. To your response of like, how do you operate when it is presented as a binary? And it's like, am I this, or am I this? This kind of gets down to the idea of identity-wise, is it a binary, or is it a spectrum? I tend to think of it kind of like an introvert-extrovert spectrum where it's like there is no wrong or right, and you can move in different places. And I think being able to explain the nuances of the modeling around how we came up with this messaging can get lost a lot of times. But I'm with you, like, how...and that's kind of something now where it's like, okay, maybe my role was to just start this conversation, but then everybody's having these ideas. But there are people who genuinely feel seen, you know. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's really interesting because what I'm hearing is that when there's this dominant narrative of what a developer should be, and should be good at, and what they should do, it's kind of like what you were saying earlier about how hard it was for you to claim that identity yourself. People who feel differently aren't seen, and that's, I think, the problem. And I'm very, very interested in the gender aspect of it because one thing that I've noticed is that a lot of my female developer friends do do more of that mending work. So when you talk about feeling like there was no community out there, it just wasn't represented at the time, you know, a decade ago for sure. And still, even now, I think we're just starting to elevate those voices and that work. I wanted to share that at thoughtbot; we have different teams for different business verticals. And so we do have a rapid validation prototyping team. We do have a greenfield like MVP, V1 product team. And then we also have a team, Boost, the team that I'm on. That is more team augmentation, working with legacy code and existing systems. And it was not lost on me that Boost has the most women. [laughs] ANDREA: Yeah, because you have the concept of cognitive load and mental load. STEPHANIE: Yes. ANDREA: Women at home end up taking a lot more of this invisible labor that's behind the scenes. Like, you're picking the kids up from school, or you're doing the laundry, or all these things that are just behind the scenes. And this was actually something...so when Scott and I also got married, that's when I first became aware of this, and it was very similar. And it was, okay, how do I...because Scott and I, both in our business and in our personal partnership, we wanted it to be based on equity. And then also, like, how do I show up? And for me, the hardest thing with that was letting go of control where it's like, it has to be a certain way. It's hard for me to comment on the broader enterprise level because what I see at Corgibytes is we have gender parity. That's been pretty balanced over the course of our..., and we're a small boutique company, so it's different. But then, in the larger community of Legacy Code Rocks, it tends to be more male. There are actually fewer women in there. And I think, too, like there's this idea of testers and QA, like, I think that falls in there as well, and that's heavily dominant. And I think sometimes it's like, oh...and I think this kind of comes to the problem of it, like, it's the way that we think about the work in general. And this might be useful just to think about kind of the way that it came about was, you know, makers and menders was we were putting together [laughs] actually this talk for this conference that we went to. And my background in marketing, I was trying to wrap my brain around when is it appropriate for mending? And I had my marketing degree. It's like, oh, the product lifecycle. And Scott's retort was, "It needs to be a circle. We're agile, so it needs to be a circle." And I was like, this doesn't make any sense. Because look, if you have maturity and then you have it...oh my gosh, it'll link back to innovation, and then you can do new stuff. And so yeah, I think when we describe makers and menders, and this is true with any label, the idea in the broader model is that makers and menders aren't necessarily distinct, and your team should 1,000%...everyone should be contributing. And if you only have one person who's doing this work, you're at a detriment. That's not healthy for your codebase like; this should be baked in. And the mender is more of like, this is where I get my joy. It's more of an opt-in. But I think that your observation about the invisible labor and how that gets translated to maintenance work is accurate. A lot of times, like when Scott was describing his thing, it's like, there's the movie "Office Space." I might be dating myself. But there's this guy, Milton, and it's like, "Just go to the basement." He was told maintenance is where good software careers go to die. [laughs] And so over the years, it's like, how do we celebrate this and make it more part of the maker work? And it's similar to how introverts and extroverts...it's like, we all work together, and you need all of it. But there is an extrovert bias. And extroverts are seen more as, oh, they have leadership traits and stuff. But increasingly, we're starting to see, no, actually, that's not the only way that you can be effective. So I think it's hard. And I think it does come down to belonging. And I think that there are also different cultural impacts there. And it comes down to just a lot of different lived experiences. And I so appreciate you sharing your point of view. And I'm curious, what would help you feel more like you belong? Is it the work and the environment that you're in that's kind of contributing to this feeling? Or is it other things in general or? STEPHANIE: Okay, so I did want to address real quick what you were saying about mental load and household labor because I think I really only started thinking about this after I read a book called "Equal Partners" by Kate Mangino, where she talks about how to improve gender equality at home, and I loved that book so much. And I suddenly started to see it everywhere in life and obviously at work too. And that's kind of what really drove my thinking around this conversation, maintenance work being considered less skilled labor or things that get offloaded to someone else. I think that really frustrates me because I just don't believe that's true. And to get back to what you were asking about what would make me feel more seen or valued, I think it's systemic. But I also think that organizations can make change within their cultures around incentives especially. When you are only promoted if you do greenfield work and write thousands of lines of code, [laughs] that's what people will want to do. [laughs] And not even just promotions, but who gets a kudos in Slack? Or when do you get positive encouragement? As a consultant, I've worked on different client teams that had different values, and that was when I really struggled to be in those environments. I have a really strong memory of working on a greenfield project, but there was another male developer who was just cranking out features and doing all of this work and then demoing it to stakeholders. But then there was one feature that he had implemented but had faked the data. So he hadn't finished the backend part of it but just used fake data to demo the user interface to stakeholders. And then he moved on to something else. And I was like, wait; this isn't done. [laughs] But at that point, stakeholders thought it was done. They thought that it was complete. They gave him positive feedback for finishing it. And then I had to come in and be like, "This isn't done. Someone needs to work on this." And that person ended up being me. And that was really frustrating because I was doing that behind-the-scenes work, the under-the-hood work for something that had already been attributed to someone else. And yeah, I think about that a lot and what systems or what the environment was that led to that particular dynamic. MID-ROLL AD: Debugging errors can be a developer's worst nightmare...but it doesn't have to be. Airbrake is an award-winning error monitoring, performance, and deployment tracking tool created by developers for developers that can actually help cut your debugging time in half. So why do developers love Airbrake? It has all of the information that web developers need to monitor their application - including error management, performance insights, and deploy tracking! 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You literally have nothing to lose. Head on over to airbrake.io/try/bikeshed to create your FREE developer account today! STEPHANIE: Do you have any advice for leaders who want to make sure there's more equity for people who like to do mending and legacy code work? ANDREA: Yeah, absolutely. I am so grateful for your questions and your perspective because this is not something that's talked about a lot, and it is so important. I wrote an article for First Round Review. This was in 2016 or 2017. And it was called "Forget Technical Debt — Here's How to Build Technical Wealth," and so if you want to link to it in the show notes. It's a really long article and that goes into some of the specifics around it, but it's meant for CEOs. It really is meant for CEOs. And I do think that you're right; some of it is that we have lionized this culture of making and the work that is more visible. And it's like, oh, okay, great, here's all the visual design stuff. That's fantastic, but then recognizing there's a lot of stuff that's behind the scenes too. So in terms of leaders, I think some of it is you have to think about long-term thinking instead of just the short-term. Don't just chase the new shiny. Also, you need to be really aware of what your return on investment is. Because the developers that are working on maintaining and making sure that your mission-critical systems don't fail those are the ones that have the highest value in your organization because if that system goes down, your company makes money. Greenfield work, yes, it's very...and I'm not downplaying greenfield work for sure. I'm definitely, [laughs] like, I love doing that stuff. I love doing the generating phase. And at the same time, if we only look towards kind of more the future bias...there's a great book that we were featured in called "The Innovation Delusion" that talks about this more in general. But if we only look at the visible work that's coming, then we forget what's important now. And so for leaders, if you're running a software company, know where your mission-critical systems are and recognize the importance of maintaining them. That's the very first step. The second step is to recognize the complexities of a situation, like, to think about things in terms of complex systems instead of complicated systems. And I'll describe the difference. So when I came to software, I had been working in the creative field, like in advertising, and branding, and copywriting, and all that. And we got inputs. We kind of ran it through this process, and then we delivered. And we did a demo and all of that stuff. It was when is the timeline? When is it done? Big air quotes. And we were pretty predictably able to deliver on our delivery day. Sometimes things would go wrong, but we kind of had a sense because we had done the same pattern over and over again. You don't get that in legacy code because the variables are so immense that you cannot predict in the same way. You have to adopt a new strategy for how do you measure effectiveness. And the idea of measuring software productivity in terms of new features or lines of code, like, that's something that goes all the way back to Dykstra [laughs] in the 1970s around, is that the right way? Well, a lot of people who code are like, "No, that's not." This is a debate that goes back to the earliest days of computing. But I think that the companies that are able to build resilient systems have a competitive advantage. If a leader wants to look at their systems, whether that is a social system and the people in their organization or whether or not it's their software if you look at it from a systems thinking, like, there are interactions that I need to pay attention to not just process, that is super key as well. And then the last one is to recognize, like, one of our core values is communication is just as important as code. I would be remiss to neglect empathy and communication in part of this, but that really is so important. Because when we position things in terms of...and I don't know as much about thoughtbot and kind of the overall strategy, but kind of an anti-pattern I have seen just in general in organizational behavior is that when you structure teams functionally and silo them, you're not getting that diversity of thought. So the way that we approach it is, like, put a mender on a maker team because they're going to have a different perspective. And then, you can work together to get things out the door faster and value each other's perspectives and recognize strengths and shadows. So, for me, as a maker, I'm like, I've got a huge optimism bias, and we can go through all this stuff. And for Scott, it's like he struggles to know when he's done. Like, for me, I'm like, cool, we're 80% done. I got it. We're good to go. And for Scott, he'll work on something, and then it's like, I have to stop him. So recognizing that we help each other, that kind of thought diversity and experience diversity goes across so many different vectors, not just makers and menders. But I think, to me, it's about reframing value so that you're not just thinking about what it is right now in this moment. And I think a lot of this comes down to investor strategy too. Because if you've got an investor that you're trying to appease and they're just trying to make short-term monetary gains, it's much harder to think in terms of long term. And I think it's developers understanding business, business understanding the struggles of developers and how they need lots of focus time, and how estimating is really freaking hard, and why if you demand something, it's going to be probably not right. And then coming up with frameworks together where...how can I describe this in a way? So to me, it really is about empathy and communication at the end of the day when we're talking about interactions and how do we operationalize it. STEPHANIE: I like what you said about reframing value because I do believe that it starts from the top. When you value sustainability...my co-host, Joël, had an episode about sustainability as a value in software development. But then that changes, like I mentioned before, the incentive structures and who gets rewarded for what type of work. And I also think that it's not only diverse types of people who like doing different types of work, but there is value in doing both. And I know we talked about it being a spectrum earlier, but I strongly believe that doing the legacy code work and experiencing what it's like to try to change a system that you are like, I have no idea why this decision was made or like, why is the code like this? That will help inform you. If you do do greenfield work, those are really important skills, I think, to bring to that other type of work as well. Because then you're thinking about, okay, how can I make decisions that will help the developers down the line when I'm no longer on this project? ANDREA: Exactly, which is a form of empathy. [laughs] STEPHANIE: Yeah, it is a form of empathy, exactly. And the reverse is also true too. I was thinking about, okay, how can working in greenfield code help inform working with legacy code? And I was like, oh, you have so much energy when the world is completely open to you, and you can make whatever decisions to deliver value. And I've really struggled working in legacy code, feeling like I don't have any options and that I have to repeat a pattern that's already been set or that I'm just kind of stuck with what I've been given. But I think that there is some value in injecting more of that agency into working with legacy code as well. ANDREA: Well, and I think, too, I think you hit it on the head because, like I said, with the mental load at home, it was like, I had to be okay with things failing where it's like, it wasn't exactly the way I would do it, and I had to be okay with that. Like, oh, the dishes aren't put in the dishwasher exactly the same way I would do it. I'm not going behind it. And like, okay, it's not perfect. That's...whoo, it's going to be okay. And I think that's kind of what we experience, too, is this idea of we have to figure out how we work together in a way that is sustainable. And I think that, similar to my experience with the technical, non-technical piece, there is an onus. Now, granted, I want to be very careful here to not...there is trauma, and there is absolutely horrific discrimination and abuse. And that is not what I'm talking about here in terms of power dynamics. I am talking more about self-identity and self-expression. And I think that if you are in a community like makers and menders, yeah, we're less represented. There is a little bit of an onus, the technical, non-technical, like the onus of understanding what non-technical means and where I can push back is really important work for me to do. Because what I was surprised with was everyone there, like, when I started asking...so my response ended up being, "Help me understand, why did you ask that question?" And I took ownership of the narrative. And it was like, oh, well, what I found was that most of the people were like, if you're a recruiter, I don't want to waste your time with a bunch of stuff that you don't want to talk about. And then being able to say, "Oh, okay, I can see that, and you assumed that I was a recruiter because of the way I looked. And I understand the intention here. Next time, if I'm at a software conference, assume that I know how to code and assume that I'm here for a reason." And a great opening question is, "What brought you here?" I'm like, oh, okay, when we ask a close-ended question, we position things as a binary, like, are you technical or non-technical? That creates a lot of cognitive dissonance, and it's hard. But if I open it up and say, "What brought you here?" Then I can create my own narrative. There is an aspect of setting boundaries and pushing back a little bit like you said, agency. And that can be really hard because it gets at the core of who you are, and then you have to really explore it. And what I found, at least, is in the majority, there have been exceptions, but in the majority of the male-dominated groups that I've been in in my career in software, the majority are very welcoming and want me to be there. But I feel inadequate, and it's more impostor syndrome than I think it is people being discriminatory. Learning about the differences between that and where is my responsibility and where's your responsibility in this that's a tough tension to play. STEPHANIE: Absolutely. And I think that's why it's really important that we're having a conversation like this. I think what you're getting at is just the harm of the default assumption that is chronic, [laughs] at least for me sometimes. And you mentioned earlier the history of computing a little bit. And I was really excited about that because I did a little bit of digging and learned about women's history in computing and how after World War II, programming, you know, there were so many women. In fact, I think by 1960, more than one in four programmers were women, and they were working on mission-critical work like for NASA for, you know, during World War II for code-breaking. And I read that at the time, that work was deemed boring and tedious, and that's why men didn't want to do it. They wanted to work on hardware, which was what was the cool, creative, interesting work. And the computing work was just second class. That's changed, but in some ways, I'm thinking about, okay, where are we now? And to what degree are we kind of continuing this legacy? And how can we evolve or move beyond it? ANDREA: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And in some of the research for the book, one of the things I learned is a lot of people know the name, John von Neumann. He created the von Neumann architecture, that is the foundation of all the hardware that most of us use today. And the very first kind of general purpose digital computer, ENIAC, all...I think it was eight of the people who were programmers for that were women. That team was led by John von Neumann's wife, Klára, and you never hear about Klára. You have to go digging for that. And The Smithsonian actually just about 8, 10 years ago did a big anniversary and then realized none of those women were invited to the press conferences. They were not invited. And so there is kind of this...similar to generational wealth, it's the thing that gets passed down. Like, if you're in the rooms in the early days...there was a quote by John Backus, who created FORTRAN and the Backus–Naur principle, where he talked about programming in the 1950s. He has an essay, and he was like, yeah, I mean, an idea was anybody who claims it, and we never cited our sources. And so it was whoever had the biggest ego was the one who got credit. And everyone's like, great; you're a hero. And so I think that's kind of the beginning of it. And so if you weren't invited into the room, because in the 1950s, in addition to gender, there was legislation that prevented...we weren't even allowed to use the same bathrooms. You had White bathrooms and Black bathrooms. So you had very serious barriers for many different people getting into that room, and I think that gets to the idea of intersectionality as well. So the more barriers that you had, the harder it was going to be. And so then you get the stereotypes, and then you get the media who promotes the stereotypes. And so that is what happened to me. So I grew up in the '80s and '90s, and just every movie I watched, every TV show portrayed somebody who was, quote, "good" with computers in a very specific way. I didn't see myself in it. So I was like, oh, I'm not there. But then, when I talk to Scott, he's like, "Oh, I never saw that. I never saw the discrimination. I just saw this stuff." That's part of it is that if you were in that position where discrimination, or difficulties, or stereotypes had been invisible to you, the onus is on you to learn and to listen. If you are in a situation where you feel like you have been in the minority, the onus is on you to find ways to become more empowered. And a lot of times, that is setting boundaries. It's advocating for yourself. It's recognizing your self-worth. And those are all things that are really hard. And saying, hey, if we want to be sustainable, everyone needs to contribute. I'm happy to train everyone, but this is not going to work. And being able to frame it, too, in terms of value, like, why? Why is it a benefit for everyone building that empathy? And you're right, I mean, there are absolutely cultures where...who was it? I think it was Edward Deming. And he said, "A single person is powerless in the face of a bad system." And so if you're in a system that isn't going to work, recognizing that and can you move into a different system? Or can you change it from within? And those are all different questions that you've got to ask based on your own fortitude, your own interests, your own resources, your own situation. There is no easy question. But it's always work. And no matter who you are, it's always work. [laughs] STEPHANIE: Yeah, yeah. I joined as co-host of this podcast just a few months ago. And I had to do a lot of reflecting on what I wanted to get out of it and what my goals were. And that's why I'm really excited to have you on here and to be using this platform to talk about things that are important to me and things that I think more people should know about or think about. So before we wrap up, Andrea, do you have anything else you want to say? ANDREA: I want to reinforce that if you feel joy from mending, it's awesome. And there are communities like legacycode.rocks. We have MenderCon, and it's a celebration of software maintenance. So it can be really great. We have a virtual meetup every Wednesday. And there's a kind of a core group of people who come, and they're like, it's like therapy because there are a lot of people who are in your situation where it's like, I'm the only person on my team who cares about automated tests, and I have no idea like...and just having people who kind of share in that struggle can be really helpful, so finding your community. And then I think software maintenance is really, really critical and really important, and I think we see it. Like, we're seeing in the news every day in terms of these larger systems going down. Just recently, Southwest Airlines and all of these flights got canceled. The maintenance work is so, so valuable. If you feel like a mender and you feel like that fits your identity, just know that there is a lot of worth in the work that you are doing, an immense amount of worth in the work that you are doing, and to continue to advocate for that. If you are a maker, yes, there is absolutely worth in the work you're doing, but learn about menders. Learn how to work together. And if you are a leader of an organization, recognize that all of these different perspectives can work together. And, again, reframe the value. So I am so grateful that you framed the conversation this way. It's so important. I'm very, very grateful to hear from you and your point of view. And I hope that you continue to push the narrative like this because it's really important. STEPHANIE: Aww, thanks. And thank you so much for being on the podcast. ANDREA: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeeeee!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.
Stephanie raves about more software development-related zines by Julia Evans. Joël has been thinking about the mechanics of rolling dice. Stephanie also started on a new client project that Joël has already been working on for many months. They talk about onboarding. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medium=website). Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Julia Evan's Wizard Zines (https://wizardzines.com/) Why's Poignant Guide To Ruby (http://poignant.guide/) Learn You A Haskell For Great Good (http://www.learnyouahaskell.com/) Mazes for Programmers (http://mazesforprogrammers.com/) thoughtbot dotfiles (https://github.com/thoughtbot/dotfiles) rcm (https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm) Transcript: AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So I got a very exciting package in the mail the other day that I wanted to share with you. So I think I've mentioned her on the pod before, but I got a package of software development-related zines by Julia Evans, and I'm going to share a few of the titles that I got. So I picked up, "Oh shit, git!" [laughs] Can I swear on this podcast? I don't know. I guess we're going to find out. Or maybe we can just make the executive decision that it's fine. [laughs] I also got "Hell Yes! CSS!", "The Pocket Guide to Debugging," which I think I mentioned previously. I had seen the PDF version before, but now I have this cute, little, I don't know, six-inch book that I can carry around for all of my debugging needs. Who knows? Maybe I'll be out in the world and just need to pull it out [laughs] and debug something while I'm on the train; who's to say? And then I also picked up "HTTP: Learn Your Browser's Language!" So I'm really excited to have these little illustrated digest-sized resources. I think they'll look really cute on my shelf next to my more intense hardcore technical books like "Design Patterns" and "Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby" or whatever. I'm really excited about the more creative endeavors people have done with creating educational resources about software development. In fact, I think last time when we talked about creativity and creative expression, we totally missed the world of side projects. And I've really just enjoyed when people illustrate things and make stuff a lot more accessible to a wider audience than a traditional textbook or more text-based heavy resources. JOËL: I love when people go for a bit more of the playful or quirky when dealing with technical topics. And this is a great example. I love Julia Evans' work. But I'm also reminded of things like "Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby," "Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!" or even...I forget the title of it. But there's a book by...I think it's Jamis Buck on mazes. And it's told in this sort of quirky style in a narrative. But it's all about maze-solving algorithms but told through the eyes of characters who are wandering through a maze, and it's just delightful. STEPHANIE: Aww, that's so cute. I love that. I also just had the thought that these things would make great gifts for a fledgling developer or a developer in your life who, if you don't want to get them something super specialized or technical or whatever. There are so many, like you said, quirky and fun things out there that I'm sure they'll appreciate. So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: I play D&D regularly with some colleagues at thoughtbot. And recently, I got to thinking about the mechanics of rolling dice. Specifically, what dice can be rolled together? Like, can I roll multiple dice at the same time? And which one do you have to wait for the outcome of a previous roll before it makes sense to roll it? That was really interesting to me because I think that connects to a lot of other things that we do in software, where sometimes some things are independent. You can do them at the same time. And then, other times, you have to wait for the outcome of the first thing before you can even start doing the second thing. So I think, in many ways, it's a great metaphor for the difference between parallel versus series operations. STEPHANIE: I think it's very funny that you found a way to connect D&D to software development. I'm just imagining you rolling your die and then while you're doing that, having some revelation like the math lady meme or whatever, just thinking about, whoa, if this outcome happens, then [laughs] what happens? I have not joined in on our company's D&D campaign, but I do like that y'all post little updates about the story in a public space for the whole company to check out. So sometimes I've been searching for some message in our company's knowledge base, and I have stumbled upon a post about the campaign so far and what happened in last night's session, you know, how all the adventurers fought the big bird, [laughs] and it is very delightful to me. JOËL: It's a really fun way, I think to be creative. I think I enjoy the role-playing side of it a little bit more than just the mechanics of rolling dice, even though the thing I was excited to share today is rolling dice is fun. It is kind of like doing improv, where you're trying to figure out what would your character do and how do they respond to what other people say? It's fun, but it's hard. STEPHANIE: One burning question I have is, does anyone do voices for their characters? JOËL: Absolutely. Aji Slater, who was on a previous episode of this podcast, is part of this campaign, and their character has some really fun voices. STEPHANIE: That's awesome. I'm really interested in joining as a guest or something. But yeah, the improv aspect of it kind of freaks me out. I bet it's a really welcoming group. And if other people are getting into it, then I can get into it too. JOËL: Yeah, this group is very, very low-key. Most people playing, I think, are fairly new to the game. So it's very friendly, very kind of tolerant of, oh, you didn't know this rule existed, that's totally fine. We'll make it work, things like that. STEPHANIE: Nice. So another recent development in my world is that I started a new client project, actually the same client that you've been working on for many months, Joël. JOËL: Yes, the same client but different teams within the client. So we don't get to necessarily interact with each other day to day. But it is interesting that now we get to share knowledge about how this application works with each other. STEPHANIE: Yeah, yeah. And I don't think we've gotten a chance to work together even in the same world like this before. So that's kind of exciting. JOËL: How has the onboarding been for you? STEPHANIE: So, one onboarding development that was surprisingly easy and felt good was setting up a new laptop. So the client company shipped a laptop to me to use for all of their work. And I had to set up just the laptop from scratch, so I could develop on it. And I was able to do that pretty painlessly with the help of the dotfiles that I had previously put together and all of the configurations that I had exported and uploaded to like a cloud drive. And so I was able to have that up and running within a day with all of my favorite keyboard shortcuts, applications, all my little preferences, and that felt really good. So I'm going to pat myself on the back [laughs] for past Stephanie's efforts in making current Stephanie's life easier. JOËL: I'm curious, do you use thoughtbot's dotfiles as the base for your development environment, or do you use something custom? STEPHANIE: I have my own personal dotfiles that I have in a GitHub repo. But I think I did, at one point, go through thoughtbot's dotfiles for inspiration. I found that it has just a lot of extra stuff that I don't really need, but I do like that it's out there. So if any folks want a place to start with having a laptop setup configuration, you should definitely check that out. And we can link that in the show notes. JOËL: I really like the tool rcm, which is also by thoughtbot that allows you to have a modular system of dotfiles that you can pull from a few different sources and combine together. STEPHANIE: Oh, that's neat. I hadn't known about that one. That's cool. JOËL: It's a suite of command-line tools that allows you to pull probably from a git repo. And it might be several, and then trying to pull them all to the right place on your machine to be executable. So, in my case, I have the thoughtbot dotfiles and then also some personal ones. And it just kind of merges them together based on some rules and creates all the dotfiles in my home directory for that. STEPHANIE: Nice. I think the one thing that I do need to keep up on is pushing updates to the dotfiles when I make changes locally because I did have to pull in a few things that I had adjusted or made tweaks to that didn't make it to the source that I was pulling from on this new machine. This is actually my fifth MacBook that I own [laughs] just from remnants of jobs and clients' past. And one day...I keep telling myself that I'll have to return one of the older ones that I'm not using anymore, but as of now, I am an owner of five computers. [laughs] JOËL: Just start mining Bitcoin on the idle ones. STEPHANIE: Oh. [laughs] That's genius. I guess that's definitely a better use than them just sitting in my drawers. JOËL: I guess you're paying for power, and that's kind of the whole point, so... STEPHANIE: That's fair. JOËL: What are some things that you like to do when you onboard onto a new project? STEPHANIE: So, aside from my laptop adventures, when I joined this new project, I had a few things in mind that I wanted to achieve during this onboarding process. One of the things I think I want to get better at is understanding the business when I'm onboarding onto a new client. I think this is an area that previously I hadn't really focused on, but I'm now understanding is actually really important to being set up for success on a team. And so, as consultants, we're dropped into a client project oftentimes when things are already moving. And they kind of clearly have some things that they were hoping we could help with. But I am hoping to also use this time to just take a bit of a step back and ask questions about, like, what is the product? And what are its core features? And who are its users? And also, what's the direction of the business? Can I get some more context on how things are right now? We're so frequently brought in and being like, okay, like, you're going to work on this project but without the context of is the business scaling right now, or what are its struggles? We aren't quite able to make as informed decisions as we could if we had been at the company for longer and had just seen things change and had more of a feel of why we're doing what we're doing. JOËL: I love that you're asking all those questions upfront. I feel like coming in onto a new project, and that can be as a consultant, or it could be just starting a new job, is the perfect time to just be asking all of those questions. And people, I think, appreciate when we ask those questions. Sometimes I think as consultants; we can sometimes be afraid that, oh, if we're asking these sorts of basic questions, people might think less of us. But I think the opposite happens where because we're asking those foundational questions about the business model, about the future of the product, about how the technical architecture works, people really appreciate that we're asking those foundational questions where other people might not. So it actually helps build credibility rather than hurting credibility. STEPHANIE: Yeah, and I think they are really important in making the right technical decision, too, because it can help inform where you spend your time refactoring or evaluating whether this shortcut is worth it to meet this deadline or if it's not because of the bigger picture and where things are headed. If anything, I've learned that being a developer really isn't just about being in the code but having as much information as possible so that there is less ambiguity and you have more clarity to make the right choices when you do have to write the code. Another key aspect that I have become a lot more observational about, I think, is understanding the team that I'm joining, especially what their process is, how they communicate. One thing that's kind of funny about seeing a lot of different companies and how they work as consultants is they might claim to use agile, but in reality, it is a little bit different than that. And you can have that perspective as an outsider. Things like pointing an estimation is kind of all over the place in the industry. So I really like to make sure I fully understand how the team does that and what points means to them. I think another thing that I want to do during my onboarding time this week and as I'm getting to know developers on the client side is learning about the pain points that they're feeling. And, yeah, just getting more of a feel about what's top of mind for them and where is a good space to invest my time and my energy. Lastly, some more basic stuff is communication. Another thing about being a contractor that's challenging is that we don't normally get the full onboarding experience that full-time hires do. And so we may or may not have an onboarding mentor or a buddy and finding out, okay, who is the right person that I should be asking questions to? Or where's the right space for that? When you join new teams, are there any other things that you like to take into consideration? JOËL: I like that you talked about understanding the team's process. One thing that I often like to do pretty early on is make some kind of small code change but then have it go through the full process of coding on my machine to deploy it in production. And so just find some small change in the code that needs to be done, and maybe it's an easy bug fix or something. But just so I can walk through all the steps and find out what the team's process is. What are some sort of weird things that this team does that other people might not that I need to know about? Where does review happen? Is there a staging environment, unexpected ways which my change might get rejected? Things like that. So walking through the entire, I guess you could say software development lifecycle, kind of speedrunning is, I think, a really valuable exercise to do really early on a new project. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a great point. Like I mentioned, I think that looks so different for every team. And I'm now learning about new tools and SaaS products that I have never seen before. And even though I have an understanding of the software development lifecycle in general, just learning those quirks is very valuable so that you can be a contributor as soon as possible. JOËL: I like to contribute on day one, if possible, so kind of in order of...I don't want to say order of priority. But the order of things that I often do on a new project is one, clone the repo, try to run the setup script, or manually step through instructions in the README. Depending on the repo, that might be 10 minutes. That might be all of my first day. Number two, try to run the test suite. STEPHANIE: Yes. JOËL: Number three is figure out what went wrong for me in step one or two, make a fix for it, commit it, and open up a PR for it, and that's my contribution. If I can do those three things on day one, I feel like that is a solid first day. STEPHANIE: That's great. I love that. What can you do to help improve this process and make it just a little bit better for someone else? I think another good first-day task might be automating a part of that process that is currently manual and kind of annoying. MID-ROLL AD: Debugging errors can be a developer's worst nightmare...but it doesn't have to be. Airbrake is an award-winning error monitoring, performance, and deployment tracking tool created by developers for developers that can actually help cut your debugging time in half. So why do developers love Airbrake? 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From testing to production, Airbrake notifiers have your back. Your time is valuable, so why waste it combing through logs, waiting for user reports, or retrofitting other tools to monitor your application? You literally have nothing to lose. Head on over to airbrake.io/try/bikeshed to create your FREE developer account today! STEPHANIE: So once you've cloned the repo and you're poking around the codebase, what are some things that you notice when you're looking at the code? JOËL: Ooh, that's always fun. In a Rails application, there are a few files I almost always open first in a new project just to get a feel for it. Number one is the routes file. What does that look like? Is it huge? Is it small? Are there a lot of non-standard routes in there, not just standard RESTful resources? That's going to tell me a lot about how things are structured. I can probably even get a sense of what controllers are large, what controllers have 20 non-RESTful actions in them just by looking at the routing file. The other place I like to look at is the user model. Generally, that just collects so many methods. And so I can also often get a feel about the app just by looking at that. And then from there, it's pulling on connections and trying to say, okay, well, what seems to be the core model of this app that everything coalesces around? And maybe for an e-commerce app, it's some kind of product, or maybe for an insurance product, it might be some kind of policy object. And so you find that, and then you find all of the core business logic around there. And that can often give you a really good picture of what the app is like. STEPHANIE: Yeah, a few other things I would add to that list of things to check out is the Gemfile. I like to look at that to see what gems are familiar to me. Do they have authentication, common authentication gems that I've used before? Or is there a lot of stuff that's new to me? And it also kind of tells you, are they more likely to reach for a library or try to build something themselves? I liked that you mentioned that you try to run the test suite early on. I think test coverage is a good place to investigate as well if they have any metrics, you know, that also tells you that it is or isn't something they value. And then seeing like, okay, what parts are well-tested and what parts are a little less tested? I'm really glad that you pointed out how much information you can glean about controllers because then, once you're poking around in there, that can tell you a lot about where are the scary parts of the app? I've found that to be really interesting. You know, sometimes you can just open up a file and be like, whoa, [laughs] and have kind of a gut reaction. Other times, you might pick it up from other developers, and you might start hearing about areas of the app that they are a little nervous to touch. JOËL: I definitely connect with that. I feel like many products have a particular file that is kind of scary and that people don't want to touch. And sometimes, people will tell you upfront, sometimes, you just discover it yourself. And I've been on projects where it's like, oh no, we have a ticket that's come up. It's fairly straightforward, except we know whoever picks it up is going to have to touch the scary file, and I'm not it. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. JOËL: I'm curious if you run any kind of automated tooling to try to understand a little bit more about the code. So I'm thinking things like maybe Flog or Flay or some of those tools to get a feel for maybe what are the hotspots in the application, anything like that that you like to look for? STEPHANIE: That's a great point. I think the only times I have invested energy into doing that has been more when I'm doing a code audit for a client, which, in some cases, is a separate service that clients can pay consultants for. But I can see the value of doing it when you're joining a team for the first time. JOËL: In a sense, I almost feel like we do a kind of abbreviated code audit for ourselves as part of onboarding. STEPHANIE: That's fair. I wonder if you can use those tools and scope it in a way to the particular team or areas in the codebase that you know that you'll be working on. JOËL: You mentioned the Gemfile earlier. And one thing that maybe seems super obvious is checking version numbers for things like Rails and Ruby because that will significantly impact how development is going to work. Is this a Rails 3 app, or is this a Rails 7 application? STEPHANIE: Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. I am glad you mentioned that because I think that's probably the very first thing [laughs] that I would do just to set my expectations around what I'm working with. JOËL: I feel like it's one of those things that's often just told to you when somebody helps you onboard. It's like, "Okay, you can clone the repo. It's over here. By the way, this is a Rails 3 app. We're kind of behind the times. Here are some weird things we've had to do to keep it alive. We have this other team. They're in this back room over there, slowly working on a Rails 4 upgrade. It's been in progress for four months, but we think we're pretty close. Can't wait for Rails 4." STEPHANIE: Oh God. [laughs] I think the alternative is a developer being like, "Oh yeah, we just upgraded to Rails 7," and they're all really excited and feeling really good about it, [laughs] as they should be, because I think that Rails upgrades are an important thing to stay on top of. And it is really great when you are working on a project that gets to be up to date there. JOËL: Yeah, Rails upgrades are interesting because I feel like when you're proactive about them, they're not that bad, especially more modern versions. I think Rails has gotten a lot better about making those upgrades smoother today than they were ten years ago. But when you're not up to date about them, when you've just kind of procrastinated on doing the updates, every month or year that you wait to do the update makes it so much harder to do that update when the time comes. Because now more gems have fallen out of date, more things have now been abandoned that you just can't use. A lot of community knowledge is just not around as much anymore. Because Rails 3...I forget when Rails 4 came out, probably about ten years ago. So people who remember how things were done idiomatically ten years ago, some of that knowledge has kind of passed on. It's not as prevalent as knowledge around Rails 6 or Rails 7 is. STEPHANIE: 100%. I think I heard someone at thoughtbot identify themselves as a post-Rails 5 generation developer. And I loved that because it really tells you a lot about just their experience. And it's kind of fun. I can imagine some kind of BuzzFeed quiz or something that's like, what Rails generation are you? But yeah, I've certainly seen pro-con lists about joining different projects, and a con might be the app is still on Rails 3. And then, if the app is on a very new version of Rails, that's usually in the pro column because folks are excited about getting to have all that good, new stuff. What do you look out for in terms of design patterns in a codebase? Is that something that kind of sets off your radar at all? JOËL: One thing that will definitely make me raise an eyebrow is heavy use of metaprogramming. I've been bitten by that a lot on projects. Some things are way too clever by half. So a lot of metaprogramming typically means it's going to be difficult to read and follow the flow of logic in the code. And also, there might be some unexpected bugs. Or I found once a memory leak that happened because of some weird metaprogramming. So that definitely makes me a little bit skeptical of part of the code. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's fair. And it also just makes it hard to understand the domain when you have no idea where things go. And you have to just find out later when you are debugging and are in the middle of desperately trying to figure out how this app works. So I can see how that is a little suspicious. I think one thing that I am reevaluating for myself when I notice design patterns is trying to figure out, do I want to perpetuate them? Do I want to follow them? And in the past, I have been more likely to just follow an existing pattern in the codebase. But one thing that I'm hoping to do moving forward is to simply ask, how do decisions get made around patterns? Who gets to introduce them? Are they documented? What does that process look like? Do you have a conversation with the team about it? Just so that I have more tools in my toolbox, I think if I ever do find something that I feel really strongly about, that should be different than what I'm seeing in the codebase. So kind of expanding my skill set there. JOËL: I think that's a fantastic question to ask, and I've done this on previous projects. And sometimes, the answers are just absolutely illuminating. So you see a weird pattern, and you ask, like, "Oh, where does that come from? Why do we do that?" And some will say," Oh yeah, that was Bob back in, you know, 2017. He read an article and was really a fan of this thing, and he put it everywhere. Nobody else really understood the pattern, but we haven't really been able to change it. And he's no longer with the company, and now we just kind of...it's there." Or sometimes it's like, "Oh, great question because you see, we have this subtle business problem. And we've got to reconcile these two pieces of technology with also this expectation that our customers have. And so we came across this pattern, and we decided to use it." And it's these things where just looking at the code with no context, you're like, that's weird. Why would you want to do that? And then, when you understand the underlying problem, it makes so much sense. It's like, okay, I don't love this pattern, but it's the correct solution here, and I fully support having that here. It's a tricky problem at the intersection of technological problems and business problems, and this was the best way we could solve it. I'm not always super happy, but it is the right choice. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I've heard someone describe that as code archaeology in a way that all codebases have a story to tell about how they got to the current state that they're in. And I have certainly struggled with this but trying to approach joining a new team and working on a new codebase, especially if it's legacy code, from a place of curiosity rather than being combative about it. And just going through the git commits or just simply asking members of the team, like, "Hey, what's going on here?" and getting to hear some of those fun stories. JOËL: Yeah, most code exists for a reason. It's not just people writing things just because, particularly code that, you walk in as an outsider and think, oh, that's bad code or looks weird. It's usually for a reason. People aren't just purposefully writing this to trigger you two years down the road. It's also important...as a new person onboarding onto a project, people care about your perspective. As an outsider, oftentimes, it's really rich to bring in an outside perspective. But it's also not a great look to come in and just immediately be like, "Oh, we need to tear this thing down," or "This is so bad." It's important to build trust with the team. And as with so many things in life, seek to understand before running your mouth. STEPHANIE: Wow, how insightful, Joël. [laughs] Speaking of building trust, can we talk a little bit about different strategies we have for doing that? JOËL: Yeah. As a new person on the team, you really want to build a strong connection with the client and to build that trust because then you can be more effective in doing your job. You can bring more value to the client. What are some ways that you like to get that moving in a positive direction early on a new project? STEPHANIE: I think setting up channels of communication is really important, so, ideally, having a one-on-one with a manager or a team lead because that is a great place to make sure that the work you're doing is aligned with what they think you should be doing. So figuring out what their expectations are, like, what do you expect me to get done in my first week? And then what do you want me to be doing by the first month? That is important because we might think about all the things we would love to improve about this codebase or like influence on the team. But if that is not lined up with their views of what success looks like, then we're not quite delivering on the value that we [laughs] had hoped that we would. Another thing that I'm starting to notice a lot more, and we talked a little bit about this previously when we talked about the value of sustainability in web development, but learning what the team's values are and also what the organization's values are because that will really inform the behavior of folks on the team and the decisions that they make. So some values that come to mind are transparency, or collaboration, or growth, or speed. Like, if you find out those underlying foundational pillars, that can really help you orient yourself in your work and being like, okay, I know that this organization really focuses on these kinds of things, so I would like to try to make decisions that uphold or are in line with the things that are important to them. JOËL: I want to really second your comment about good communication. That is one of the most powerful things you can do to build credibility to build trust with another human being, and that can happen in a lot of ways. Like you're saying, some of it is setting up actual communication channels with a manager. Some of that can be the things we mentioned earlier, like asking questions about the architecture, trying to learn all about the product and the business. That can also be being active in that particular team's Slack channel. Sometimes new people come on to a team, and they're a little bit more timid, and they're just kind of not present. And so kind of coming in and...like, you don't want to take over the channel but being active in the channel, asking your questions in that channel, even just talking about your onboarding experience being like, "Hey, I'm running through...I got stuck on this thing. Here's the thing I did to get unstuck." People love seeing that. And it helps them to feel like you're actively participating from day one. STEPHANIE: Yes, that is a great transition to what I wanted to make sure to say at the end of this is that your onboarding experience matters. I know that when you're joining a new team, you might feel a lot of pressure to start contributing and make sure that you are providing value. But your onboarding experience should be inclusive, and you should advocate for your needs. Like, if you don't have access to credentials or there are just various blockers to your onboarding, that's a big deal, and it should not be a gatekeep-y process. Everyone wants you to be able to do your job, and so if you're running into those issues, it's definitely important to raise those concerns for yourself and also for anyone else who comes along the way. Also, everything is new, and will probably feel uncomfortable. If you're anything like me, I feel a lot of pressure to prove myself when I join a new team and start contributing left and right. But it's just important to remember that when all this stuff is new, feeling uncertain or feeling confused and just being in that beginner's mindset again can be uncomfortable, but that is totally normal. JOËL: I feel like something I sometimes do that ties all of these ideas together is when I'm encountering some new code or a new problem, to help myself understand it, I will diagram it. But oftentimes, it can be nice to share that diagram in the team's Slack channel and to say, "Hey, I'm new to the project, and I was exploring this area, and I kind of diagrammed it." Just talk a little bit about the thing that you're doing and maybe what you learned about it. People love that. Visuals are a really powerful tool. And you might be surprised that there might be some team members that have been on the project for a while who never really understood that part of the code. And so they will latch on to what you've shared and be like, "Oh, thank you, because now I finally have a feel for that part." Or maybe you didn't get it quite right, and somebody will follow up and say, "Hey, I love your diagram, but you have a misconception here. There's actually a different piece that connects here." And then you can have a conversation, and you just revealed a blind spot. And so I've found that that can be a really positive way to get started. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. Joël Quenneville, professional diagrammer. But even if you don't draw a diagram, putting your assumptions out into the world and how you understand things I think is really valuable because, yeah, it's like you are showing your learning path and also being open to receiving feedback if it's not quite right and, hopefully, spreading knowledge all around. So I love that. JOËL: This reminds me a little bit of the episode we had with Steve Polito about learning in public. And he was focused more on learning about Rails, and open source, and things like that. But there's a sense in which you can sort of learn the product or learn the codebase. And public means your team channel. So you can say, "Hey, I'm digging into this model, and here's how I understand the way things work. It's a bulleted list of three things." You might get some good comments on that. You might get other people who appreciate it. So kind of learning the internals of a product within the public confines of a team, I think, is a really good framework as well. STEPHANIE: Absolutely. JOËL: On that note, Shall we wrap up? STEPHANIE: Let's wrap up. Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeee!!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.
Joël has been fighting autoloading in a Rails app recently, and it's been really unpleasant. Stephanie has been experimenting with how she interacts with Slack. What are "the fundamentals"? People often argue for the value of Computer Science classes for the jobbing programmer because we need "the fundamentals." But what are they? And does CS really provide that for us? This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medium=website). Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. RailsConf talk on autoloading (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57AsQrxjLEs) Joël's RubyConf Mini talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHMOsTK1jSE) Stephanie's RubyConf Mini talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-ukCrsrTNw) Fun, Friendly Computer Science by Mercedes Bernard (https://mercedesbernard.com/speaking/fun-friendly-cs) Achieving Fast Method Metaprogramming: Lessons from MemoWise by Jemma Issroff and Jacob Evelyn (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2Pa6W_O8oo) Episode on specialized vocabulary (https://www.bikeshed.fm/356) Episode on what to learn (https://www.bikeshed.fm/362) Transcript: AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: I have been fighting autoloading in a Rails app recently, and it's been really unpleasant. This is an older Rails 4 application, so we don't have Zeitwerk, any of the fancy modern things. But the problem I'm encountering is that people write code that references a constant somewhere. And if that constant is not named in the conventional way so that it would load from the proper file, it will raise a NameError at runtime when you try to execute the code. And then you want to reference that constant with a big asterisk there because if anybody else has happened to have loaded that constant correctly either by a manual require or some other method, then that constant will already be in scope, and so you don't get a NameError. So it causes a situation where you have a lot of non-deterministic failures in the code that are not easy to always reproduce either locally or even in the test suite. STEPHANIE: That sounds really frustrating because you must be getting errors left and right that you weren't expecting and then have to deal with. I'm curious, though, because you use the word non-deterministic. But in some ways, I'm thinking that you could perhaps grep or search the codebase for places where we're requiring constants like that and perhaps even audit that. Has that been something you've thought about, or do you think that's possible at all? JOËL: I don't think just grepping is going to be good enough because it's anytime you use a constant, and that's a class name, a module name. Things like that are probably the most common cases. If you're just referencing a constant like an array or a string, it's probably defined in the same file, so you're probably good. But if you're trying to include a module, or inherit from another class, or you want to instantiate another class somewhere, then you can run into issues if the class name or the namespacing for it doesn't line up with the file name so that when Rails tries to autoload it, it doesn't find it where it expects. STEPHANIE: Got it. Okay, that makes more sense to me now. JOËL: When I interviewed at thoughtbot, one of the questions that I was asked, and I don't know if that's still in our interview anymore, was, "Tell us about one of your favorite features in Ruby." And then, "If you could remove one or change one thing about the language, what would you change?" And I think the goal of that was to see if people had enough expertise in the language to both have something they really liked about it but also know the warts; what are the places that are hard to work with? And I definitely know that I said enumerable is my favorite part of Ruby because enumerable is amazing. I feel like, at the time, I didn't have a great answer for what I would change, but I don't remember what I said. I think today, if I had to answer that question, I might say the global namespace for all constants where just because you load another file, it might change what constants are available in a way that can really lead to some surprising behavior sometimes. STEPHANIE: It's really funny that you mentioned enumerable because I think, at this point, you've been at thoughtbot for almost a decade, and you recently gave a talk about the enumerable module. [laughs] And so it sounds like that's something that's still one of your favorite and beloved features of Ruby. So that's really fun. I also agree that autoloading is very opaque to me, especially, like you mentioned earlier; things can be totally different depending on what Rails version you're running. And it sounds like, ideally, when it works, it works. And hopefully, someone has done the legwork of making it effective for you. But when something goes wrong, then something that you had kind of taken for granted prior becomes really hairy. JOËL: I think for those who are interested in digging into really deep how autoloading works in Rails and how it's sort of changed over time, there was a keynote at RailsConf last year that dug into that. That is an excellent talk to listen to. STEPHANIE: Yes, that keynote from RailsConf 2022 about how Zeitwerk was developed by Xavier Noria, Xavier with an X. I was there too. That was a really awesome keynote. And I found it really interesting because, again, it was about this whole aspect that I just took for granted and had never really thought about. And I'm glad that someone else [laughs] figured it out for me. So that was a great reference. Speaking of conference talks, in prior episodes, we had mentioned the talks that you and I gave at RubConf Mini back in November, and the videos for those talks are out. So if you want to check out Joël's talk about enumerable or my talks about pair programming and non-violent communication, we'll link the videos of those talks in the show notes. JOËL: Excellent. So, what's new in your world, Stephanie? STEPHANIE: I've been experimenting with how I interact with Slack. So I used to be very distracted by Slack as someone who needs to mark everything as read in order for the little red badge to go away or for the bold channel name to become unbold. I was constantly clicking around in Slack whenever I had it open for the sake of completing that task of reading messages, even if I wasn't necessarily in a space to fully read or even had time to be spending distracted on Slack. But naturally, I would like, oh, click on this channel because it's bold, so I've unread messages. And then I'd get sucked in and be like, oh, I totally lost like five minutes of my time [laughs] and have forgotten what I was doing prior. So I started experimenting with using Slack as an inbox instead, so more of a pull than push in terms of receiving notifications. And I think it's been working well for me. I've also been leaning on Slack's native keyboard shortcuts instead of using a mouse to interact with the Slack client because that helps me avoid that distracted clicking or going into this channel just to see what's up, and that has also been just okay. I think their keyboard navigation is not my favorite. There are no customization options. So at one point, the shortcut to close the thread window pane was conflicting with my 1Password keyboard shortcuts, so I had to change my 1Password situation. And whenever you have to learn keyboard shortcuts for something different and in ways that might clash with your regular muscle memory for other applications, it's kind of annoying. But that's my journey with using Slack mostly on the keyboard so far. JOËL: What kind of impact have you seen on your focus since you've been using this workflow? STEPHANIE: I think it's been helpful for me to tune out things that I just can't prioritize my time and energy to at the moment. So I'm also pretty decisive when it comes to muting and leaving channels. I'm not in a ton of fun, casual channels because, again, I find them a little bit distracting. If I do want to go see cute dog content, I will go into the pets channel. But it's easier for me to have that be an intentional decision that I'm making as opposed to, oh, look, there are more messages in the dog channel. [laughs] Let me go check them out now. I think it has helped me focus my time and energy on the things that are most important to me. And the trade-off there is that I missed out on some content, but I think that I've become okay with that. And the channels that I am more subscribed to, like our dev channel that we've mentioned on the podcast before any project or team-related communications those, are top of mind for me. And when I do need a little bit of a break and do need some fun banter, I will hop into other channels for that. JOËL: So you brought up a little bit of this idea of FOMO around Slack channels. I think there's an area where our industry at large has a lot of FOMO, and this is around the computer science degree. A lot of people that are in the industry do not have one. There are a lot of different paths that can come into becoming a developer. Some people are entirely self-taught. Some people have gone through a bootcamp. Some people have kind of transferred from other similar or not at all similar industries. So there are a lot of different journeys that people have. But for many people, if you don't have that, there is some FOMO around, “Did I miss out on something?” And there's a word that people always kind of toss around when talking about computer science and specifically the things you might be missing out on if you don't have it, and that is the fundamentals. You might be missing out on the fundamentals or, oh, well, what if I don't know the fundamentals, then I'm faced with a problem? And I won't know what to do, or it might make me learn more slowly. Is that something that you've heard thrown around? STEPHANIE: I agree that the word fundamentals is extremely vague. In fact, I'm just going to say it: I have no idea what most people mean when they say the fundamentals, or at least I think they could mean a lot of different things. And so when that term is used, maybe I should just be asking for clarification [laughs] because I think that we could be talking about a lot of different things. Before we get into what fundamentals of programming or computer science or whatever means to each of us, Joël, do you want to share a little bit about where you're coming from in terms of any education prior to becoming a developer? JOËL: Sure. So I do have a CS degree. I actually learned to code before college. I read some books, did some tutorials on the internet, played around with some code on my own, had a lot of side projects, and even at some point was, freelancing a few small projects as well. But I always struggled trying to build projects larger than a certain size. I felt like they would sort of implode under the weight of their own complexity. I definitely felt like there's got to be some underlying fundamentals that I'm missing, some theory of writing code that would explain how to structure things in a way that scales. And this is not scaling to millions of users; this is scaling beyond 100, 200 lines of code, maintainability. And so, I had really high hopes for a computer science degree. And honestly, I think I was a little bit disappointed. I learned a lot of other interesting theoretical things, but not a lot that was actually answering that underlying problem. And I didn't really get the answers I was looking for until I started working more in the industry, doing various internships and then later on full-time jobs as well. And just over the years, that has sort of built up a lot of answers to those questions that I had. But I didn't necessarily find them in my computer science degree, so I have mixed feelings. STEPHANIE: I had no idea that you were doing that level of coding prior to studying in college. That's really cool. Now that I'm thinking about it, I think that's the case for a lot of people. They might get a taste of coding when they're young. It was true for me. I was a young girl on the internet in the early days writing HTML and CSS on neopets.com. And that is also how I got my first taste, and kind of wanted to explore further. So, in college, I studied journalism actually. That was where my interests were at the time. But I did take some computer science courses on the side and ended up completing it as a minor. But I'm with you that the education I got didn't quite match up with what I was expecting. In fact, I kind of struggled, I think, because there weren't a lot of more relatable applications to what I was learning, and so I was very bored and disengaged, I think. And so when I came out of college, I didn't think I wanted to do software development, or programming, or anything like that because I didn't love taking those classes. And, I don't know, I'm going to get into my whole career history today. But I basically fell into the role of development. It was kind of like, oh, you have these coding skills; we need these coding skills. I was like, okay, I guess this is my job now. [laughs] And I think you and I are actually kind of similar in the sense that once you started doing the work, you started to see a lot of the things that you had learned previously that you could then apply. Does that sound right? JOËL: Yes. And I think maybe more so over the years, there are some things where it's like, oh, with a five-year mark, it's like, oh, finally now I feel like I've got enough practical experience where I can start to appreciate some of these underlying things, or I'm getting into things beyond just the basics of writing a simple Rails app where I start to need some of those other concepts. And some of those it's five years, some of those are ten years. And so it's sometimes nice to have something to go back to. Although after ten years, there's only so much I remember, so sometimes it's just having a keyword that I can Google and dig into further. MID-ROLL AD: Debugging errors can be a developer's worst nightmare...but it doesn't have to be. 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STEPHANIE: Yeah, I want to caveat this by saying that I think you can learn these different skills in many different ways; that could be formal education, that could be a bootcamp, that could be self-taught. But these three categories are what I think are useful education for a web developer. So firstly, understanding how computer systems work at the abstraction you're using and maybe even one level lower. So this is likely the programming language or framework and the tools that you're using, and I think a lot of bootcamps teach this. They want to teach you the skills you need to get a job and do that job. The second category, I would say, is more theoretical. So the theories of computer science and math that you and I alluded to earlier as not having been super practical at the time that we learned them. I guess that's probably why they're called theories. [laughs] But I'm thinking like algorithms, data structures, and other concepts like O notation or whatever. And then thirdly, this one, I think, doesn't get talked about enough. But there's this whole world of practical skills that we do in the industry that I don't quite think are taught in either environment, so that looks like reading code and reviewing code, especially as it relates to working in an existing application as well as writing tests and documentation, and, in general, working with other people. I think a lot of programming education focuses on the act of writing code when I think there's a lot to learn from reading code and analyzing it. And that's something that I have been thinking a lot about the more I spend doing it in my job. JOËL: I like the way you've sort of broken these down into more relatable categories rather than just this generic idea of the fundamentals. I think when people think of the fundamentals, they're probably thinking mostly of your category two, the more theoretical underpinnings. Some of those are actually quite relevant, I think, to the day-to-day work that we do. And then some of them are very kind of abstract and maybe even to the point of mostly being relevant if you're doing research but not that interesting if you're writing code on a day to day. Does that sound about right to you? STEPHANIE: That's fair. I revisited a series of blog posts and conference talks that my friend Mercedes Bernard gave called "Fun, Friendly Computer Science," that was aimed towards people who didn't have a formal CS background to give them a vocabulary or some exposure to computer science concepts that would be helpful in day to day programming work. And one thing that stood out to me was the idea of set theory and how working with relational databases is pretty much working with set theory, even if you don't use that vocabulary or reference those underlying concepts. I think another aspect of these theoretical fundamentals that companies might interview people on, like algorithms or data structures, there's also a lot of talk about how those aren't part of your day-to-day jobs. And yes, knowing about them is useful, but the benefits of working in an existing programming language is that those have all been figured out for you. And you are just using those data structures and have to worry a bit less about how they are working under the hood. That's not to say you should know nothing about them, but I think I had mentioned earlier maybe it's helpful to understand things at a lower level than what you're working with. And that can come up when you run into problems that those data structures aren't quite able to help you solve, and you need something different, or you need to be a little more creative. But I would say that almost all of the time, you have the luxury of not having to think about that. JOËL: It's interesting you mentioned set theory because I was thinking of a set theory metaphor here, which is we have a set of things, which is what a traditional computer science degree will teach you. We have a set of things that are the quote, unquote, "fundamentals." And there's definitely an intersection between those two sets, but they don't totally overlap over each other. And so there are some things in a computer science degree that are absolutely going to be fundamentals that you need to use and that you're going to use in your day-to-day job. You don't have to learn them through CS. You can learn them from all sorts of other sources. And then there are also some things in CS that are maybe not part of the fundamentals. All knowledge has value. And so these things can be mental models, or they can connect to other things. But they're not necessarily fundamental to you being able to do a good job as a working developer out in the world. And again, this will vary a lot depending on the type of development that you're doing. I'm mostly thinking of web development because that's what you and I do, both front end and back end. I want to come back to something that you mentioned earlier because I feel like when everybody thinks of the fundamentals of computer science, the first thing that comes to mind are data structures and algorithms. Those are the things that you're working on when you're doing leet code. They are the kind of things you get asked on interviews. It's the kind of thing that's kind of fun to show off to other people. And it sounds like you're saying that data structures and algorithms are actually kind of overrated; that's a hot take. STEPHANIE: I think it's overrated if you are working in web development. Like we were talking about earlier, at that level of abstraction, you're using the tools of the language to build software that works for your users. Like, I am really not thinking all that much about how to implement a linked list or something like that. [laughs] I have my trusty hash in Ruby. I can use an array if I need to and just put my data in there, and that is perfectly fine and acceptable. And I have not really needed to do anything too fancy beyond that. In fact, I think you and I have talked a lot on this podcast about paradigms and design patterns. And those are the things that I find really interesting and want to learn more about at this point in my career and because they're more relevant to my day-to-day work. And I think we should be interviewed on the work that we will be doing. JOËL: I think that lines up a lot with my experience as well. I have had to implement some trees, some linked lists, and things occasionally throughout time. I think especially working in Elm, sometimes is a little bit more lower-level data structures to work with or to construct. And sometimes you might need that to know some basics around things like trees if you're operating over the DOM, which is a tree, things like that. But, again, a lot of those things are already pre-built for you. So having the 10-minute version might be good enough to get what you need to do. I think one thing that's probably the most useful thing that I would pull out of an algorithms class is the concept of a binary search, not just literally how do I implement a binary search on an array or a linked list but the idea of it and then taking that and applying it to a very broad set of problems. And a classic one is when you're debugging, and there are all sorts of ways that your program might fail. And if you are looking at it just process of elimination, just one little thing at a time, it's going to take you forever to check every possible cause. But if you can find a way to eliminate half of the possibilities, and that might be by putting a conditional high in your decision tree, or there are a lot of different ways you can do that, all of a sudden, it makes it much easier to narrow down your search and to find a bug. And so that is a technique that I think is just hugely valuable that you learn in an algorithms class, but that can be generalized to all sorts of problems. I'm curious, in writing in Ruby, or JavaScript, or any of the web languages that we tend to write in, have you ever had to calculate the big O of a method or function you've written? STEPHANIE: Only in the context of performance and Rails performance. The only times I think I've ever really pulled it out is when I am seeing a database query that is O of n or worse, and then I rewrite the function to avoid that inefficiency. Otherwise, I think most functions are perfectly fine, and there's no need to really optimize for that the first time around. Though, I am going to plug another conference talk that I watched recently from Jemma Issroff and Jacob Evelyn about their developing of a gem called MemoWise which involves memoization and caching. But they did a really cool job of deep diving into the source code of their gem to make things as efficient as possible. And that did involve investigating different O notations and stuff like that. 111 JOËL: Yeah, I found that in practice, most performance bottlenecks on the web tend to be I/O bound rather than CPU bound. I just realized I threw out some fancy technical terms that you probably would learn in a CS degree, and that might feel confusing for those who don't have that background. So that means that your problem is slow. It's waiting on, usually, some sort of network or file system, or database, or something like that rather than waiting for processing speed. As an aside, we've talked about the value of having specialized vocabulary and names to add to problems. So that is a value that you get out of a more formal education path is that you do learn some of those technical terms. And that can sometimes help you to build a mental model of the solutions you can apply to a problem. STEPHANIE: I might have mentioned it in that episode, but I do think I learned best, having had to wrestle with something in my personal life and experience and then going out and seeking more information about it and learning about it. And at that point, it's much more interesting to me because I can relate it to something that is in front of me as opposed to reading a textbook and trying to imagine ways that this information would be useful. A lot of these concepts, it's totally okay to go explore them once you need them. You're right that it is tough if you have no idea where to even begin or what to search for, or what to look for. But I don't know; I think maybe I'm just being efficient with my time this way. [laughs] JOËL: I'd like to throw a metaphor at you that you kind of introduced earlier when you were talking about Slack and how you're trying to change from a push to a pull mode, and I think this can apply to learning as well. Any sort of push approach to learning, you're kind of pre-learning some things because you think they're going to be useful or they might power some more learning. And it's going to be good to have that sort of already there in the situation where you need it. Then that might be going to do a four-year degree, or maybe that's just saying, this year, I want to learn a little bit of this theoretical idea to build some better understanding of the quote, unquote, "fundamentals." And that could just be sort of general continuing education that you do. But sometimes, like you said, it's just in time. You say until I encounter a problem, it's like, okay, this problem is slow. I don't know a whole lot about performance. Let me go read up about performance. And then you get to be like, oh, the first question you ask is, is your problem I/O bound or CPU bound? What does that mean? Okay, now there are different strategies for how you deal with things and different analysis tools. And then you go and learn that at that moment rather than having learned it the summer before because you just were trying to fill out a sort of broader foundation for your knowledge. STEPHANIE: Wow. Excellent callback. Again, only you can find multiple ways to reference something [laughs] I said earlier. I also really enjoy listening to someone who's an expert at something or particularly knowledgeable talk about something that they're excited about. And so I was thinking that I don't have as robust of a computer science education as some of my peers or coworkers, but I know that I have people to go to with my problems. Like you, for example, you might pull out, oh, this reminds me of graph theory. [laughs] I know we've talked about dependency graphs a lot on this podcast. And, in some ways, I am absorbing that education through you. And maybe in the future, I will encounter something that reminds me of a conversation we had, and I have a starting place. So I think having people with diverse backgrounds in this field can be really valuable as well. JOËL: I love that because that means that even in your day-to-day, there's kind of a sort of mix of push and pull that's happening. You might just be having a conversation with somebody, and they're really excited about dependency graphs, and they tell you why they're excited about it. And that's maybe a little bit more of a push because you don't immediately need it, but you're gathering some knowledge. But then you might also be encountering a problem on a client, and then you ask in our dev channel, "Hey, I'm encountering this sort of problem. What should I do?" And somebody says, "Oh, you might want to look into calculating the big O of this function because that looks suspicious. Tell me about that." STEPHANIE: Exactly. And now it's my turn to call back to my Slack anecdote earlier because I do think in this field, there's just an infinite amount of things to learn. And I do have to accept that I'm not going to learn everything. And I have found a way that works for me, you know, that combination of, oh, here's a problem I'm facing. And I really need to find out what is going on in this C code so I can better understand this Ruby code I'm writing or something like that. Or people sharing different insights that they have, and I'm getting that information that way. And you said it earlier that however you receive this information or get this education, there's no one way to do it. There's no one correct way. JOËL: And I think everybody does a mix of both, right? You've mentioned several times that you had attended a conference talk, or read a book, or read an article on a topic related to more theoretical underpinnings. And I'm pretty sure you weren't going to that talk because you had a problem that needed to be solved, and you're like, oh, if only I could get the answer, this is where I'll get it. It's probably a little bit more in preparation, saying, oh, I'm at a conference. The whole point of a conference is to get some information ahead of time. And this particular topic sounds like it would be helpful. Does that sound right? STEPHANIE: Yeah, that is a really great way of putting it. I hadn't thought of it that way. But that also kind of checks off the box of listening to someone else explain things to me [laughs] that they've already done a lot of research on and feel excited enough to share with the world. And that is inherently more interesting to me than reading a textbook. JOËL: Oh yeah. Textbooks are boring. We'd done a whole episode recently about where to focus our learning. So I think if listeners are interested in digging deeper into that and maybe the push versus the pull, there are a lot of great thoughts there as well. STEPHANIE: So before we wrap up, are there any underrated quote, unquote, "fundamental" computer science topics or concepts that you think are particularly valuable to you and your work as a developer? JOËL: I would like to plug discrete math as a topic. And I know we've talked about, oh, there are some theoretical ideas that are maybe very firmly in the theoretical realm and aren't that useful in day-to-day work, and math sounds like it would be in that branch. But discrete math is basically all the practical math that is useful to you as a developer. It's kind of a mishmash of 10 different subjects. So it's a bit of an overview of here's an intro to Boolean algebra. Here's an intro to propositional logic. Here's an intro to predicate logic. Let's talk about set theory. Let's talk about combinatorics. Let's talk about recursive functions from a mathematical perspective. Let's talk about a little bit of graph theory. So it just touches on a bunch of these topics, and they're all generally quite useful. I find things like Boolean algebra I use absolutely every day because writing Boolean expressions is a thing that we do all the time in our code. And you might think there's not that much to doing Boolean expressions. And you might even have picked up on some of the patterns by yourself just by doing the work long enough. But there are some really interesting laws and rules that can be applied and analysis techniques that, even in just the small portion of a course dedicated to that topic, you get a lot of value out of it. So I would recommend either digging into some of these topics a little bit on your own, so digging a little bit into Boolean algebra, digging a little bit into set theory, or digging into discrete math as a whole, sort of looking at all the different little sections together. I think that really gives you a lot of tools to improve your day-to-day work. STEPHANIE: That was a great sell on discrete math. And who knows? Maybe you've influenced some of our listeners to go check that out. On that note, shall we wrap up? JOËL: Let's wrap up. STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thank you so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.
Joël has been pondering another tool for thought from Maggie Appleton: diagramming. What does drawing complex things reveal? Stephanie has updates on how Soup Group went, plus a clarification from last week's episode re: hexagons and tessellation. They also share the top most impactful articles they read in 2022. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medium=website). Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Maggie Appleton tools for thought (https://maggieappleton.com/tools-for-thought) Squint test (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE&themeRefresh=1) Cardinality of types (https://guide.elm-lang.org/appendix/types_as_sets.html) Honeycomb hexagon construction (https://www.nature.com/articles/srep28341) Coachability (https://cate.blog/2021/02/22/coachability/) Strangler Fig Pattern (https://shopify.engineering/refactoring-legacy-code-strangler-fig-pattern) Finding time to refactor (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/finding-the-time-to-refactor) Parse don't validate (https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-validate/) Errors cluster around boundaries (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/debugging-at-the-boundaries) Transcript: STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot that has basically become a two-person book club between me and Joël. [laughter] JOËL: I love that. STEPHANIE: I'm so sorry, I had to. I think we've been sharing so many things we've been reading in the past couple of episodes, and I've been loving it. I think it's a lot of the conversations we have off-air too, and now we're just bringing it on on-air. And I am going to lean into it. [laughs] JOËL: I like it. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: So, in a recent episode, I think it was two episodes ago, you shared an article by Maggie Appleton about tools for thought. And I've kind of been going back to that article a few times in the past few weeks. And I feel like I always see something new. And one tool for thought that Maggie explicitly mentions in the article is diagramming, and that's something that we've used as an industry for a long time to deal with conditional logic is just writing a flow diagram. And I feel like that's such a useful tool sometimes to move away from code and text into visuals and draw your problem rather than write your problem. It's often useful either when I'm trying to figure out how to structure some of my own code or when I'm reviewing a PR for somebody else, and something just feels not quite right, but I'm not quite sure what I want to say. And so drawing the problem all of a sudden might give me some insights, might help me identify why does something feel off about this code that I can't quite put into words? STEPHANIE: What does drawing complex things reveal for you? Is there a time where you were able to see something that you hadn't seen before? JOËL: One thing I think it can make more obvious is the shape of the problem. When we describe a problem in words, sometimes there's a sense of like, okay, there are two main paths through this problem or something. And then when we do our code, we try to make it DRY, and we try all these things. And it's really hard to see the flow of logic. And we might actually have way more paths through our code than are actually needed by the initial problem definition. I think we talked about this in a past episode as well, structuring a multi-step form or a wizard. And oftentimes, that is structured way more complex than it needs to be. And you can really see that difference when you draw out a flow diagram, the difference between forcing everything down a single linear flow with a bunch of little independent conditions versus branching up front three or four or five ways, however many steps you have. And then, from there, it's just executing code. STEPHANIE: I have two thoughts here. Firstly, it's very tragic that this is an audio medium only [laughs] and not also a visual one. Because I think we've joked in the past about when we've, you know, talked about complex problems and branching conditionals and stuff like that, like, oh, like, if only we could show a visual representation to our listeners. [laughs] And secondly, now that makes a lot more sense why there are so many whiteboards just hanging out in offices everywhere. [laughs] JOËL: We should use them more. It's interesting you mentioned the limitations of an audio format that we have. But even just describing the problem in an audio format is different than implementing it in code. So if I were to describe a problem to you that says, oh, we have a multi-step form that has three different steps to it, in that description, you might initially think, oh, that means I want to branch three ways up front, and then each step will need to do some processing. But if you look at the implementation in the code, maybe whoever coded it, and maybe that's yourself, will have done it totally differently with a lot more branching than just three up front because it's a different medium. STEPHANIE: That's a really good point. I also remember reading something about how you can reason about how many branches a piece of code might have if you just look at the structure of the lines of code in your editor if you either step away from it and are just looking at the code not really able to see the text itself but just the shape that it makes. If you have some shorter lines and then a handful of longer lines, you might be able to see like, oh, like these are multiple conditionals happening, which I think is kind of related to what you're saying about taking a piece of code and then diagramming it out to really see the different paths. And I know that that can also be obscured a little bit if you are stylistically using different syntax. Like, if you are using a guard clause to return early, that's a conditional, but it gets a bit hidden from the visual representation than if you had written out the full if statement, for example. JOËL: I think that's a really interesting distinction that you bring up because a lot of languages provide syntactic sugar for common conditional tasks that we do. And sometimes, that syntactic sugar will almost obfuscate the fact that there is a conditional happening at all, which can be great in a lot of cases. But when it comes to analyzing and particularly comparing different implementations, a second conversion that I like to do is converting all of the conditional code to some standardized form, and, for me, that's typically just your basic if...elsif...else expressions. And so any fancy Boolean operators we're doing, any safe navigation that we're doing around nil, maybe some inline conditionals, early returns, things like that, all of the implicit elses that are involved as well, putting them all into some normalized form then allows me to compare two implementations with each other. And sometimes, two approaches that we initially thought were identical, just with different syntax, turned out to have slightly different behavior because maybe one has this sort of implicit branch that the other one doesn't. And by converting to a normalized syntax, all of a sudden, this difference becomes super obvious. To be clear, this is not something I do necessarily in the actual code that I commit, not necessarily writing everything long-form. But definitely, when I'm trying to think about conditional code or analyzing somebody else's code, I will often convert it to long-form, some normalized shape so that I can then see some things about it that were not obvious in the final form. Or to make a comparison with something else, and then you can compare apples to apples and say, okay, both these approaches that we're considering in normalized form, here's what they look like. There's some difference here that we do care about or don't care about. STEPHANIE: That's really interesting. I find it very curious that there is a value in having the long-form approach of writing the code out and being able to identify things. But then the end result that we commit might not look like that and be shortened and be kind of, quote, unquote, "polished," or at least condensed with syntactic sugar. And I'm kind of wondering why that might be the case. JOËL: I think a lot of that will come down to your personal or your company's style guide. Personally, I think I do lean a little bit more towards a slightly more explicit form. But there are plenty of times that I will use syntactic sugar as well, as long as everybody knows what it does. But sometimes, it will come at the cost of other analysis techniques. You had mentioned the squint test earlier, which I believe is a term coined by Sandi Metz. STEPHANIE: I think it might be. That rings a bell. JOËL: And that is a benefit that you get by writing explicit conditionals all the time. But sometimes, it is much nicer to write code that is a little bit more terse. And so you have to do the trade-offs there. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a really good point. JOËL: So that's two of the sort of three formats that I was thinking about for converting conditional code to gain more insight. The other format is honestly a little bit weird. It's almost a stretch. But from my time spent working with the Elm language, I learned how to use its type system, which uses a concept called algebraic data types, or some languages will call these tagged unions, some languages will call these sum types. This concept goes by a lot of different names. But they're used to define types into model data. But there's a really fun property, which is that you can model conditional code using this as well. And so you can convert executable code into these algebraic data types. And now, you can apply a lot of tools and heuristics that you have from the data modeling world to this conditional code. STEPHANIE: Do you have a practical example? JOËL: So a classic thing that data modelers will say is you should make impossible states impossible. So in practice, this means that when you define a type using these algebraic data types, you should not be able to create more distinct values than are actually valid in this particular system. So, for example, if a value is required to always be present for something and there's no way in the system for a value to become not present, then don't allow it to be nullable. We do something similar when we design a database schema when we put a null false on a column because we know that this will never be null. And so, why allow nulls when you know they should never be there? So it's a similar thing with the types. This sort of analysis that you can do looking at...the fancy term is the types cardinality. I'll link to an article that digs into that for people who are curious. But that can show you whether a type can represent, let's say, ten possible values, but the domain you're trying to model only has 5. And so when there's that discrepancy, there are five valid values that can be modeled by your type and an additional extra five that are not valid that just kind of shake out from the way you implemented things. So you can take that technique and apply it to a conditional that you've converted to algebraic data type form. And that can help find things like paths through your conditional code that don't line up with the problem that you're trying to solve. So going back to the example I talked about earlier of a multi-step form with three different steps, that's a problem that should have three paths through your conditional. But depending on your implementation, if it's a bunch of independent if clauses, you might have a bit of a combinatorial explosion. And there might be 25 different paths through that chunk of code. And that means three of them are the ones that your problem wants, and then the extra 22 are things that should quote, unquote, "never happen," but we all know that they eventually will. So that kind of analysis can help maybe give you pointers to the fact that your current structure is not well-suited to the problem that you're trying to solve. STEPHANIE: I think another database schema example that came to mind for me was using an enum to declare acceptable values for a field. And, yeah, I know exactly what you mean when working with code where you might know, because of the way the business works, that this thing is impossible, and yet, you still have to either end up coding defensively for it or just kind of hold that complexity in your head. And that can lead to some gnarly situations, and it makes debugging down the line a lot more difficult too. JOËL: It definitely makes it really hard for somebody else to know the original intention of the code when a conditional has more paths through it than there actually are actual paths in the problem you're trying to solve. Because you have to load all of that in your head, and our programmer brains are trained to think about all the edge cases, and what if this condition fires but this other one doesn't? Could that lead to a bug? Is that just a thing that's like, well, but the inputs will never trigger that, so you can ignore it? And if there are no comments to tell you, and if there are comments, then do you trust them? Because it -- STEPHANIE: Yes. [laughter] I'll just jump in here and say, yeah, I have seen the comments then conflict with the code as well. And so you have these two sources of information that are conflicting with each other, and you have no idea what is true and what's not. JOËL: So I'm a big fan of structuring conditional code such that the number of unique paths through a set of conditions is the same as the sort of, you might say, logical paths through the problem domain that we haven't added extra paths, just sort of accidentally due to the way we implemented things. STEPHANIE: Yeah. And now you have three different ways to visualize that information in your head [laughs] with these mental models. JOËL: Right. So from taking code that is conditional code and then transforming it into one of these other representations, I don't always do all three, but there are tools that I have. And I can gain all sorts of new insights into that code by looking at it through a completely different lens. STEPHANIE: That's super cool. JOËL: So the last episode, you had mentioned that you were going to try a soup club. How did that turn out? STEPHANIE: It turned out great. It was awesome, the inaugural soup group. I had, I think, around eight people total. And I spent...right after work, I went straight to chopping celery [laughs] and onions and just soup prepping. And it was such a good time. I invited a different group of friends than normally come together, and that turned out really well. I think we all kind of had at least one thing in common, which was my goal was just to, you know, have my friends come together and meet new people too. And we had soup, and we had bread. Someone brought a spiced crispy chickpea appetizer that went really well inside of our ribollita vegetable bean soup. And then I had the perfect amount of leftovers. So after making a really big batch of food and spending quite a long time cooking, I wanted to make sure that everyone had their fill. But it was also pretty nice to have two servings left over that I could toss in the freezer just for me and as a reward for my hard work. And then it ended up working out really well because I went on vacation last week. And the night we got back home, we were like, "Oh, it's kind of late. What are we going to do for dinner?" And then I got to pull out the leftover soup from my freezer. And it was the perfect coming home from a big trip, and you have nothing in your fridge kind of deal. So it worked out well. JOËL: I guess that's the advantage of hosting is that you get to keep the leftovers. STEPHANIE: It's true. JOËL: You also have to, you know, make the soup. [laughs] STEPHANIE: Also true. [laughs] But like I said, it wasn't like I had so much soup that I was going to have to eat it every single day for the next week and a half. It was just the amount that I wanted. So I'm excited to keep doing this. I'm hoping to do the next soup group in the next week or two. And then some other folks even offered to host it for next time. So maybe we might experiment with doing a rotating thing. But yeah, it has definitely brought me joy through this winter. JOËL: That's so lovely. What else has been new in your world? STEPHANIE: I have a clarification to make from last week's episode. So last week, we were talking about hexagons and tessellation. And we had mentioned that hexagons and triangles were really strong shapes. And we mentioned that, oh yeah, you can see it in the natural world through honeycomb. And I've since learned that bees don't actually build the hexagon shape themselves. That was something that scientists did think to be true for a little bit, that bees were just geometrically inclined, but it turns out that the accepted theory for how honeycomb gets its shape is that bees build cylindrical cells that later transform into hexagons, which does have a lot of surface area for holding the honey, though the process itself is actually still debated by scientists. So there's some research that has supported the idea that it's formed through physical forces like the changing temperature of the wax that transforms it from a cylinder shape into a hexagon, though, yeah, apparently, the studies are still a bit inconclusive. And the last scientific paper I read about this, just to really get my facts straight [laughs], they were kind of exploring aspects of bee behavior that led to the hexagons eventually forming because that does require that the cylinders are perfectly the same size and are at least built in a hexagonal pattern, even though the cells themselves are not hexagons. JOËL: Fascinating. So it sounds like it's either a social thing where the bees do it based off of some behavior. Or if it's a physical thing, it's some sort of like hexagons are a natural equilibrium point that everything kind of trends to, and so as temperature changes, the beehive will naturally trend towards that. STEPHANIE: Yeah, exactly. 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JOËL: So in the past few episodes, we've talked about books we're reading, articles that we're reading. This is kind of turning into the Stephanie and Joël book club. STEPHANIE: I love it. JOËL: That got me thinking about things that I've read that were impactful in the past year. So I'm curious for both of us what might be, let's say, the top two or three most impactful articles that you read in 2022. Or maybe to put it another way, what are the top two or three articles that you reference the most in conversations with other people? STEPHANIE: So listeners might not know this, but I actually joined thoughtbot early last year in February. So I was coming into this new job, and I was so excited to be joining an organization with so many talented developers. And I was really excited to learn from everyone. So I kind of came in with really big goals around my technical growth. And the end of the year just passed, and I got to do a little bit of reflection. And I was quite proud of myself actually for all the things that I had learned and all the ways that I had grown. And I was reminded of this blog post that I think I had in the back of my mind around "Coachability" by Cate, and she talks about how coaching is different from mentorship. And she provides some really cool mental models for different ways of providing support to your teammates. Let's say mentorship is teaching someone how to swim, and maybe helping someone out with a task might be throwing them a life raft. Coaching is more like seeing someone in the water, but you are up on a bridge, and you are kind of seeing all of their surroundings. And you are identifying ways that they can help themselves. So maybe there's a branch, a tree branch, a few feet away from them. And can they go grab that tree branch? How can they help themselves? So I came to this new job at thoughtbot, and I had these really big goals. But I also knew that I wanted to lean on my new co-workers and just be able to not only learn the things that I was really excited to learn but also trust that they had my best interests in mind as well and for them to be able to point out things that could help my career growth. So the idea of coachability was really interesting to me because I had been coming from a workplace that had a really great feedback culture. But I think this article touches on what to do with feedback in a way that I hadn't seen before. So she also describes being coachable as having two axes, one of them being receptiveness to feedback and the other being actionability in response to feedback. So receptiveness is when you hear feedback; do you listen to it? Do you work through it? How does that feedback fit into your mental model of your goals and your skills? And then actionability is like, okay, what do you do with that? How do you change your behavior? How do you change the way you approach problems? And those two things in mind were really helpful in terms of understanding how I respond to feedback and how to really make the most of it when I receive it. Because there are times when I get feedback, and I don't know what to do with it, you know, maybe it just wasn't specific enough. And so, in that sense, I want to work on my actionability and figuring out, okay, someone said that testing would be a really great opportunity for me to learn. But what can I do to learn how to write better tests? And that might involve figuring that out on my own, like, what strategies work for me. Or that might involve asking them, being like, "What do you recommend?" So yeah, I had this really big year of growth. And I'm excited to keep this mental model in mind when I feel like I might be stuck and I'm not getting the growth that I want and using those axes to kind of determine how to move forward. JOËL: I think the first thing that comes to mind for me is the episode that you and I did a while back about the value of precise language. For example, you talked about the distinction between coaching and mentorship, which I think in sort of colloquial speech, we kind of use interchangeably. But having them both mean different things, and then being able to talk about those or at least analyze yourself through the lens of those two words, I think, is really valuable and may be helping to drive either insights or actions that you can take. And similarly, this idea of having two different axes for receptiveness versus...was it changeability you said was the other one? STEPHANIE: Actionability. JOËL: Actionability, I think, is really helpful when you're feeling stuck because now you can realize, oh, is it because I'm not accepting feedback or not getting good feedback? Or is it that I'm getting feedback, but it's hard to take action on it? So just all of a sudden, having those terms and having that mental model, that framework, I feel like equips me to engage with feedback in a way that is much more powerful than when we kind of used all those terms interchangeably. STEPHANIE: Yeah, exactly. I think that it's very well understood that feedback is important and having a good feedback culture is really healthy. But I think we don't always talk about the next step, which is what do you do with feedback? And with the help of this article, I've kind of come to realize that all feedback is valuable, but not all of it is good. And she makes a really excellent point of saying that the way you respond to feedback also depends on the relationship you have with the person giving it. So, ideally, you have a high trust high respect relationship with that person. And so when they give you feedback, you are like, yeah, I'm receptive to this, and I want to do something about it. But sometimes you get feedback from someone, and you might not have that trust in that relationship or that respect. And it just straight up might not be good feedback for you. And the way you engage with it could be figuring out what part of it is helpful for me and what part of it is not? And if it's not helpful in terms of helping your growth, it might at least be informative. And that might help you learn something about the other person or about the circumstances or environment that you're in. JOËL: Again, I love the distinction you're making between helpful and informative. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think I had to learn that the hard way this year. [laughs] So, yeah, I really hope that folks find this vocabulary or this idea...or consider it when they are thinking about feedback in terms of giving it or receiving it and using it in a way that works for them to grow the way they want to. JOËL: I'm curious, in your interactions, and learning, and growth over the past year, do you feel like you've leaned a little bit more into the mentorship or the coaching side of things? What would you say is the rough percentage breakdown? Are we talking 50-50, 80-20? STEPHANIE: That's such a good question. I think I received both this year. But I think I'm at a point in my career where coaching is more valuable to me. And I'm reminded of a time a few months into joining thoughtbot where I was working and pairing with a principal developer. And he was really turning the workaround on me and asking, like, what do I want to do? What do I see in the code? What areas do I want to explore? And I found it really uncomfortable because I was like, oh, I just want you to tell me what to do because I don't know, or at least at the time, I was really...I found it kind of stressful. But now, looking back on it and with this vocabulary, I'm like, oh, that's what true coaching was because I gained a lot of experience towards my foundational skill set of figuring out how to solve problems or identifying areas of refactoring through that process. And so sometimes coaching can feel really uncomfortable because you are stretching outside of your comfort zone and that your coach is hopefully supporting you but not just giving you the help but teaching you how to help yourself. JOËL: That's a really interesting thing to notice. And I think what I'm hearing is that coaching can feel less comfortable than mentoring because you're being asked to do more of the work yourself. And you're maybe being stretched in some ways that aren't exactly the same as you would get in a more mentoring-focused scenario. Does that sound right? STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think that sounds right because, like I said, I was also receiving mentorship, and I learned about new things. But those didn't always solidify in terms of empowering me next time to be able to do it without the help of someone else. Joël, what was an article that really spoke to you this last year? JOËL: So I really appreciated an article by Adrianna Chang, who's a developer at Shopify, about "Refactoring Legacy Code with the Strangler Fig Pattern." And it talks about this approach to moving refactoring code from one implementation to another. And it's a longer-ranged process, and how to do so incrementally. And a big theme for me this year has been refactoring and incremental change. I've had a lot of conversations with people about how to spot smaller steps. I've written an article on working incrementally. And so I think this was really nice because it gave a very particular technique on how to do so with an example. And so, because these sorts of conversations kept coming up this year, I found myself referencing this article all the time. STEPHANIE: I really loved this article too. And this last year, I also saw a strangler fig tree for the first time in real life in Florida. And I think that was after I had read this article. And it was really cool to make the connection between something I was seeing in nature with a pattern in software development or technique. JOËL: We have this metaphor, and now you get to see the real thing. I was excited because, at RubyConf Mini this year, I actually got to meet Adrianna. So it was really cool. It's like, "Hey, I've been referencing your article all year. It's super cool to meet you in person." STEPHANIE: That's awesome. I love that, just being able to support members of the community. What I really liked about the approach this article advocated for is that it allowed developers to continue working. You don't have to halt everything and dedicate time to refactor and not get any new feature work done. And that's the beauty of the incremental approach that you were talking about earlier, where you can continue development. Sometimes that refactoring might be paused for some reason or another, but then you can pick back up where you left off. And that is really intriguing to me because I think this past year, I was working on a client where refactoring seemed like something we had to dedicate special time for. And it constantly became tough to prioritize and sell to stakeholders. Whereas if you incorporate it into the work and do it in a way that doesn't stop the show [laughs] from going on, it can work really well and work towards sustainability and maintenance, which is another thing that we've talked a lot about on the show. JOËL: Something that's really powerful, I think, with that technique is that it allows you to have all of the intermediate steps get merged into your main branch and get shipped. So you don't have to have this long-running branch with a big change that's constantly going stale, and you're having to keep in sync with the main branch. And, unfortunately, I've often seen even this sort of thing where you create a long-running branch for a big change, a big refactor, and eventually, it just gets abandoned, and you have not locked in any wins. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's the worst of both worlds where you've dedicated time and resources and don't get the benefits of that work. I also liked that the strangler fig pattern kind of forces you to really understand the existing code. I think working with legacy code can be really challenging. And a lot of people don't like to do it because it involves a lot of spelunking and figuring out, okay, what's really going on. But in order to isolate the pieces to, you know, slowly start to stop making calls to the old code, it requires that you take a hard look at your legacy code and really figure it out. And I honestly think that that then informs the new code that you write to better support both the old feature and also any new features to come. JOËL: Definitely. The really nice thing about this pattern is that it also scales up and down. You can do this really small...even as part of a feature branch; maybe it's just part of your development process, even if you don't necessarily ship all of the intermediate steps. But it helps you work more incrementally and in a tighter scope. And then you can scale it up as big as changing out entire sections of a framework or...I think Adrianna's example is like switching out a data source. And so you can do some really large refactors. But then you could do it as well on just a small feature. I really like using this pattern anytime you're doing things like Rails upgrades, and you've got old gems that might not convert over where it's like, oh, the community abandoned this gem between Rails 4 and Rails 5. But now you need sort of a bridge to get over. And so I think that pattern is particularly powerful when doing something like a Rails upgrade. STEPHANIE: Very Cool. JOËL: So what would be a second article that was really impactful for you in the past year? STEPHANIE: So, speaking of refactoring, I really enjoyed a blog post called Finding Time to Refactor by a former thoughtboter, German Velasco. He makes a really great point that we should think of completeness in our work, not just when the code works as expected or meets the product requirements, but also when it is clear and maintainable. And so he really advocates for baking refactoring into just your normal development process. And like I said, that goes back to this idea that it can be incremental. It doesn't have to be separate or something that we do later, which is kind of what I had learned before coming to thoughtbot. So when I was also speaking about just my technical growth, this shift in philosophy, for me, was a really big part of that. And I just started kind of thinking and seeing ways to just do it in my regular process. And I think that has really helped me to feel better about my work and also see a noticeable improvement in the quality of my code. So he mentioned the three times that he makes sure to refactor, and that is one when he is practicing TDD and going through the red-green-refactor cycle. JOËL: It's in the name. STEPHANIE: [laughs] It really is. Two, when code is difficult to understand, so if he's coming in and fixing a bug and he pays the tax of trying to figure out confusing code, that's a really great opportunity to then reduce that caring cost for others by making it clear while you're in there, so leaving things better than you found it. And then three, when the existing design doesn't work. We, I think, have mentioned the adage, "Make the change easy, and then make the easy change." So if he's coming in to add a new feature and it's just not quite working, then that's a really good opportunity to refactor the existing design to support this new information or new concept. JOËL: I like those three scenarios. And I think that second one, in particular, resonated with me, the making things easier to understand. And in the sort of narrower sense of the word refactoring, traditionally, this means changing the structure of the code without changing its behavior. And I once had a situation where I was dealing with a series of early return expressions in a method that were all returning Booleans. And it was really hard because there were some unlesses, some ifs, some weird negation happening. And I just couldn't figure out what this code was doing. STEPHANIE: Did you draw a diagram? [laughs] JOËL: I did not. But it turns out this code was untested. And so I pretty much just tried, like, it took two Booleans as inputs and gave back a Boolean. So I just tried all the combinations, put it in, saw what it gave me out, and then wrote tests for them. And then realized that the test cases were telling me that this code was always returning false unless both inputs were true. And that's when it kind of hits me, it's like, wait a minute, this is Boolean AND. We've reimplemented Boolean AND with this convoluted set of conditional code. And so, at the end there, once I had that test coverage to feel confident, I went in and did a refactor where I changed the implementation. Instead of being...I think it was like three or four inline conditionals, just rewrote it as argument one and argument two, and that was much easier to read. STEPHANIE: That's a great point. Because the next time someone comes in here, and let's say they have to maybe add another condition or whatever, they're not just tacking on to this really confusing thing. You've hopefully made it easier for them to work with that code. And I also really appreciated, you know, I was mentioning how this article affected my thought process and how I approach development, but it's a really great one to share to then foster a culture of just continuous refactoring, I guess, is what I'm going to call it [laughs] and hopefully, avoiding having to do a massive rewrite or a massive effort to refactor. The phrase that comes to mind is many hands make light work. And if we all incorporated this into our process, perhaps we would just be working all around with more delightful code. Joël, do you have one more article that really stood out to you this year? JOËL: One that I think I really connected with this year is "Parse, Don't Validate" by Alexis King. Long-time listeners of the show will have heard me talk about this a little bit with Chris Toomey when he was a guest on the show this past fall. But the gist of the article is that the process of parsing is converting a broader type into a narrower type with the potential for errors. So traditionally, we think of this as turning a string which a string is very broad. All sorts of things are strings, and then you turn it into something else. So maybe you're parsing JSON. So you take a string of characters and try to turn it into a Ruby hash, but not all strings are valid hashes. So there's also the possibility for errors. And so, JSON.parse() could raise an error in Ruby. This idea, though, can be then expanded because, ideally, you don't want to just check that a value is valid for your stricter rules. You don't want to just check that a string is valid JSON and then pass the string along to the next person. You actually want to transform it. And then everybody else down the line can interact with that hash and not have to do a check again is this valid JSON? You've already validated that you've already converted it into a hash. You don't need to check that it's valid JSON again because, by the nature of being a hash, it's impossible for it to be invalid. Now, you might have some extra requirements on that hash. So maybe you require certain keys to be present and things like that. And I think that's where this idea gets even more powerful because then you can kind of layer this on top and have a second parsing step where you say, I'm going to parse this hash into, let's say, a shopping cart object. And so, not all Ruby hashes are valid shopping carts. And so you try to take a broader value and coerce it into a narrower value or transform it into a narrower value and potentially raise an error for those hashes that are not valid shopping carts. And then, whoever down the line gets a shopping cart object, you can just call items on it. You can call price on it. You don't need to check is this key present? Because now you have that certainty. STEPHANIE: This reminds me of when I was working with TypeScript in the summer of last year. And having come from a dynamically-typed language background, it was really challenging but also really interesting to me because we were also parsing JSON. But once we had transformed or parsed that data into this domain object, we had a lot more confidence about what we were working in. And all the functions we wrote down the line or used on the line, we could know for sure that, okay, it has these properties about it. And that really shaped the code we wrote. JOËL: So use the word confident here, which, for me, it's a keyword. And so you can now assume that certain properties are true because it's been checked once. That can be tricky if you don't actually do a transformation. If you're just sort of passing a raw value down, you'll often end up with code that is defensive that keeps rechecking the same conditions over and over. And you see this lot around nil in Ruby where somebody checks for a value for nil, and then inside that conditional, three or four other conditions deep, we recheck the same value for nil again, even though, in theory, it should not be nil at that point. And so by doing transformations like that, by parsing instead of just validating, we can ensure that we don't have to repeat those conditions. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I mean, that refers back to the analyzing conditional code that we spent a bit of time talking about at the beginning of this episode. Because I remember in that application, we render different components based on the status of this domain object. And there was a condition for when the status was something that was not expected. And then someone had left a comment that was like, technically, this should never happen. But I think that he had to add it to appease the compiler. And I think had we been able to better enforce those boundaries, had we been more thoughtful around our domain modeling, we could have figured out how to make sure that we weren't then introducing that ambiguity down the line. JOËL: I think it's interesting that you immediately went to talking about TypeScript here because TypeScript has a type system. And the "f, Don't Validate" article is written in Haskell, which is another typed language. And types are great for showing you exactly like, here's the boundary. On this side of it, it's a string, and on this side here, it's a richly-typed value that has been parsed. In Ruby, we don't have that, everything is duck-typed, but I think the principle still applies. It's a little bit more implicit, but there are zones of high or low assumptions about the data. So when I'm interacting directly with raw input from a third-party endpoint, I'm really only expecting some kind of raw string from the body of the response. It may or may not be valid. There are all sorts of checks I need to do to make sure I can do anything with it. So that is a very low assumption zone. Later on, in the business logic part of the code, I might expect that I can call a method on the object to get the price of a shopping cart or a list of items or something like that. Now I'm in a much higher assumption zone. And being self-aware about where we transition from low assumptions to high assumptions is, I think, a really key takeaway for how we interact with code in Ruby. Because, oftentimes, where that boundary is a little bit fuzzy or where we think it's in one place but it's actually in a different place is where bugs tend to cluster. STEPHANIE: Do you have any thoughts about how to adhere to those rules that we're making so we're not having to assume in a dynamically-typed language? JOËL: One way that I think is often helpful is trying to use richer objects and to not just rely on primitives all the time. So don't pass a business process a hash and be just like, trust me, I checked it; it's got the right keys because the day will come when you pass it a malformed hash and now we're going to have an error in the business process. And now we have a dilemma because do we want to start adding defensive checks in the business process to be like, oh, are all our keys that we expect present, things like that? Do we need to elsewhere in the code make sure we process the hash correctly? It becomes a little bit messy. And so, oftentimes, it might be better to say, don't pass a raw hash around. Create a domain object that has the actual method that you want, and pass that instead. STEPHANIE: Oh, sounds like a great opportunity to use the new data class in Ruby 3.2 that we talked about in an episode prior. JOËL: That's a great suggestion. I would definitely reach for something like that, I think, in a situation where I'm trying to model something a little bit richer than just a hash. STEPHANIE: I also think that there have been more trends around borrowing concepts from functional programming, and especially with the introduction of classes that represent nil or empty states, so instead of just using the default nil, having at least a bit of context around a nil what or an empty what. That then might have methods that either raise an error or just signal that something is wrong with the assumptions that we're making around the flexibility that we get from duck typing. I'm really glad that you proposed this topic idea for today's episode because it really represented a lot of themes that we have been discussing on the show in the past couple of months. And I am excited to maybe do this again in the future to just capture what's been interesting or inspiring for us throughout the year. JOËL: On that note, shall we wrap up? STEPHANIE: Let's wrap up. Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thank you so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.
Joël's been traveling. Stephanie's working on professional development. She's also keeping up a little bit more with Ruby news and community news in general and saw that Ruby 3.2 introduced a new class called data to its core library for the use case of creating simple value objects. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medium=website). Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Maggie Appleton's Tools for Thought (https://maggieappleton.com/tools-for-thought) Episode on note-taking with Amanda Beiner (https://www.bikeshed.fm/357) Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/) Zettelkasten (https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/) Evergreen notes (https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes) New Data class (https://ruby-doc.org/3.2.0/Data.html) Joël's article on value objects (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/value-object-semantics-in-ruby) Episode on specialized vocabulary (https://www.bikeshed.fm/356) Primitive Obsession (https://wiki.c2.com/?PrimitiveObsession) Transcript: AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a little bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: I've been traveling for the past few weeks in Europe. I just recently got back to the U.S. and have just gotten used to drinking American-style drip coffee again after having espresso every day for a few weeks. And it's been an adjustment. STEPHANIE: I bet. I think that it's such a downgrade compared to European espresso. I remember when I was in Italy, I also would really enjoy espresso every day at a local cafe and just be like sitting outside drinking it. And it was very delightful. JOËL: They're very different experiences. I have to say I do enjoy just holding a hot mug and sort of sipping on it for a long time. It's also a lot weaker. You wouldn't want to do a full hot mug of espresso. That would just be way too intense. But yeah, I think both experiences are enjoyable. They're just different. STEPHANIE: Yeah. So, that first day with your measly drip coffee and your jet lag, how are you doing on your first day back at work? JOËL: I did pretty good. I think part of the fun of coming back to the U.S. from Europe is that the jet lag makes me a very productive morning person for a week. Normally, I'm a little bit more of an evening person. So I get to get a bit of an alter ego for a week, and that helps me to transition back into work. STEPHANIE: Nice. JOËL: So you've also been on break and have started work again. How are you feeling productivity-wise, kicking off the New Year? STEPHANIE: I'm actually unbooked this week and the last week too. So I'm not working on client projects, but I am having a lot of time to work on just professional development. And usually, during this downtime, I also like to reassess just how I'm working, and lately, what that has meant for me is changing my note-taking process. And I'm really excited to share this with you because I know that you have talked about this on the show before, I think in a previous episode with a guest, Amanda Beiner. And I listened to that episode, and I was really inspired because I was feeling like I didn't have a note-taking system that worked super well for me. But you all talked about some tools you used and some, I guess, philosophies around note-taking that like I said, I was really inspired by. And so I hopped on board the Obsidian train. And I'm really excited to share with you my experience with it. So I really like it because I previously was taking notes in my editor under the impression that, oh, like, everything is in one place. It'll be like a seamless transition from code to note-taking. And I was already writing in Markdown. But I actually didn't like it that much because I found it kind of distracting to have code things kind of around. And if I was navigating files or something, something work or code-related might come up, and that ended up being a bit distracting for me. But I know that that works really well for some people; a coworker of ours, Aji, I know that he takes his notes in Vim and has a really fancy setup for that. And so I thought maybe that's what I wanted, but it turns out that what I wanted was actually more of a boundary between code and notes. And so, I was assessing different note-taking and knowledge management software. And I have been really enjoying Obsidian because it also has quite a bit of community support. So I've installed a few plugins for just quality-of-life features like snippets which I had in my editor, and now I get to have in Obsidian. I also installed things like Natural Language Dates. So for my running to-do list, I can just do a shortcut for today, and it'll autofill today's date, which, I don't know, because for me, [laughs] that is just a little bit less mental work that I have to do to remember the date. And yeah, I've been really liking it. I haven't even fully explored backlinking, and that connectivity aspect, which I know is a core feature, but it's been working well for me so far. JOËL: That's really exciting. I love notes and note-taking and the ways that we can use those to make our lives better as developers and as human beings. Do you have a particular system or way you've approached that? Because I know for me, I probably looked at Obsidian for six months before I kind of had the courage to download it because I didn't want to go into it and not have a way to organize things. I was like; I don't want to just throw random notes in here. I want to have a system. That might just be me. But did you just kind of jump into it and see, like, oh, a system will emerge? Did you have a particular philosophy going in? How are you approaching taking notes there? STEPHANIE: That's definitely a you thing because I've definitely had the opposite experience [laughs] where I'm just like, oh, I've downloaded this thing. I'm going to start typing notes and see what happens. I have never really had a good organizational system, which I think is fine for me. I was really leaning on pen and paper notes for a while, and I still have a certain use case for them. Because I find that when I'm in meetings or one-on-ones and taking notes, I don't actually like to have my hands on the keyboard because of distractions. Like I mentioned earlier, it's really easy for me to, like, oh, accidentally Command-Tab and open Slack and be like, oh, someone posted something new in Slack; let me go read this. And I'm not giving the meeting or the person I'm talking to my full attention, and I really didn't like that. So I still do pen and paper for things where I want to make sure that I'm not getting distracted. And then, I will transfer any gems from those notes to Obsidian if I find that they are worth putting in a place where I do have a little bit more discoverability and eventually maybe kind of adding on to my process of using those backlinks and connecting thoughts like that. So, so far, it's truly just a list of separate little pages of notes, and yeah, we'll see how it goes. I'm curious what your system for organizing is or if you have kind of figured out something that works well for you. JOËL: So my approach focuses very heavily on the backlinks. It's loosely inspired by two similar systems of organization called Zettelkasten and evergreen notes. The idea is that you create notes that are ideas. Typically, the title is like a thesis statement, and you keep them very short, focused on a single thing. And if you have a more complex idea, it probably breaks down into two or three, and then you link them to each other as makes sense. So you create a web of these atomic ideas that are highly interconnected with each other. And then later on, because I use this a lot for either creating content in the future or to help refine my thinking on various software topics, so later on, I can go through and maybe connect three or four things I didn't realize connected together. Or if I'm writing an article or a talk, maybe find three or four of these ideas that I generated at very different moments, but now they're connected. And I can make an article or a talk out of them. So that's sort of the purpose that I use them for and how I've organized things for myself. STEPHANIE: I think that's a really interesting topic because while I was assessing different software for note-taking and, like I said, knowledge management, I discovered this blog post by Maggie Appleton that was super interesting because she is talking about the term tools of thought which a lot of these different software kind of leveraged in their marketing copy as like, oh, this software will be like the key to evolving your thinking and help you expand making connections, like you mentioned, in ways that you weren't able to before. And was very obviously trying to upsell you on this product, and she -- JOËL: It's over the top. STEPHANIE: A little bit, a little bit. So in this article, I liked that she took a critical lens to that idea and rooted her article in history and gave examples of a bunch of different things in human history that also evolved the ways humans were able to express their thoughts and solve problems. And so some of the ones that she listed were like storytelling and oral tradition. Literally, the written language obviously [laughs] empowered humans to be able to communicate and think in ways that we never were before but also drawings, and maps, and spreadsheets. So I thought that was really cool because she was basically saying that tools of thought don't need to be digital, and people claiming that these software, you know, are the new way to think or whatever, it's like, the way we're thinking now, but we also have this long history of using and developing different things that helped us communicate with each other and think about stuff. JOËL: I think that's something that appealed to me when I was looking at some of these note-taking systems. Zettelkasten, in particular, predates digital technology. The original system was built on note cards, and the digital stuff just made it a little bit easier. But I think also when I was reading about these ideas of keeping ideas small and linking them together, I realized that's already kind of how I tend to organize information when I just hold it in my brain or even when I try to do something like a tweet thread on Twitter where I'll try to break it up. It might be a larger, more complex idea, but each tweet, I try to get it to kind of stand on its own to make it easier to retweet and all that. And so it becomes a chain of related ideas that maybe build up to something, but each idea stands on its own. And that's kind of how in these systems notes end up working. And they're in a way that you can kind of remix them with each other. So it's not just a linear chain like you would have on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I remember you all in that episode about note-taking with Amanda talked about the value of having an atomic piece of information in every note that you write. And since then, I've been trying to do that more because, especially when I was doing pen and paper, I would just write very loose, messy thoughts down. And I would just think that maybe I would come back to them one day and try to figure out, like, oh, what did I say here, and can I apply it to something? But it's kind of like doing any kind of refactoring or whatever. It's like, in that moment, you have the most context about what you just wrote down or created. And so I've been a little more intentional about trying to take that thought to its logical end, and then hopefully, it will provide value later. What you were saying about the connectivity I also wanted to kind of touch on a little bit further because I've realized that for me, a lot of the connection-making happens during times where I'm not very actively trying to think, or reflect, or do a lot of deep work, if you will. Because lately, I've been having a lot of revelations in the shower, or while I'm trying to fall asleep, or just other kinds of meditative activity. And I'm just coming to terms with that's just how my brain works. And doing those kinds of activities has value for me because it's like something is clearly going on in my brain. And I definitely want to just honor that's how it works for me. JOËL: I had a great conversation recently with another colleague about the gift of boredom and how that can impact our work and what we think about, and our creativity. That was really great. Sometimes it's important to give ourselves a little bit more blank space in our lives. And counter-intuitively, it can make us more productive, even though we're not scheduling ourselves to be productive. STEPHANIE: Yes, I wholeheartedly agree with that. I think a lot about the feeling of boredom, and for me, that is like the middle of summer break when you're still in school and you just had no obligations whatsoever. And you could just do whatever you wanted and could just laze around and be bored. But letting your mind wander during those times is something I really miss. And sometimes, when I do experience that feeling, I get a little bit anxious. I'm like, oh, I could be doing something else. There's whatever endless list of chores or things that are, quote, unquote, "productive." But yeah, I really like how you mentioned that there is value in that experience, and it can feel really indulgent, but that can be good too. MID-ROLL AD: Debugging errors can be a developer's worst nightmare...but it doesn't have to be. Airbrake is an award-winning error monitoring, performance, and deployment tracking tool created by developers for developers that can actually help cut your debugging time in half. So why do developers love Airbrake? 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From testing to production, Airbrake notifiers have your back. Your time is valuable, so why waste it combing through logs, waiting for user reports, or retrofitting other tools to monitor your application? You literally have nothing to lose. Head on over to airbrake.io/try/bikeshed to create your FREE developer account today! JOËL: So you mentioned recently that you've had a lot of revelations or new ideas that have come upon you or that you've been able to dig into a little bit more. Is there one you'd like to share with the audience? STEPHANIE: Yeah. So during this downtime that I've had not working on client work, I have been able to keep up a little bit more with Ruby news or just community news in general. And in, I think, an edition of Ruby Weekly, I saw that Ruby 3.2 introduced this new class called data to its core library for the use case of creating simple value objects. And I was really excited about this new feature because I remembered that you had written a thoughtbot blog post about value objects back in the summer that I had reviewed. That was an opportunity that I could make a connection between something happening in recent news with some thoughts that I had about this topic a few months ago. But basically, this new class can be used over something like a struct to create objects that are immutable in their values, which is a big improvement if you are trying to follow value objects semantics. JOËL: So, I have not played around with the new data class. How is it different from the existing struct that we have in Ruby? STEPHANIE: So I think I might actually answer that first by saying how they're similar, which is that they are both vehicles for holding pieces of data. So we've, in the past, been able to use a struct to very cheaply and easily create a new class that has attributes. But one pitfall of using a struct when you're trying to implement something like a value object is that structs also came with writer methods for all of its members. And so you could change the value of a member, and that it kind of inherently goes against the semantics of a value object because, ideally, they're immutable. And so, with the data class, it doesn't offer writer methods essentially. And I think that it freezes the instance as well in the constructor. And so even if you tried to add writer methods, you would eventually get an error. JOËL: That's really convenient. I think that may be an area where I've been a little bit frustrated with structs in the past, which is that they can be modified. They basically get treated as if they're hashes with a slightly nicer syntax to interact with them. And I want slightly harder boundaries around the data. Particularly when I'm using them as value objects, I generally don't want people to modify them because that might lead to some weird bugs in the code where you've got a, I don't know, something represents a time value or a date value or something, and you're trying to do math on it. And instead of giving you a new time or date, value just modifies the first one. And so now your start date is in the past or something because you happen to subtract a time from it to do a calculation. And you can't assign it to a variable anywhere. STEPHANIE: Yeah, for sure. Another kind of pitfall I remember noticing about structs were that the struct class includes the enumerable module, which makes a struct kind of like a collection. Whereas if you are using it for a value object, that's maybe not what you want. So there was a bit of discourse about whether or not the data class should inherit from struct. And I think they landed on it not inheriting because then you can draw a line in the sand and have that stricter enforcement of saying like, this is what a data as value object should be, and this is what it should not be. So I found that pretty valuable too. JOËL: I think I've heard people talk about sort of two classes of problems that are typically solved with a struct; one is something like a value object where you probably don't want it to be writable. You probably don't want it to be enumerable. And it sounds like data now takes on that role very nicely. The other category of problem is that you have just a hash, and you're trying to incrementally migrate it over to some nicer objects in some kind of domain. And struct actually gives you this really nice intermediate phase where it still mostly behaves like a hash if you needed to, but it also behaves like an object. And it can help you incrementally transition away from just a giant hash into something that's a little bit more programmatic. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a really good point. I think struct will still be a very viable option for that second category that you described. But having this new data class could be a good middle ground before you extract something into its own class because it better encapsulates the idea of a value object. And one thing that I remember was really interesting about the article that you wrote was that sometimes people forget to implement certain methods when they're writing their own custom value objects. And these come a bit more out of the box with data and just provide a bit more like...what's the word I'm looking for? I'm looking for...you know when you're bowling, and you have those bumpers, I guess? [laughs] JOËL: Uh-huh. STEPHANIE: They provide just like safeguards, I guess, for following semantics around value objects that I thought was really important because it's creating an artifact for this concept that didn't exist. JOËL: And to recap for the audience here, the difference is in how objects are compared for equality. So value objects, if they have the same internal value, even if they're separate objects in memory, should be considered equal. That's how numbers work. That's how hashes work. Generally, primitives in Ruby behave this way. And structs behave that way, and the new data class, it sounds, also behaves that way. Whereas regular objects that you would make they compare based off of the identity of the object, not its value. So if you create two user instances, not ActiveRecord, but you could create a user class, you create two instances in memory. They both have the same attributes. They will be considered not equal to each other because they're not the same instance in memory, and that's fine for something more complex. But when you're dealing with value objects, it's important that two objects that represent the same thing, like a particular time for a unit of measure or something like that, if they have the same internal value, they must be the same. STEPHANIE: Right. So prior to the introduction of this class, that wasn't really enforced or codified anywhere. It was something that if you knew what a value object was, you could apply that concept to your code and make sure that the code you wrote was semantically aligned with this concept. And what was kind of exciting to me about the addition of this to the core class library in Ruby is that someone could discover this without having to know what a value object is like more formally. They might be able to see the use of a data class and be like, oh, let me look this up in the official Ruby docs. And then they could learn like, okay, here's what that means, and here's some rules for this concept in a way that, like I mentioned earlier, felt very implicit to me prior. So that, I don't know, was a really exciting new development in my eyes. JOËL: One of the first episodes that you and I recorded together was about the value of specific vocabulary. And I think part of what the Ruby team has done here is they've taken an implicit concept and given it a name. It's extracted, and it has a name now. And if you use it now, it's because you're doing this data thing, this value object thing. And now there's a documentation page. You can Google it. You can find it rather than just be wondering like, oh, why did someone use a struct in this way and not realize there are some implicit semantics that are different? Or wondering why did the override double equals on this custom class? STEPHANIE: Yeah, exactly. I think that the introduction of this class also provides a solution for something that you mentioned in that blog post, which was the idea of testing value objects. Because previously, when you did have to make sure that you implemented methods, those comparison methods to align with the concept of a value object, it was very easy to forget or just not know. And so you provided a potential solution of testing value objects via an RSpec shared example. And I remember thinking like, ooh, that was a really hot topic because we had also been debating about shared examples in general. But yeah, I was just thinking that now that it's part of the core library, I think, in some ways, that eliminates the need to test something that is using a data class anyway because we can rely a little bit more on that dependency. JOËL: Right? It's the built-in behavior now. Do you have any fun uses for value objects recently? STEPHANIE: I have not necessarily had to implement my own recently. But I do think that the next time I work with one or the next time I think that I might want to have something like a value object it will be a lot easier. And I'm just excited to play around with this and see how it will help solve any problem that might come up. So, Joël, do you have any ideas about when you might reach for a data object? JOËL: A lot of situations, I think, when you see the primitive obsession smell are a great use case for value objects, or maybe we should call them data objects now, now that this is part of Ruby's vocabulary. I think I often tend to; preemptively sounds bad, but a lot of times, I will try to be careful. Anytime I'm doing anything with raw numbers, magic strings, things like that, I'll try to encapsulate them into some sort of struct. Or even if it's like a pair of numbers, it always goes together, maybe a latitude and longitude. Now, those are a pair. Do I want to just be passing around a two-element array all the time or a hash that would probably make a very nice data object? If I have a unit of measure, some number that represents not just the abstract concept of three but specifically three miles or three minutes, then I might reach for something like a data class. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think that's also true if you're doing any kind of arithmetic or, in general, trying to compare anything about two of the same things. That might be a good indicator as well that you could use something richer, like a value object, to make some of that code more readable, and you get some of those convenient methods for doing those comparisons. JOËL: Have you ever written code where you just have like some number in the code, and there's a comment afterwards that's like minutes or miles or something like that, just giving you the unit as a comment afterwards? STEPHANIE: Oh yeah. I've definitely seen some of that code. And yeah, I mean, now that you mentioned it, that's a great use case for what we're talking about, and it's definitely a code smell. JOËL: It can often be nice as you make these more domain concepts; maybe they start as a data object, but then they might grow with their own custom methods. And maybe you extend data the same way you could extend a struct, or maybe you create a custom class to the point where the user...whoever calls that object, doesn't really need to know or care about the particular unit, just like when you have duration value. If you have a duration object, you can do the math you want. You can do all the operations and don't have to know whether it is in milliseconds, or seconds, or minutes because it knows that internally and keeps all of the math straight as opposed to just holding on to what I've done before, which is you have some really big number somewhere. You have start is, or length is equal to some big number and then comment milliseconds. And then, hopefully, whoever does math on that number later remembers to do the division by 1,000 or whatever they need. STEPHANIE: I've certainly worked on code where we've tolerated those magic numbers for probably longer than we should have because maybe we did have the shared understanding that that value represents minutes or milliseconds or whatever, and that was just part of the domain knowledge. But you're right, like when you see them, and without a very clear label, all of that stuff is implied and is really not very friendly for someone coming along in the future. As well as, like you mentioned earlier, if you have to do math on it later to convert it to something else, that is also a red flag that you could use some kind of abstraction or something to represent this concept at a higher level but also be extensible to different forms, so a duration to represent different amounts of time or money to represent different values and different currencies, stuff like that. JOËL: Do you have a guideline that you follow as to when something starts being worth extracting into some kind of data object? STEPHANIE: I don't know if I have particularly clear guidelines, but I do remember feeling frustrated when I've had to test really complicated hashes or just primitives that are holding a lot of different pieces of information in a way that just is very unwieldy when you do have to write a test for it. And if those things were encapsulated in methods, that would have been a lot easier. And so I think that is a bit of a signal for me. Do you have any other guidelines or gut instincts around that? JOËL: We mentioned the comment that is the unit. That's probably a...I wasn't sure if I would have to call it a code smell, but I'm going to call it a code smell that tells you maybe you should...that value wants to be something a little bit more than just a number. I've gotten suspicious of just raw integers in general, not enough to say that I'm going to make all integers data objects now, but enough to make me pause and think a lot of times. What does this number represent? Should it be a data object? I think I also tend to default to try to do something like a data object when I'm dealing with API responses. You were talking about hashes and how they can be annoying to test. But also, when you're dealing with data coming back from a third-party API, a giant nested hash is not the most convenient thing to work with, both for the implementation but then also just for the readability of your code. I often try to have almost like a translation layer where very quickly I take the payload from a third-party service and turn it into some kind of object. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think the data class docs itself has an example of using it for HTTP responses because I think the particular implementation doesn't even require it to have attributes. And so you can use it to just label something rather than requiring a value for it. JOËL: And that is one thing that is nice about something like a data object versus a hash is that a hash could have literally anything in it. And to a certain extent, a data object is self-documenting. So if I want to know I've gotten to a shopping cart object from a third-party API, what can I get out of the shopping cart? I can look at the data object. I can open the class and see here are the methods I can call. If it's just a hash, well, I guess I can try to either find the documentation for the API or try to make a real request and then inspect the hash at runtime. But there's not really any way to find out without actually executing the code. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's totally fair. And what you said about self-documenting makes a lot of sense. And it's always preferable than that stray comment in the code. [laughs] JOËL: I'm really excited to use the data class in future Ruby 3.2 projects. So I'm really glad that you brought it up. I've not tried it myself, but I'm excited to use it in future projects. STEPHANIE: On that note, shall we wrap up? JOËL: Let's wrap up. STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.
For our final holiday special podcast episode, we want to help you feel as physically prepared as possible when going for your VBAC!Stephanie of My Essential Birth joins Meagan to share her wisdom from her own two VBAC births as well as what she has helped women learn through her many years as a birth worker. You will hear tips on how to choose and vet providers, three free exercises that might just make all the difference during your labor, and the secret lesson Stephanie has learned that she wants all of our listeners to know. Additional LinksStephanie's Website and CoursePregnancy and Birth Made Easy PodcastBebo Mia's WebinarHow to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for ParentsFull Transcript under Episode DetailsFull TranscriptMeagan: Turn your love of babies and bellies into cash. If you love babies and bellies and want to provide care and support to families, then Bebo Mia's webinar is the right place for you. Get answers to those burning questions like how to be the voice you wish you had at your birth and how babies and families can be supported by doulas. Learn all about the different kinds of doulas. You can work in fertility, pregnancy, birth, postpartum, or just enjoy working with those squishy babies. Supporting families by becoming a birth worker, aka doula, is perhaps an option that hasn't even crossed your mind. That's why we want you to join this webinar. You can have great earning potential while doing something you love. Bebo Mia is the one-stop shop for education, community, and mentorship. Reserve your spot today at bebomia.com/freewebinar.Meagan: Hello, hello you guys. It is the end of the year. This is Meagan with The VBAC Link and I have another holiday edition for you. Today is one that I am so excited about because this is someone that I know personally. She's a dear friend of mine and we have taken similar journeys through our doula careers, so it's really fun to be with someone that I already know and that we have the same mindset and goals for all of you out there. This is Stephanie and she is amazing. So amazing. She is a mom and a doula. She's had a VBAC and she actually has an amazing course through My Essential Birth. That's correct, right? My Essential Birth? Stephanie: Yep. Meagan: It's a course on how to prepare and get ready for birth. She has the same drive, I feel like, and passion as I do to get the information out to all of you and to help you know what is best for you whether it be, again, scheduling a repeat Cesarean or having a VBAC or maybe you're a first-time mom and you just want to know how to go along the way, seriously, Stephanie is going to be that person for you. So I'm so excited today to have her on. Welcome, Steph. Stephanie: Thank you. That's quite an introduction. I love it. Come to my podcast. Do the same thing. Meagan: No, no seriously. I was going to say, she has a full-on introduction here too. But you are amazing. You are so amazing and I love what you have done with My Essential Birth. You're busy. You've got three kids. You've got three kids and something too that is really fun is every single birth has been so different which I think just broadens your knowledge and passion, even more, to do what you do because for me, my births were all so different and I don't know, I really don't know if I would be here today if I didn't have all of those births. Stephanie: Yeah, 100%. Yes. Meagan: Don't you feel like these experiences in our lives have brought us here today and have brought passion to our hearts? But yeah. On top of that, you homeschool. You do so many things. You wear so many hats, so I'm so grateful for you taking the time today to talk to us about all of the amazing things that you do. But I think one of the really cool things right off the bat is, let's talk about your VBACs and how you really got started in all of this. Stephanie: Yeah, I think you really hit the nail on the head because 100%, if I hadn't had the experiences with the births that I have had, I wouldn't have not only the passion but the knowledge from seeing things go wrong. It makes me think of when I was 16 and I got my first car and it was a piece of crap and everything broke down on it so I had to learn about things [inaudible]. Meagan: Yes. Stephanie: No, I'm not comparing my body to a car, but I will say that those experiences totally shaped the way that I do what I do today and the passion behind it. My first baby– now, mind you, in my head, this was my goal. I wanted to go unmedicated. It was what I wanted to do. I just wanted to have that experience for myself for no particular reason. That's just what I wanted to do. We got around 34-35 weeks and I was reading a birth story online. Mind you, this was 13, 14 years ago, so it was a little bit ago not like what we see today with birth stories and stuff, but I'm at work and bawling because I'm super pregnant. I'm like, “That's what I want my birth to be like,” so I researched the classes that kind of went along with this book and I reached out to some local birth educators. It was this 12-week series and I had four or five weeks left to go. There was this one lady that was like, “Okay, I'll do these intensive courses on the weekend if you could make it.” I'm over like, “My husband works every weekend. We're super broke.” She was going to do it for this bigger prize. I'm like, “It's fine. I'll wing it. It's going to be fine.”Fast forward to that birth and missing some red flags, things like my provider telling me when first of all, he didn't want to have the conversation until 36 weeks about what the birth was going to be like, so I told him early on, “I don't want to have an epidural. I want to go unmedicated.” He was like, “We don't talk about that until 36 weeks.” That was a red flag, but I didn't know any better. Meagan: Interesting, yeah. Because that's what they do. Stephanie: Uh-huh and I was like, “Okay. Sure.” Totally. He was super old school. There were a couple of things and just the way that he talked to me that I should have caught on, but when 36 weeks came and I said, “I really want to go unmedicated,” and whatever and he was talking about, “Well, I actually let my patients get their epidurals much earlier than others. Why be in pain?” And I'm like, “No, it's really important to me.” And then he continued with, “Well, women with size 5.5 shoes and smaller tend to have Cesarean births.” Now, mind you, I'm a small person. I'm 5'0”. My shoe size is 5.5 and I'm sitting there just, “You've got to be freaking kidding me,” because my grandmother who was 4'10”, and her grandmother. I'm just going down the line like, “Nobody would be here. What are we talking about?” But at the same time, I'm a new mom. It's my first birth. I'm scared, so I stayed with him, and anyways, the cascade of intervention that happened was my water broke with just a trickle. I didn't have contractions. The provider ended up telling me once I was at the hospital that I needed to have Pitocin and I say that because I remember asking the nurse, “Did he say that word need?”She was like, “I'll come back.” But she was like, “He said need.” So I said, “Okay, well then I must need Pitocin.” So we took Pitocin. That baby did not do well with it. He couldn't crank up the Pitocin enough to make the contraction strong enough to actually make labor progress because my baby's heart rate would drop. That was, in my opinion, a medically-caused Cesarean because yes, when I have a baby in distress, then there we are. So that was my first experience with birth. I didn't connect with my baby right away. On top of being a new mom and figuring out life, I had just had abdominal surgery. I was a mess of emotions and then the next two births are where I found some redemption and healing and passion and power for women's bodies and what we can do. During my second birth, we had moved overseas to Germany and I was meeting with a doctor. I'd met with an OB but it was actually midwives who you give birth with. I had taken a really good birth course and I had been practicing a lot of stuff. I did not understand a ton about positioning though for my baby and so I had two days of prodromal labor which is not that big of a deal. Two days of prodromal labor, then finally things kicked in and I was in full active labor, but then I had pushing contractions at 4 centimeters, so now, my doula brain goes, “Oh, it's a positional thing. I have all of these ideas,” but then, I was like, “Oh my gosh. I'm not going to make it.” And then too, the wonderful German nurse there– there was a little bit of a language barrier for sure, but I was like, “I really want to get into the water.” She was like, “Oh, later. And also, I have something, honey, that will take all of that away. You just let me know if you want a little bit. We'll just stick it in the bum. A little bit of pain meds.” At the time, I was like, “Yeah, that's a good idea. Let's try that.” But I had the pain meds. That ended up being like, I was comfortable before two contractions before my water broke. It took the edge off enough that my body was like, “Let's get things started,” but then the contractions were right back on. I did end up with an epidural for that birth. My baby did fine with the Pitocin. I pushed that baby out vaginally. I wasn't forced into another Cesarean or anything and that birth was amazing. I was very, very pleased with the way that that birth went. And then we were moving from Germany back to the United States, particularly to North Dakota. If you know anything about North Dakota, they don't even have– my midwife was not a licensed midwife on purpose. You cannot be a licensed midwife and deliver babies outside of a hospital setting. They can get arrested. Meagan: Yeah. Yeah. It's illegal. Stephanie: It's not the black market, but she's not licensed. She was a direct-entry midwife. So we were moving back from overseas to North Dakota and I called the hospital first before I met with a home birth midwife. They told me, “Well, we don't really care that you've had a vaginal birth after Cesarean. You had a Cesarean before, so you need to plan for another scheduled Cesarean birth,” so talk about my red flags now. Meagan: You're like, “Nope. Nope.” Stephanie: No way. I'm going to do whatever I have to do. So I did. I reached out to a home birth midwife. I found a doula and all of those things that I probably should have done with baby #1. We planned for me to have an unmedicated experience at home. I was really excited about that up until 35, 36 weeks. I had a breech baby for one and that breech baby, we were able to get him turned, so that part went away, but then it was the mental game of, “Can I actually do this? You've never not had an epidural.” All of that self-talk starts happening and it's not good. My doula was like, “Here's a list of affirmations. Take what you like. Leave the rest and start saying them out loud several times a day every day.” And so I did that and within a week or so, I was like, “Oh my gosh.” I went from being scared and nervous to confident and excited. I was like, “I can do this.” So that baby had a week of prodromal labor. It was about 5 or 6 days of prodromal labor and then things get moving and I have some active labor that hit, but my contractions never really got closer than about 6 minutes apart. They would last a minute to two minutes long, but they were never those super crazy close, consistent. Things kept going off in my head like, “If I was in the hospital, I definitely would have been offered a Cesarean birth.” It wouldn't have been a question, especially in that hospital. These contractions were coming. My midwife, we finally call her and I'm like, “Look. I've been in prodromal labor and now it's active labor, but they're not closer than 6 minutes.” She checks me and I'm 6 centimeters. I was like, “My labor is progressing on my own.” It was so cool. And then it was another 12 hours from that point and I had my baby. But it was incredible. Those contractions and just knowing that my body was doing what it was meant to do. There was a point where I was like, “Oh my gosh. I'm so tired. I need to sleep.” For sure, we went upstairs. I slept for 45 minutes. I had two contractions. It was another moment where I was like, “Yeah.” If I was at the hospital, somebody would say, “Oh, she's stalling. We've got to do something.” Whatever. But those two contractions and the second one, I woke up and I was like, “Oh my gosh, what is happening? I can't do this anymore.” Sure enough, I'm thinking, this better be transition. My midwife comes in. She had heard me. She was sleeping downstairs. She comes to the door. She's like, “Do you want me to check you?” I'm like, “Yes, please. Let's see where I'm at.” She's like, “You're 9.5 with a bouncy lip of cervix. You're good to go. Let's get you to go to the bathroom. You can get in the birth tub now.” So we did that and i can laugh about it now, but I went downstairs. I went to the bathroom and after I was done peeing, I had my first pushing contraction. I remember telling my husband, “I don't want to give birth on the toilet. I have to get out of here.” 4.5 hours later because of the mental blocks that I had– we can laugh about that now, but at the time, it was very serious. Like, “I'd better get to the birth tub.” Meagan: Yeah. I'd better get out of here. Stephanie: Yeah, but it was wonderful. I will tell you the differences. The major differences for me in the spaces that I was in for being able to give birth unmedicated and as a VBAC, my birth team made the biggest difference. When I was at home and feeling like, “Oh my gosh. I can't do this anymore. Oh my goodness. I've been pushing so long. I'm so tired,” everyone was like, “But you are doing it. You're doing great. Keep it up.” I'm like, “Oh. I can take that in and chill and feel supported.” So I did. We kind of joke about, first of all, I was making noises that my husband the next day told me, “You sound like the screaming goats.” I was like, “Oh my gosh. I do.”Meagan: I was called a cow. My husband was like, “You're a mooing cow in there.” I'm like, “Thank you so much.”Stephanie: Well, the best part of this story, I actually love this story, the next day, my husband is sitting at the table and showing our little boys the screaming goat video. His mom's walking down the stairs and goes, “You recorded her?!” Meagan: Uh-uh!Stephanie: So I'm like, “Okay, yeah. I get it. I get it. I really did sound like that.” Meagan: You really did sound like that. That is so funny. Stephanie: But anyways, I'm pushing all this time and I do remember hitting a point even during pushing, I'm like, “Oh my gosh. I can't do this.” I was scared. I had never pushed a baby out before. Instead of holding my breath and bearing down, I was purposely breathing through my nose and not leaning into that pushing. My husband was finally like or I told him, “You need to make the bed. I need to get out of the tub,” because in my head, all I'm thinking about was, “If I can't do this, then I'm going to have to go to the hospital. We're going to have to call an ambulance. The lights are going to be on. There's going to be people I don't know.” I had to walk myself through all of those things. Meagan: You were really deep in that space. Yeah. Stephanie: Yeah. I was like, “No. This has to happen here because I can't deal with all of that.” So I told my husband, “Go upstairs. Make the bed.” I was like, “Make sure you get the lining down so we don't mess up the mattress and all of that.” When he went upstairs, it was the first time that I paused and tuned into myself. I just said a quick prayer and for me, I call God Heavenly Father. “Heavenly Father, please. I can't do this alone. I'm scared.” My husband comes down the stairs. I'm just finishing that prayer. He's ready to lift me out of the water. He was like, “Come on. Let's go. Let's go now.” He went to lift me and I'm like, “No. It's happening.” Two pushes later, that baby was out. Meagan: Oh, that just gave me major chills. Stephanie: It was the most spiritual experience of my life. I love everything about it. Yes, it was probably one of the hardest things I've ever done physically. Mentally, how it pushes you to your limits, and then you feel like you are the strongest woman alive. You can do anything. You're a good mother. You're all of the things. It was that feeling and looking at what I had done through having good support that I was like, “No. We're lying to women. You know what? If I could do this, anyone can. So now I'm going to become a birth educator and now I”m going to work with women one-on-one. I know that you can do this.” So that's where the passion came from. Those were my birth stories. Meagan: I love it. I love it. Oh, that just gave me such chills. You know what's interesting is I don't think I've ever even heard all of your birth stories like that. Stephanie: Oh really? Meagan: I don't think I have. We have some similarities. We have some similarities. Stephanie: I know. I've read through some of yours too. I love it. Yeah. Meagan: Even more. I don't think I realized. Yeah, maybe I have and it was a long time ago and I forgot, but there are a lot of similarities. I love it. You've had these VBACs. You found this passion and here you are today. So in past episodes, we've talked about mentally preparing and mentally getting into that space. You just did that. You just talked about that which is so important. It is so crucial to be in that space because when we're out here, we can't dive into birth. I feel like I did the same thing. I wish that it was recorded so I could really show people how big of a tantrum I was throwing, but I was legitimately throwing a tantrum in my driveway pacing back and forth saying, “If my water wouldn't have just broken, this would be totally different. This is happening all over again.” I was really spiraling and everyone just sat there. My neighbor was seeing me. She was like, “Oh!” I'm like, “I'm in labor.” She stopped and was like, “Is she okay?” Rick was like, “She's just gonked or something right now.” I had her watching me. My mom was watching me. The kids were like, “Mom!” I'm throwing my hands and voicing everything that was in my head out loud getting it out there but I needed to do that. I needed to do that but as soon as I could get that out, I remember the drive. We were getting in the car to go to the birth center and meet my midwife. I had my baby later that night, but it was the morning before I had my baby and he was just like, “So, how did that feel?” I was like, “So good.” I just remember labor coming on so much stronger. You have to get in that head space. We know there is the headspace, but what about the physical? I feel like there is so much goodness that you talk about. The physical aspect of preparing for birth and not even just preparing to actually give birth, but preparing and creating that team and creating that environment. One of the first things is knowing your stuff. How can our listeners know their stuff? Right now, they are listening to this, so this is what you can do to know your stuff. But yeah. When you say ‘know your stuff', what would that all entail? What would you suggest?Stephanie: Yeah, this is kind of the tricky thing that I'm always weighing one thing against the other where it's knowing what you want for your birth and how to get there and then making sure that you're vetting your provider. They really do go hand in hand but it's really tricky because just depending on what order you take, you may have to change up one or the other. But when it comes to understanding what you need in order to have the birth that you desire, one of the things that I tell moms to do is, “Take a meditative moment. Close your eyes and take some deep breaths. Picture yourself from that very first contraction through to when you give birth. What does that look like? Where are you? Who is around you? What are the lights like? What do you smell? What do you see?”That will help you decide. It gives you some idea of how to get there or what you're going to need in order to get there. I'll do this exercise with moms and moms that were planning to give birth at a hospital but never make it there in their minds. They're at home. They don't ever get in the car to go to the hospital. They've had their baby at home. So I think really understanding what you are looking for. And even for a mom that has that experience, she's planning to give birth at a hospital, but she has this really calm, relaxing thing at home, it doesn't necessarily mean that she needs to be giving birth at home although it could, maybe it's more of, “So I need to have control over my body, control over the situation. I need to be in my own clothes,” and those sorts of things. Meagan: Oh, I love that you just said that. Stephanie: And really understanding what is creating that image in your mind. But of course, I'm going to talk about taking a good birth course because not only is that what I did that was so life-changing for me but that is what I help moms do today just like you have a birth course where you talk about preparing for VBAC. A good birth course is going to include all of those things like how to stay healthy and low-risk with nutrition, and good exercise that you can do not just moving your body and keeping your heart rate, but what are things positionally that you can do for yourself and your baby? How are you going to stretch the perineal area or use the specific muscles that are going to be used for birthing and labor time? That's going to be all the way through understanding each phase of labor, how to work with your birth partner, how they can support you, how relaxation can be so important and meditation, all the way through to birth and postpartum. That includes every situation that can happen on the way. When you walk into your birth space, are you going to have an IV or wear your own clothes? Do you want to have intermittent fetal monitoring or do you want to be on the monitor the whole time? If you're talking induction, what are your options? So I think really understanding what your options are, and some of that changes as your birth changes or as other options are provided whether or not you have gestational diabetes or if you're GBS positive. Those are different decisions you have to play with and make, but if you like listening to podcasts, taking a good birth course, watching birth videos, if you're gathering all of that information and coming together for yourself deciding what you want for yourself, then you can move into asking the right questions to help that provider because that really is the next step. You can have this wonderful birth that you have thought of and dreamed of in your mind and if your provider is not on the same page, if they are not supportive, you might not get it at all and it's not even your fault. Meagan: I know. That is so hard because sometimes we don't know what it looks like to have that supportive provider. We don't know what it looks like because for me, with my first birth, I went to my OB and he was really nice and welcoming, and charming. I was like, “Cool. He's rad. He's great,” and then there were the red flags but I didn't see those red flags. It's so hard to know how to find that provider and you say to vet your provider. What do you mean by vetting your provider and what tips would you give to start that process and know right away what you really want to look for? Stephanie: Yeah. I'm glad you asked that. I think probably one of the best things you can do is meet with more than one and different practices. Meagan: Yes. Yes. Different practices are such a big thing because even the one provider in the same practice, they're going to have similarities so it is so important to branch out. When I was going that with my VBAC baby, I did. I went to multiple people and I could physically feel the difference without even speaking to anybody. Stephanie: Yes. 100%. I always said that I didn't believe I was intuitive at all just as a person, I don't feel like I am in touch with myself. If that's you, you're wrong. Just like you explained right there, we do. You know when you have conversations with other people or you walk into a room. There's a feeling there and how you're treated matters. The problem is, I think and I mean, I'm guilty of it too. I think we put providers on this pedestal and they're kind of untouchable. They're above us in some way because they're gone to school and they've got knowledge about things that we don't. In some ways, maybe that's true. That's why we hire them because they have skills that we need that we can't meet while we are in our vulnerable state. The other side of that is that they are also a person and how they treat us matters. And so when you are asking questions and meeting with providers, how are you feeling? Were you respected? Were you rushed when you bring up something? Providers will actually eye roll or laugh at some of the things that you say. That's a red flag. Meagan: It's so true. Yes. Stephanie: I say too, you know what? Go meet with a birth center out-of-hospital provider. You don't have to plan on giving birth there at all. Pay attention to how you are treated. How does that feel for you? For people that are maybe interested in that and they are like, “Oh, that's so scary and my husband doesn't want to or my birth partner really doesn't want me out of the hospital,” great. Go take him and have a free interview with an out-of-hospital care provider and just see how you feel. If you hate it or it's not for you, then that's great but I think that you need to have the contrast. I think you deserve to have the contrast. It's the same with doulas. I'm like, “You don't know if you want a doula? Great. Go meet with one anyways. It's a free consult and then you can decide.” But vetting a provider, like I said, you have to have some questions going in. VBAC-specific moms, they're going to want to know things like, “Okay. For a mom like me, I'm healthy and low-risk. It's my second baby and I've only had one Cesarean birth. What does it look like for someone like me in your practice having a vaginal birth after a Cesarean? What are your percentage rates? Do you use the VBAC calculator or how do you decide? Do you induce? What are your reasons for induction and can I say no?” You always can but it's always fun to ask a provider, “Can I say no?” The answer should always be yes but it might not be. “We'll talk about it when we get there.” So you have to have some specific questions that you're bringing in to decide if this is somebody that you can handle and you are probably maybe not going to match up on every single thing. That's okay too, but are those big things being met? I think that's what helps you decide, “Is this going to be a good match for me or not?” Meagan: Yeah. I love that. And just tuning into your overall feeling. Like you said, providers can eye roll and they can be subtle. They can be subtle, really subtle, right? Even midwives can do that too. Stephanie: Oh totally, yes. Meagan: OBs, midwives, it's so important to really tune into that. I think it's so important to do that even before becoming pregnant too. Sometimes to find an OB—if you are thinking that you want to become pregnant soon and you have an OB or a midwife, start there. That's totally fine, but it's okay to branch out and say, “I'm not expecting yet. I'm preparing. I want to find that provider right from the beginning.” Sometimes that doesn't happen, but I think it's good to do if you can. I mean, I wasn't pregnant and I went to 12 providers. Stephanie: I love it. Meagan: 12 providers which were maybe excessive. Maybe, but that's what I needed. I needed to go and I needed to hear all of their things and feel all of that in those environments. I chose the provider that I thought was totally amazing. He still is. I'm not saying he's not, but for me, I thought he was perfect. He was exactly what I needed out of everybody and then I still changed at 24 weeks, right? And so a lot of people are like, “Why would you change? He's so supportive.” I'm like, “He is so supportive and I still feel all the good, but something is not resonating.” That's okay too. Even if you do find your provider. Say at your appointment, you find your provider and you're not feeling it or you're getting things like Stephanie where it's like, “Hey, this is what I want to do.” “We don't talk about that yet.” Those types of things, if they are not willing to hear you and they don't want to know how they can help you in this birth experience, are red flags. Don't feel like you have to stay like both Stephanie and I did because I felt like I had to stay too. I felt like I was cheating on my provider if I left him. He had gone this far with me. He had supported me this far, but at the same time, I truly believe I probably wouldn't have had that second Cesarean. I really don't believe that if I would have changed, but it's okay because it's my birth story and that's why I'm here, but it's okay. It's okay if you're feeling off and you want to change. It's okay to do that. Stephanie: Yeah. I think you can't shout that from the rooftops enough because it's true. You do feel like, “Oh, I'm going to hurt their feelings or something.” No, you're not and if you do, who cares? You're never going to see them again. Let it go. Meagan: Exactly. Stephanie: It's so important for you and your future. It's such an important moment for you. It doesn't matter. It should trump that. Meagan: It should trump that. Someone else's feelings. That's the hardest thing. We have so many people out there. If you are a people pleaser, you're not alone and it's easy to please your provider. You want to please your provider, but remember, they are working for you. They are there for you. If they're not pleasing you, it's okay to leave. It is okay to leave and so yeah. It's a hard thing to do, but I do encourage people to tune in, follow their hearts, tune into that and do what's best for them because if they don't truly vet their provider, it can make or break an experience. Stephanie: Yeah, it can. A good provider is going to help make it just like you said. My midwife and my doula who were in that third birth, oh my gosh. They are a part of my life forever whether they like it or not. You are bonded with those people forever and you need that kind of support in your life. Meagan: Right, yes. Yes. Okay, so we're talking about knowing your stuff and vetting your provider. Now, let's talk about putting in the work. We've got these things. Now, going for it. What things would you suggest? Stephanie: Yeah as far as putting in the work, I really recommend– and I have it on my website as well and you can tell me if you like these ideas or not, but I recommend these three exercises that you can do every day. First is the forward-leaning inversion. You're literally—you get up on a low-lying chair or couch probably with support. Put a pillow down in front of you. Get your elbows on the ground with your bum in the air and you hold that for three breaths. You do that once a day. If you're somebody who has heartburn or something, obviously, you're maybe going to want to not do that depending on how the heartburn is or there are a couple of people who shouldn't do that. Basically, that is really good because it releases certain ligaments. It allows more room for baby. It allows for really good positioning. That's something that you can do to make sure baby is in a good position. Meagan: Every day. Stephanie: Every day. An easier, more comfortable labor. The other thing you're going to do is pelvic tilts. You can choose to do how many you want, but I like to do them at least when I get up in the morning and before I go to bed. That's 20-40 tilts. That's in the hands-and-knees position. You're tilting your pelvis forward and into a flat back, forward and into a flat back. Again, that's strengthening certain areas. It's helping baby's position. Those are really, really good for you to be doing. The third one is the squat. This is a deep-seated squat. It's not like we are going to grab weights and do a weighted squat or anything like that. This is like how you see people in third-world countries who don't have chairs or new babies, toddlers when they go down to squat and play with something, look at that squat because that's the one that you are going for. The reason for that is because it stretches the perineal area. It strengthens the muscles in your legs. Chances are when it was pushing time, you're going to be in some kind of squat. Now maybe not, but chances are the majority of us are going to end up there. The other thing about squatting is that it shortens the birth canal, it makes it easier to be able to push baby out and that's why we end up in that position but if you're practicing that squat specifically, and this is where my husband was so good. “I'll tell you what, for every minute you squat for the day, I will give you a minute of massage at the end of the night.” I was like-- Meagan: Oh my gosh. Done. Done, done, done. Stephanie: An hour a night, I am not joking. So he was so good supporting me that way, but I'll tell you what, when I started squatting and it was probably later in my pregnancy like 34-35 weeks. When I started squatting, it was 1-2, maybe 3 minutes before my legs were numb, my feet hurt and I had to stand up. Everything was tingling, but a couple of weeks in, I could hold it for 15 minutes comfortably. So when I was telling you before that I was pushing for 4.5 hours, I was in a birth tub in a squatted position for that amount of time— Meagan: Wow. Stephanie: --and I remember thinking, “I'm so glad I practiced these squats because I wouldn't have had the stamina.” As far as physical prep, those are things that you can do every single day. Meagan: I love that. Stephanie: Thank you. I know and I'm like, you and I have taken some similar training and stuff. It's valid. It's real. Meagan: It really is. Stephanie: The other things that you can do are, let's stay healthy and low-risk. That means you're eating a high-protein diet. You're drinking a lot of water. You're taking your prenatals, well-balanced. That matters because it can keep things like preeclampsia at bay. It's also going to make you feel better and give you more energy, so there are a lot of benefits to that. But my favorite part of staying healthy and low-risk is that you remain in charge of your birth decisions. That's why it matters to me so much. It's not even just for the health of myself and my baby. It also comes down to, “I want to have a say as to how all of this goes.” So those are some of the physical things. Then we move into the, once I understand how birth works, what are the signs that I'm in labor? What are the signs I'm in active labor? How do I work with my body? Learning things like relaxation and I do that through relaxation practice. Even just a simple one, and you can do this with your birth partner or by yourself, but you set up this stage. So use your senses. You should be leaning back in a chair or in your bed lights dimmed with essential oil or a consistent smell that your body gets used to smell. You just practice breathing deep into your belly. Imagine how you breathe when you wake up in the morning. First thing, pay attention to how you breathe when your eyes first open. It's really deep belly breaths so try to aim for that. Do that for 10 minutes. Just go from your head to your toe and be like, “Okay. I'm going to feel the hairs on my head relax, and then my eyebrows, and then my jaw.” All the way down. The thing is, it's not easy to do when you're not used to relaxing but when you utilize all of those senses, then it becomes something called muscle memory. So if I know my body knows because I've been doing this for the last several months that every time the lights are dimmed and I smell lavender essential oil and I'm breathing into my belly, then when you do those things during labor, it's like, “Oh, lights are dimmed and lavender,” then you don't really have to think about it. Meagan: It's intuitive. Stephanie: Yes. “I'm supposed to relax now.” And then obviously you need to practice relaxation. Once you get good at that, you can practice it with the lights on, with the TV on, with your husband or kids walking through the room because that's the reality of birth and especially if you're in a hospital. Meagan: Yes, yes. Stephanie: But learning relaxation is really important. And then you move into—there's a lot more to do with that like meditation and the mental stuff and all of that. Labor rehearsal where you practice with ice and other things. There is plenty that you can do, but I would say relaxation, your three exercises, and staying healthy and low-risk are probably just top of the list things that you can do on a daily basis. Meagan: Oh my gosh. I love it. So good, so good. I love that you talked about preparing and then it becomes muscle memory. It's so true. It's so, so true. I encourage if you're ever in a moment where you're feeling stressed or overwhelmed to dive into that because there are going to be moments in labor and birth when you might feel stressed and overwhelmed. If you can practice doing that in those moments, oh my gosh. It's going to be so beneficial. So I know we're almost out of time, but I wanted to ask you what is a secret lesson or something no one really talks about that you wish you would have known ahead of time when preparing for time? Stephanie: That would be that you can say ‘no' to anything. I feel like I teach this all day long and I talk about it a lot. I don't know how often moms let that register because they will know that and then you'll get with their provider and they're doing non-stress tests or whatever and it's like, all of a sudden, oh crap. I need this and this and this. No. You can actually say ‘no' to literally anything. Meagan: Anything, yeah. Stephanie: Anything, yeah. They can't do anything. The best that they can do is make you sign, what is it? Meagan: An AMA. Stephanie: A medical release, yeah. AMA, against medical advice. Meagan: Against medical advice. Stephanie: Sign it. Sign it. It's your body. You get to choose. And then kind of like I talked about, when I talk about health and nutrition, I think a lot of times, moms don't register. “Okay, yeah. I get it. I'm supposed to be healthy.” But it's so you can be low-risk and in charge of your birth. I think that's a really important part of that. Meagan: Yes. I think so too. It's so hard. It's so hard to be in that moment and be like, “Uh, okay.” When you're like, “I really wanted to say no. I had a prenatal last night with a client and they were like, “One of the biggest things that we don't want to do is go in and just say yes to everything. That's one of their biggest goals is not to just say yes to everything. They're not saying, “We want to refuse everything,” they're just saying, “We want to be educated and we want to know what we're saying yes to.” It's so important to know. If you are saying yes, know why you are saying yes. And if not, it's okay to say no or “One moment. Let me think about it.” It's okay because there are times where things are going to be thrown at you and it is hard to say, “No” or actually, “I want more time” or “I'm not sure about that right now” but you can. You can. You have the right to say no. You have the right. So it's so important to know. I love that. Any last final tips for someone preparing for VBAC that you would like to give to our listeners? Stephanie: I think we've kind of touched on this before. It just really matters who you pick for your provider. I know we kind of talked about some things that warrant a red flag or time to interview somebody else or something, but really, if you've got that education and you've got that provider piece, you're setting yourself up for success. It should be somebody that supports you, not tolerates the opportunity to try for a VBAC, but somebody who believes in the natural process of birth and that having a vaginal birth after a Cesarean is more healthy and safer for mom and baby than having another abdominal surgery. I think that matters that you've got somebody that believes that way. Meagan: Totally. I love that. Oh, well thank you so much for being here with us today. I want you listeners to know that she has the three free, that's what you say, right? Stephanie: Yes, three free exercises. Meagan: Three free exercises. I'm having a hard time lately with tongue twisters. Three free exercises, so we are going to be providing that in our email. If you're not subscribed to our email, please check it out because we are going to be providing so many new things and some really exciting upcoming things with The VBAC Link are going to be happening. We are going to be providing that and then will you tell everybody where they can find you? Because everyone needs to know where you're at and follow you. Stephanie: Thank you, yes. So I too have a podcast. It is called Pregnancy and Birth Made Easy. Pregnancy and Birth Made Easy is the podcast so anywhere you listen to podcasts, you can take that in. I'm also on Instagram @myessentialbirth, Facebook, TikTok, all the things, and then if you are looking for information on the birth course or anything else in regards to where some of the podcast show notes and some of that live, it's myessentialbirth.com. Meagan: Yes and all of these will be listed in our show notes today so if you want to go follow her which I promise you that you do, go click that and give her a follow because her content is amazing. Her podcast is amazing and it's been such an honor to have you here today. Stephanie: Thank you, Meagan. I love what you do too and I love that we get to do this together. Meagan: Me too. Yeah, so before we let everyone go, I didn't really give a full, “Hey, we know each other,” but we actually were in the same doula course. We became doulas together which seems like forever ago, but it was so fun to be there and to learn. You had already had your VBACs, hadn't you? Stephanie: I did. Meagan: Yes and I hadn't yet. I had only had my two Cesareans and so I just remember you being so inspirational to me and motivating me. I was like, “Okay. She could do it. She's here. She is doing this too. We have the same interests,” and I just connected to you so much. Stephanie: Same, yeah. Well then, and now look at you with The VBAC Link. You just took off. I love it. Meagan: I love being here and I love being here with all of our listeners, so again, listeners, thank you so much for being here with us today, and thanks again, Steph. Stephanie: Thank you.ClosingWould you like to be a guest on the podcast? Tell us about your experience at thevbaclink.com/share. For more information on all things VBAC including online and in-person VBAC classes, The VBAC Link blog, and Meagan's bio, head over to thevbaclink.com. Congratulations on starting your journey of learning and discovery with The VBAC Link. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
thoughtbotter Stephanie Minn joins The Bike Shed as co-host!
Subscribe to Reactionary Minds: Apple Podcasts | SpotifyThe following is a transcript of Reactionary Minds’ interview with Stephanie Muravchik and Jon A. Shields, authors of the book Trump’s Democrats. The transcript has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.Aaron Ross Powell: I’m Aaron Ross Powell, and this is Reactionary Minds, a project of The UnPopulist. A good way to understand the appeal of Donald Trump is to talk to the people who voted for him. One of the most interesting ways to approach that is to talk to voters and counties that flipped, long voting for Democratic Party candidates until suddenly in 2016, they didn’t. That’s the background for Trump's Democrats, a book that looks at three communities that turned to Trumpism after having been solidly blue basically forever.I’m joined today by its authors, Professors Stephanie Muravchik and Jon A. Shields of Claremont McKenna College. Their fascinating book explores why Trump clicked with these voters and why many of the very things that turned so many of us off about him were the very things they found so appealing. We’ll discuss machine politics, political bosses, honor cultures, localism and what it means to identify strongly with a narrowly circumscribed place. The story that emerges is a good deal more complex and nuanced than the easy tales we sometimes tell ourselves about us and them.Stephanie, Jon, your book is part of a genre we have seen come out of the Trump years, with academics and journalists going to small towns that voted for Trump, sitting in diners and asking Trump voters why they believe what they believe. I think your book is the best example of that I have come across, the one that I certainly have learned the most from and the one that puts the most work into really getting at the ideas motivating Trump supporters. Can you tell us a bit about what prompted this and how you approached this project?Jon A. Shields: Yes. Thanks, Aaron, for having us, and thanks for the compliment. This is a book that really started on election night in 2016. Like lots of Americans, and, I’m sure, like yourself, we were up late that night watching the returns come in. It was really the most astonishing and surprising election in our lifetime, in our living memory. Immediately, we were eager to get outside of our little academic town and get a feel for what happened.In the weeks that followed, our sense of surprise really deepened. First, we discovered that there were all these Obama-Trump counties. There were all these places that had voted for Obama on two occasions—in fact, there were over 200-some counties that did this—and then flipped for Trump. That itself is very surprising and unusual, especially in this age of polarization, where partisan IDs and loyalties are especially sticky. But then, quickly, we not only discovered that there were all these Obama places that flipped for Trump; we also discovered that a lot of these places had voted Democratic for a very long time. Many of these places had a pretty unbroken record of voting for Democratic presidents, some stretching back to Reagan, some to Nixon, some much further back. In fact, one of the counties we ended up studying was a place that had never voted for a Republican president in its history. This is a county formed in the 19th century and—it’s really astonishing—had never voted for a Republican. In the Western world, that’s probably the longest streak of any polity voting for just one party.That was interesting. Of course, we’re accustomed to thinking and talking about the Nixon Democrats in ’72 or the Reagan Democrats in ’84. In some ways—in lots of ways, actually—the Trump Democrats were much more interesting. Nixon won in a huge landslide in ’72, as did Reagan in ’84, so it’s not so surprising that in those years, you get lots of Democratic places that flip. That’s not weird. In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote, and yet he managed to win some of the most loyal Democratic communities in the country despite that.So we got really interested in not just the red-blue divide, but a divide that had opened up in blue America. We were curious. We wanted to make sense of what had happened. In our college community, Trump is a loathed figure, a sort of proto-authoritarian, a dangerous person. We more or less agree with that point of view. I think there’s a lot to that, but then there are all these other Democratic communities that see him in a radically different way.They see him as one of the greatest presidents in American history, and so we were really deeply interested in that question. Then all these places we studied in 2016, I should add, remain loyal to Trump in 2020. These are places that are really drifting into the Republican Party. Trump is the character who shepherded all these communities into the Republican column, and so that’s quite interesting. That’s how we got interested in the project.Not Your Tea Party TypesAaron: You mentioned Nixon and Reagan and so on, and we have seen that Trumpism represents a populist movement. We have seen prior waves of things that look like populism, the most recent probably being the Tea Party movement. As you point out, the three communities that you looked at, they didn’t go Republican. They didn’t vote Tea Party candidates. What was different? Was it something that had happened to them—i.e., economic changes that hurt these communities and they said, “Now, it’s time to vote for a Republican”? Was it something about the community, or was there something that really set Trump apart from past populist candidates or waves?Stephanie Muravchik: Well, I think one piece of it is just how deeply blue these communities were. The Tea Party really emerged out of places that had some significant Republican organization movement identification, and there simply weren’t enough Republicans on the ground to get attention for that in most of the places—Iowa might have been a little different, but certainly in Rhode Island and Kentucky. We had one Democratic local-level party leader in Rhode Island—we were asking him about his relationship with Republicans—and he said: “I don’t know any Republicans in this town. I don’t think there are any.” There just weren’t enough even for the most knowledgeable Democratic leadership to know them. So I think part of it was that it would have been hard to get the attention of the local Democrats.Then the other piece that I think stands out is that there was a lot of libertarian rhetoric out of the Tea Party. There’s some controversy about how top-down that was, how “astroturf” that was, et cetera, but that libertarian rhetoric is really not at all resonant with the Democrats that we talked to. That was not the piece of the populism that appealed to them. I think that’s another piece of the answer. Jon?Jon: Well, I would just simply add—I guess this is really echoing what Stephanie said— you have to keep in mind that these are really one-party towns. The party, locally, for these folks is really the individuals who lead the party: the county-level or town-level elected officials. So these are mayors, city council people, county commissioners, and they’re really the face of the party. The other thing to add is that they really insulated these local communities from national politics in some ways. In a lot of ways, these places were pretty provincial. When they thought about the Democratic Party, they didn’t think about national leaders for the most part. They thought about people in their own community, and so Trump really shook these communities. It was a shock to them and really got them thinking about national politics and questions and controversies. It really took someone like a Trump to do that. The Tea Party was something that just didn't—it was a movement that was pretty remote from a lot of these places.Boss Politics and Honor CultureAaron: One of the really interesting parts of this book is when you’re talking about how politics worked or works in these small towns, and I’m reading it sitting inside the Beltway, having that as my frame of reference for politics. I’ve mostly lived in big cities and so on, where national politics is about—during the Trump years, he’s pushing against the guardrails, if not leaping right over them.We have our norms and institutions, and that’s the way that we tend to talk about these things. It was fascinating, the stories that the two of you tell about how different politics is in these small communities. Can you talk a bit about that? That also, you say, plays into a part of Trump's appeal.Jon: Yes, sure. One of the things that really struck us, Aaron, is that in these communities, politics is much more Trumpian in all kinds of ways. It was Trumpian before Trump, right? The local public officials reminded us of Trump in various ways. They were thin-skinned. They were brazen. They were tough. They were macho. They were the local daddies of their communities. They were there to take care of their flock—that is to say, they weren’t particularly ideological; rather, it was a sort of friends-and-neighbors politics. They were going to do particular favors or provide for particular constituents. It echoed back to a sort of machine politics, which has deep roots in the Democratic Party. Politics in these places weren’t very ideological really. They were much more boss-centered. They were really about providing for and taking care of local constituents. Political leaders were expected to do favors for their constituents. We saw all of this in all kinds of ways. Maybe Steph wants to jump in and give some examples, give some flavor and feel for some of these characters.Stephanie: In all three of the places in this town in Rhode Island, in this city in Iowa, in this county in Eastern Kentucky, there had been a strong-boss politics—perhaps most strong in Kentucky. These little rural counties are often dominated by these people called judges. They’re not judicial figures. They’re county executives essentially. There was a man in the county that I was looking at who had held office almost continually for about 30 years.When I arrived there during the Trump administration, he had been out of office due to the fact that he had been brought up on federal charges in a votes-for-gravel scheme. This was after about some 30 years in office. The county had fallen on hard times. The main way that he was able to show his friendship to voters was by providing loads of gravel to them at county expense. A lot of these people live on little far-flung farms in this rural district. They need to have little roads that connect their farmsteads to the main public arteries.The roads need to be constantly refreshed with gravel, and he was dumping loads of gravel in the months leading up to an election. The Feds came after him, and he pled. He had to deal with them basically so he would be free, but he pledged never again to run for office. The county’s political imagination had been very much shaped by this man’s long reign. He remained a very popular—although controversial—figure in the county when I was there.Jon: There were echoes of this, too, in another town we studied, which is Johnston, Rhode Island. On the surface, you might think it would be a place with a radically different politics than Appalachia, right? It’s in New England. It’s a suburb of Providence, but in many ways, actually, the politics was really similar. It’s a very Italian-American community, and they still practice old-style machine politics.The mayor there is Joe Polisena. He rules with an iron fist. Again, he’s like everyone’s daddy, right? People go to Joe. They need something done. They need a favor. Sometimes they ask for things he can’t deliver. When we asked Joe about this, he said, “Yes, sometimes they’ll come in, my constituents, and they’ll ask for something off the wall.” Joe would have to tell them, “Gee, I can’t do that. That’s illegal, but I can do something else.”Likewise, people in that community feel like if they don’t support the machine, if they don’t support Joe Polisena and other Democratic candidates, they’ll be basically shut out. They won’t be able to get any goods from the city, because they’ll be punished by the mayor, who can be very vindictive. Again, very different, seemingly, kinds of communities. They’re regionally different. One’s rural, one’s suburban, et cetera, but a very different style of politics. It’s a kind of politics that used to dominate the Democratic Party.We forget about it in college towns and big urban cities because we’ve cleaned up this kind of politics, right? We want a politics that’s more policy-oriented—politics without nepotism, without wheeling and dealing in this sort of favoritism—but it’s a kind of politics that survived in a lot of these Democratic communities. It survived in those places because there are fewer college-educated, good-government types who wanted to clean up this kind of politics and get rid of it. That’s one way in which the politics of these places was distinctive, but they also had a particular political culture, and we could talk about that if you like, Aaron.Aaron: Just briefly before we turn to that: I’m curious, do the people in those towns view this as a kind of politics that needs to be cleaned up but just can’t for various reasons, or do they think this is the right way to do politics, even if it sometimes is a little messy and looks corrupt?Stephanie: Yes, I think there’s definitely a view among some voters—and they’re all men; these men are all somewhat controversial and have their detractors—who don’t like how personalized the politics are. I spoke to one. Mayor Polisena in Johnston, Rhode Island, is very widely popular. He gets very high margins in elections, and lots of people had lots of good things to say about him, but he did have his detractors.I was trying to talk to one of them, and he was quite anxious about talking to me and said, “Well, you know how things are in this town.” Then he paused a beat, and then he said: “Well, you’re not from here. Maybe you don’t.” There was this sense that there were critics, and they would often say: “This is too personalized. There’s too much retribution for disloyalty. This is America. We should be able to express alternate opinions and not be personally penalized by the powers that be in our locality for this.”One colorful example from Elliott County was an executive who was no longer in office because of this federal deal and had one very outspoken opponent in the community. When they would be paving roads, like county roads, the new asphalt would stop at this man’s property line and then start up again at the next property line. Only in front of his farm would there be no paving. That kind of stuff rubbed some people the wrong way for sure.Jon: I would just echo that. I think it was somewhat mixed, but I think there was also a sort of sense in these places that this is just how one does politics. These are the main models of politics. It wasn’t clear to many, I think, what the alternative to this might look like. In many ways, it’s a sort of model that grows up out of their own community. It’s the kind of politics that grows out of a traditional family in some ways. It’s the sense that, “Well, there’s a patriarch who’s the head of the household but also the head of the community.” They should provide and take care of their community. In exchange, they should get the loyalty of their constituents and their supporters.There’s also a sense that their loyalty is the main way that they pay back their benefactors, those who have supported them. Even if they have some misgivings or grumblings, or they think the mayor can be a little too iron-fisted or whatever, there’s also a sense that they should be loyal to that person because they owe them something.Aaron: Given all of that, and given the personal and transactional nature of the politics and the politics as extended family, as you describe it, the initial motivation of this book and the ethnographies that you conducted was that there was something new about Trump or Trumpism, or Trump as a candidate. It attracted what had been historically very, very exclusively blue communities. These were Democratic strongholds.Given all of this, within this context, what does it mean for them to have been Democrat? You said this wasn’t really about policy per se, so were they meaningfully Democratic in the way that we would think about it, from the perspective of looking broadly in American politics? Democrats represent a set of policy preferences and a certain coalition. Do they even fit within that? Or was it more just that this was a label, but they could have had a different one slapped on, and it wouldn’t have been meaningfully distinct?Stephanie: Yes, I think one thing that became very clear was that because of the relationships with these party elites in their local community, what the party meant, meant relationships with these local party leaders. What they understood “Democrat” to mean had been very much reflected or filtered through these local party leaders. A lot of their, I would say, social-cultural ideas were quite conservative.Some of them made a point of saying, “I’m a Democrat and I’m a conservative.” For example, we met a woman in Rhode Island who was from a deeply political family herself and had been a low local-level political leader—so not someone who was out of touch or disengaged at all. She talked about the revelation that Democrats were pro-choice. For her, this was a shock.She had to wake up to this fact because she herself and her family were fierce Democrats. She had been told since she was a child that if the Republicans get into power, we’ll all starve. It was that kind of rhetoric we've heard from a lot of people. But she was also from this deeply Catholic, church-going, mass-going family. She said she would go to mass and see her elected local leaders also taking communion.It never crossed her mind that these people would not be pro-life. On a lot of the social-cultural issues in Elliott County, which was very rural, one big issue had to do, of course, with guns and the Second Amendment. All the Democrats were very pro-Second Amendment in Elliott County. They didn’t feel a sense of cognitive dissonance because their understanding was so local.Jon: And as Stephanie suggested, too, in some ways, they do have a sense that Republicans are the party of the rich. That resonates with what a lot of Democrats might say about the Republican Party and have said for a long time, but it’s a very class-bound, New Deal, Democratic sense of the parties. Indeed, in some of the restaurants in these towns, it’s not uncommon to find pictures of JFK or FDR.They had a sense that those were the patron saints of the party. They did have a sense that they were part of something larger than their own local, particular community. It’s like the culture wars were this thing that was blowing beyond their own local lives, and they didn’t have a sense of where the parties landed on guns or abortion or those kinds of questions. That surprised us. That was interesting.In lots of ways, of course, these people, on a lot of these issues, they’re kind of conservative. They’re pretty pro-Second Amendment. They’re fairly pro-life. Although on economic questions, they’re more moderate or even left-leaning. Ottumwa, Iowa, for example: It’s a place with a meat-packing plant. There’s a strong tradition of unionism there. Basically, it’s as if you froze the Democratic Party in the North in 1960 and took a peek at it; that’s more what these places are like. It almost felt like going back in time a little bit. We got to peer at the old Democratic Party, as it used to be. We were reminded that it didn’t all change overnight—that there are still these vestiges of this old party that have endured partly because they’re isolated and they have this strong localism. The local leads buffer them from some of the big changes that are happening at the national level.Indeed if you talk to local people, one of the major things they’re trying to do is create their own brand, because they know that there’s a big ideological divide between them and the national party. They want to keep the Democratic Party as localized as they can. Trump has made that a lot harder for them in all kinds of ways, because a lot of these folks are starting to become more aware of the national party and the ways in which it’s different from their local party.Localism versus CosmopolitanismAaron: One of the broad theses of your book is that Trump appealed to these communities in part because the very things that those of us in our coastal, rootless, cosmopolitan enclaves were often dramatically, viscerally turned off by about him were the very things that felt the most familiar about him to the voters in these communities. As just discussed, he looked like the politicians that they’re used to. What we saw as wild corruption and nepotism and so on was just business as usual—that’s of course how politicians operate.I want to move to another one that you discuss, which is honor cultures, because Trump for many of us was this famously belligerent but thin-skinned bully who couldn’t back down. Constantly, anytime anyone said anything, he needed to come back at them, even if he looked ridiculous doing it. It seemed very off-putting to all of us. As you point out, this is like a quintessential “honor culture.” What is an honor culture, and why do we see it in communities like this?Stephanie: Well, an honor culture is a way of understanding reputation and conflict that makes it imperative that a person, particularly a man, demonstrate his toughness, his willingness to meet any insult—or certainly an assault—but even just an insult with a kind of fierceness and a willingness to use violence to avenge his reputation, to reestablish his reputation.Men in all these communities have all kinds of personalities, just like in any other community, but they understand that they’re expected to do this. If they don’t, they risk really losing status in their communities, and they also risk inviting further insult and even violence. I think it was pervasive in all three communities. I think some of the most colorful examples probably come from Ottumwa, from Iowa. Jon: Well, there’s a lot of examples. I would just say by way of defining honor culture that on the one hand, it’s unfamiliar to a lot of folks who live in highly educated bubbles like college towns and blue urban centers, but it’s the default culture in a way, right? It exists around the world. It still exists in lots of places in the United States. It’s a much more common mode of conflict resolution than we often imagine.The play Hamilton reminds us that it used to exist in our national political culture, because, after all, Hamilton died in a duel defending his honor. But that play misleads us, too, because it suggests that this honor culture is some ancient, barbaric, strange cultural thing that existed in the past and that we’ve done away with it. In fact, as Steph said, it existed in all these communities.I guess we should give some examples. I guess before I get to Iowa, I would start with Rhode Island. The mayor, Polisena, very much practiced this honor culture. We really first saw this in action during a town council meeting, because every month or so, Joe Polisena holds court and various citizens come. They have various complaints and they want to give the mayor a hard time.Mayor Polisena doesn’t do what politicians might do in, say, a college town when they hear a complaint. When people come to complain to Polisena, he gives them hell. He starts calling them names, and it doesn’t matter who they are. In fact, this one old woman used to consistently go and complain to him, and he would just let her have it. Polisena would say, “You’re a malcontent.”Later, as the meeting spilled out into the parking lot, he even audibly called her a douchebag. He doesn’t mince words, and we asked him about this. We said, “Joe, what are you doing? Why are you so rough with these constituents? Why can’t you do what Michelle Obama suggests? She said, ‘When they go low, we go high.’ Why can’t you take the high road?” His response was very telling. He said, “No, I can’t do that. If I do that, they’re just going to roll over me. I’m just going to show my weakness. They’re going to take advantage of me.” He said, “Look, I have to be a street fighter when it comes to politics. I have to be tough, because that’s the only thing that people understand, is strength.” We saw this again, as Steph suggested, in Ottumwa. There, a fight nearly broke out at a local Democratic county meeting. This is back in 2016 during the primaries. The county commissioner was a guy named Jerry Parker. He supported Hillary Clinton. There was a guy named Alex Stroda, who was on the other side. They were fighting over who to endorse. It nearly came to blows. There was a belly bump, but not an actual fight. Again, those were two guys who couldn’t just talk it out. There was a sense that an insult had to be forcefully confronted. That was normal in these places and that’s also how Trump operates, right?For Trump, you’re either a strong person or you’re a weak person, and that’s how he divides the world. Nationally speaking, some of the candidates that gravitated toward Trump early also shared some of that honor culture. You think about guys like Rudy Giuliani or Chris Christie. They too have some of that in them. That’s a flavor for this culture. To sum up, I guess the final thing I would say is that Trump—I think you said this well, Aaron—but Trump to us, to people in our community, seems like he’s pathologically thin-skinned. And maybe he is, right? I’m sure Trump has all kinds of personality disorders, but that’s not how it’s necessarily read in the communities we studied. To them, his behavior is totally normal. Of course you punch back. Of course you don’t let things roll off your back. That’s not how politicians behave in their communities. He doesn’t seem weird even if he does have all kinds of personality disorders, which I’m sure he does. He doesn’t read quite that way in these places.Aaron: You’re conducting these interviews after Trump has been in office for a bit, so they’ve gotten to see him not just with the bluster of a candidate, but actually as the leader of the free world. Was there a sense of the disconnect between how they perceive him and how he is perceived elsewhere? For example, you quote a handful of people about this. One guy, and I’ll just read the quote, he says, “I think other countries are afraid of him, which I think is a good thing. I hate to say it, but with Bush and Obama, they were pushovers. With Trump, he’s not a pushover. You’re going to have to deal with him. There’s no playing games with him.” This is really striking because it became very clear in Trump’s presidency that other world leaders were just constantly playing games with him. They saw his thin skin, his reactivity, his susceptibility to flattery, and they just manipulated the hell out of him. They were maybe afraid of him in the sense that he was a loose cannon, but they weren’t afraid of him as a tough guy that they had to take seriously. Were the communities aware of that disconnect, of how he was perceived on a world stage?Stephanie: No, I think that the idea of a leader that might speak quietly and carry a big stick just doesn’t make a lot of sense to them. In their own sphere of understanding, the way that you make people understand that you will not be messed with is through this thin-skinned response. It’s this kind of machismo. I think that that was how they understood. I was at a church service in Kentucky and the minister there was trying to get the churchgoers to be more assertive in their faith.He said, “Growing up, my big brother always taught me”—basically, he meant in the context of working at a job site like a construction site—“don't back up. Never back up.” That was seen as a deep truth that had application in all realms of life. They heard Trump making those sounds. It’s a pretty policy-wonkish person who could then read and trace actually what the consequences might have been, which you were just alluding to. Jon: I think it’s important to bear in mind that what’s happening here is a kind of identity politics. When they see a candidate like Trump who behaves in ways that are familiar to them, in ways that they might behave, in ways that their leaders might behave, it signals to them that this candidate is one of them. That’s how most voters behave, right? They don’t think very systematically, for the most part, about politics or ideology. Really, they’re interested in candidates and the extent to which they feel some sort of a social proximity to them. The closer they feel to them, the more they feel like they can trust them. I think the people we talked to just have a sense that Trump, because he seems familiar, because he seems trustworthy, will do the right thing on the international stage in these contexts that are removed from their knowledge or expertise. In that way, they’re really different from the wonky people one might meet in Washington, D.C., who are pulling their hair out because Trump is getting rolled by China and Putin, et cetera.Class, Not RaceAaron: One of the other things that is characteristic of Trumpism—and it was certainly present throughout Trump’s campaign—was nationalism, and then what often looked like racist dog whistles, if not just quite audible whistles. What has seemed to be characteristic is that Trumpism and Trump’s supporters are intensely nationalistic and often have—let’s call them racially charged views. What you found pushes back on that, at least in some ways, and you argued that it has more to do with the sense of place. Can you talk about how sense of place plays out and what that says about nationalism as a Trumpist phenomenon?Stephanie: All three of these were places we chose precisely because they represented a larger group of counties mostly that had voted twice for Obama and then flipped. We were interested in part because that seemed to be complicating what seemed like a clear-cut story of the kind of bigoted appeal, the appeal of bigotry that the Trump campaign represented. Then spending time there, what really stuck out in all three of the places was the localism and we've talked about some facets of that.These were all places where the people who lived there felt deeply, deeply connected to their hometowns and even so much that in the Johnston Rhode Island community that we were in, they had long had a phrase that was Johnston First—long before Trump was on the political landscape, that there was a sense of belonging to each other and needing to help each other and work for the community. This sometimes then resonated out to a nationalistic commitment. For example, in Ottumwa, Iowa where there were these strong unions, where there had been the car industry, it was difficult to buy a non-American made car in Ottumwa.They linked Ottumwa to the nation in a sense. In all of these places, there was that intense localism. For example, I was asking some women in Elliott County, Kentucky early on. One of them mentioned that they had read Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance and there was some other women at the conversation that I was having and the other women hadn't heard of the book, but they said, "Oh, was he from Elliot?" Then the response was, "No, because he's actually from another county that's an hour or two away, also part of Eastern Appalachia." Fairly indistinguishable from my eyes, but when they were told, "No, not from Elliot county, from this other county," they all laughed like, "Oh, okay, well that's a different county, we don't know about that county." Even the county boundaries of this tiny rural county really mattered to the civic imagination of the residents there.Jon: The other thing I'd say along these same lines is these are all places that are struggling to varying degrees and have been for quite some time. When Trump came around and said he was going to Make America Great Again, what they heard is not so much that he was going to make the nation writ large great again in some general way, what they heard rather is that he was going to make Ottumwa Great Again and Elliot Great Again and Johnston Great Again. That very nationalistic rhetoric, they heard in this very localized way. The fate of those communities matter to them partly because their social identities are so connected to those places.In these communities is where they're really socially known, where they really have reputations, where all their kin are, where all their kin are buried, and so to leave those places because they can't find the jobs or that they might need, for example, is a social death. Here it's a really a class-based difference. If Steph and I get offered a job at, say, Harvard and we go, our social reputation actually enhances because the nature of our communities is really different. It's not neighborhood-based, it's not especially place-based. Our communities are much more based in our professions. We're having this conversation with you across thousands of miles and that's the nature of our community.We don't know our neighbors all that well and it's certainly not the center, it's not really where our social identities are fundamentally based. The fate of these communities matters in a existential way to them in a way that I think it's sometimes hard for those of us who are part of the professional class to notice and to see. The other thing I'd say about race is, as we mentioned, these are places that voted for Obama twice. In that way, they're also different from places that were touched by the Tea Party. As soon as Obama's elected, you get the tea party, and I'm sure some of that was racially driven. He's our first black president but notably, it wasn't these communities. Obama really didn't create some massive counter mobilization in these places. These are places that voted for him twice, Obama was their president for eight years. Some of these places did grow disenchanted with him in the second term, and particularly in Elliot county where the policies of the Biden administration was particularly hard on the coal industry there. But for the most place, these weren't places that had some allergy to Obama. These were places that, in fact, voted for him and supported him.In general, I think we would say that to those studying Trump is that I think it is true on the one hand that these folks, they do think of Trump as a patron of the white working class in some ways. I think that's true. I do think, especially today, things have become more racialized. I'm sure if we went back into these communities in the wake of BLM and everything else, the racial politics has changed. Perhaps they think of themselves more fundamentally as white citizens and that's probably likely. But when we arrived there, I guess we were struck by the fact that they didn't particularly think in those terms and their social identities were much more class-based, they were much more place-based. I think we have to keep in mind that however much race plays a role, their politics aren't reducible to race either, that they have other social identities. I think that's hopeful in some ways.Stephanie: Just to put a point on the comment with one example that comes to mind in terms of Elliott County. Elliott county, Kentucky, is a particularly white area. There's very few people that are non-white.Jon: In fact, if I could just add, I think it's the whitest county that voted for Obama, which makes it interesting.Stephanie: All the political conflict there that sometimes can be racially charged in other places all happens within whites. For instance, when there's lots of grumbling about welfare and they're all looking at their white neighbors who are ethnically, religiously identical, racially identical to them. One thing I discovered among some of the older, this is not common among the younger, but the older people in Elliott County will sometimes complain about foreigners. When they talk about foreigners, they mean people from Ohio who are coming across the border or other counties, other white people.When there's lots of talk about invidious distinctions between us and them or between “othering” someone in the jargon of the academy, but in this case, they're “othering” white Ohioans, so the racial divisions aren't always the most important divisions to them.Jon: Just a quick footnote to that. It should remind us that, in some ways, their identities are much more provincial than whiteness. White America, that's a pretty big group of people. For the most part, it didn't seem like that was a community they felt especially close to. As Steph said, they feel like they're white neighbors and a neighboring county are, in some ways, outsiders and not part of their community.Aaron: The main issue of Trump's campaign, the thing that he ran on and drove home from early on his presidency was anti-immigration. That was his hobby horse. Is it then the case that for these communities, an anti-immigration view is less about race, ethnicity, nationality, immigrants with their weird languages and weird foods and more that if your community is intensely socially interconnected in a way that makes it look more like an extended family, then the immigrants look like the person who marries into that family and has a hard time fitting in because they didn't grow up in it, then they physically look different from us?Jon: Yes, you could see this in, I think, most notably actually in Ottumwa, Iowa, which of the three communities we studied has the highest level of immigration and they've come there really to work the meat packing plant. I do think there's something to what you're saying. There's a sense that these folks are outsiders who don't quite share our norms, and therefore, it's harder to have the tightly knit homogeneous community. We know from research on social capital that ethnic diversity, at least in the short and median term, undermines community and feelings of trust and belonging, and so diversity is a challenge to community.If your community is fundamentally neighborhood-based, then immigration can be a cost to those communities. Again, it's really quite a contrast from our college town. Here, we benefit from immigration on all kinds of ways. We pay immigrants in California, some in California, they cut our lawns, they clean our houses, they care for our children, they allow us to neglect our neighborhoods and tend to the communities that we care about, which is really our broader, professional, more diffuse, virtual kinds of communities. But in places like Ottumwa, those communities, again, are much more neighborhood-based.There is signs though that does sort of change over time as immigrants become part of the community. This is why I think it has more to do with culture than race. One Ottumwan, for example, told us about one of his neighbors, really about the Latinos in the community. Generally, he said, well, they're not even Mexican anymore because they don't speak Spanish. It was an interesting way of saying this was fundamentally about race. They may look a little different, but what matters is that they've socially and culturally integrated into the community.Policy Is Not the AnswerAaron: Looking forward then for those of us who are deeply worried about what Trumpism represents on the national stage, look back at the four years that he was in office and the real damage it did to American institutions and so on, and are worried about the continuing prevalence of this fundamentally illiberal views in the American electorate, what lessons should we draw from this? These people are speaking to genuine interests in cultural needs and affiliations. The book is very good at pointing out how much those of us in the cosmopolitan cities don't understand the way that class really works.There's a very nice line in it where you mention how much in colleges the future generations of progressive leaders are taught lots of courses in gender and race, but very little, if anything at all, in class and how important class is to this conversation. What lesson should we draw from what you've learned in these communities as far as understanding and preventing some of this from turning into the really dangerous illliberalism that we all fear?Jon: I think it is certainly heading that way. When we were in these communities at the time, it was still relatively early in their romance with Donald Trump, so they were not talking a lot of crazy conspiracy theory. Now we're really at a different place and I think partly what it highlights is the dangers of identity politics in some ways. There's a sort of cultishness that has really grown around Trump. Again, we were there and saw the beginnings of that, but we were just, in fact, at a rally in Wyoming, and Trump was there to officially nominate Harriet Hageman who's taking on Liz Chaney. It was everyone was in their Trump gear. Everyone had Trump T-shirts, lots of folks had Trump flags.If you've been to an NFL game, it had that feel to it like everyone's on the same team rooting together. Maybe that would be okay if Trump was less reckless. I think in many ways, we're in this moment because of Trump's bad character. Not so much that he appealed to people's place-based or class-based identities and mobilized this group of folks, but the power of that social connection has been so badly abused by him and so recklessly done, exploited. In a way, I think there'll be more responsible people. I hope there'll be more responsible people who will follow some of his example and leave other parts of it behind.I think there's responsible ways to appeal to these folks. I think it's important to remember, there's a decent part of this world. There's a decent morality there. Not all of it exports well up to the national level. I think honor culture, for example, for reasons we can explain, we think that maybe it's not great anywhere, but it works much better locally, and when it's exported up to the national level, it doesn't play out well. There are folks who I think are trying to take some of the Trump's playbook. One good example is this candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, Fetterman, who's a Democrat, and very Trumpy in all kinds of ways.If you haven't bothered to look, on one of his forearms, he has a huge tattoo of a ZIP code of his hometown. Talk about appealing to place-based identities. This guy's really figured it out. On his other arm, he has the names of all those who died in his community while he was mayor. Very personal concern about his own hometown and community. Look, I don't know what kind of governor he would be if he makes it that far, but it strikes me that's, particularly for Democrats or even really Republicans, who are thinking about how do you mobilize some of these social identities in a way that's less reckless than Trump, I think it can be done.Again, I think it'd be done responsibly and that's partly because there's something admirable and something to like about the localism of these folks.Stephanie: Yes, I think a lot of the things that we found that we highlight in our book, the moral vision behind them has to be understood. Even something like the boss nature of politics, which is often something that's considered very sleazy in the kind of communities that John and I have lived really has a lot to do with this ethic of friendship and loyalty. It's a way that voters understand friendship and loyalty more than any policy-minded way of assessing candidates. I had one woman tell me, actually, a few people say things like this, but one woman comes to mind in Kentucky who was a very disengaged voter and worked a minimum wage, a pretty crappy job.She was one of the defenders of this disgraced county executive and she said: "At least when David was in office, you could get a load of gravel when you needed one." It was her sense of this was a true mark of friendship. I think that certainly the boss style politics, which has to do with personal loyalty, which, of course, resonates very large with the unusually intense following that Trump has at the national level, the localism, again, is about community and loyalty. I think candidates that can speak that cultural jargon can signal that it's more important to signal that than it is to have policies. The policies aren't the draw I guess. I saw some Trump voters who said to me Trump Democrats in Kentucky who said, "Oh, we have great internet. We got that under the Obama administration," but there was no sense that they gave credit to the Obama administration for this policy that clearly helped them. They giggled about. Or the same with Obamacare. We saw people in Rhode Island say, "Oh, well, yes, I am dependent on Obamacare," but didn't give much credit. I think what they want is a feeling of being represented by someone they can identify with and trust and they're much more attuned to social-cultural clues, maybe all of us are, when picking candidates. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theunpopulist.substack.com
Welcome back to Artbeat Radio! You're listening to our 100th episode! We started in 2012, posting about one episode a year. In September of 2020, quarantine inspired us to find a way to interact more with our greater community. Unable to go on community outings or leave our homes, we decided it was time to post on a weekly basis to maintain our connection. Listen in as we share our favorite moments, our hopes for the future, and interview one another on our accomplishments! Thanks for listening and tune in next time! For more information about our organization, please visit our website www.ableartswork.org Audio Transcription: (Please listen on Podomatic or Spotify to view the full transcript) *Intro music by Artbeat Radio staff* Music, stories, and more! You're listening to Artbeat Radio, a program of Able ARTS Work. Stephanie: Hello and welcome to Artbeat Radio! My name is Stephanie! This is our 100th podcast episode. Wow, that is crazy. Our 100th episode! Looks like we made it! Thank you for listening to our podcast. Hope you like the episode. Alison: Okay, now I remember there was one time when we were doing something and it didn't turn out right and somebody dropped a box. I don't know what was in the box but somebody accidentally dropped a box and then in class somebody got the words backwards. Like they accidentally screwed up the words and that was my favorite part. Brian: Well, I loved Katie Jo also. Interviewed her about her country music and she actually performed for us live. My favorite was interviewing the guy who played Spiderman. He was really interesting. Eric: Guess what folx, the interview with spiderman will be available as of next week! Brian: Stephanie. Stephanie: Yes? Brian: What podcast did you enjoy? Stephanie: I liked “Summer Sounds” because it was really upbeat and it was really nice and I also like that I have my professional headphones. I would like, in the future, to meet my goal, which is to be a person on the radio but talk about my play, which is going to be awesome. Hey Renee. Renee: Yes? Stephanie: What's your favorite part of the podcast? Renee: I loved interviewing Spider-man, Ricky because we have a lot in common and are the same age. Brian: Yeah, I really enjoyed the interview with Ricky Mena, who played Spiderman. Stephanie: I think the interview with Julianna and Matthew was my favorite. And I just like podcast because I just like it. I like it because I get to produce the episode about my play. That's why. My goal is to be on a radio station and be the head podcast talker and to talk about my musical and my jewelry business. And that's going to be fun. Go podcast class! Brian: What I love about working with KLBP a lot is getting my voice heard. Getting my thoughts across. To have some of my thoughts that I have not illustrated before and that's very important to me. It's a terrific radio station to air what we've learned. Tim: Well, I like the guests that we have and then talking about our program and sharing all our details. I enjoyed interviewing our staff and then others from- different staff from different sites and music instructors. I like the most about it how we come together as one. Alison: This is our 100th episode! Well, what do you think of it? Stephanie: I think that it's amazing so far. Alison: I didn't think we'd go this far. Stephanie: I know right? Brian: Aaron, what do you think about the 100th podcast episode? Aaron: I like it. Brian: Did you think that we would make it this far? Aaron: Yes. Brian: It's a real honor to interview you, Aaron. Stephanie? Stephanie: Yes, Brian? Brian: What do you think of the 100th episode? Stephanie: I think it's cool. Brian: Did you think that we would make it this far? Stephanie: No! That's crazy, Brian! Brian: Yeah! Stephanie: Wow. Brian: I'm-I'm with you. I can't imagine that we're up to the 100th. Stephanie: We gotta' keep going. It'll be 101! Brian: Yeah! *laughs* and maybe 102, 3, 4, 5 and so on. *laughter* Stephanie: How do you like this class? Brian: I love it. So much so that I took it last semester and I'm taking it this semester. I can't remember if I took it the semester before. Stephanie: Yeah. Brian: How do you like this podcast? Stephanie: I think it's great! I like- I like my first- I like my classes this year. They're fun! Renee: How long have you been on the podcast, Stephanie? Stephanie: Um...not very long but I think I like it. How long have you been in podcast? Renee: I'm not sure. I just started *laughs* Stephanie: Just started? Renee: Yeah. Stephanie: I wanna keep working on podcast! Renee: Me too! Stephanie: Sorry, I'm just stoked! I'm so sorry *laughter* Artbeat Radio was created in 2012 at the TAP II location in Gardena California. Brian: Here's a clip of our first podcast! *Dead Man's Bones cover plays softly behind voices* Alison: This was made in 2012. This was the first podcast of Artbeat Radio. it was posted on October 18th 2012. *Dead Man's Bones cover plays louder* *Song fades out* Stephanie: I thought it was awesome. The way that it was presented and the way that they were singing. Brian: I liked it! Alison: It was beautiful. I think the song was great considering it was our first one. Brian: Hope you enjoyed our 100th episode! Have a wonderful day and thank you for listening to our podcast. Stephanie: Thank you! Renee: Thank you for listening and thank you for coming. Have a beautiful and wonderful day. Brian: Here's to 100 more episodes! Thank you very much ladies and germs. *laughter* Renee: Gentlemen! Stephanie: That's so funny, Brian! Renee: I like that Brian: Thank you! Renee: “germs” that's so funny! I like that *laughter* *Outro music by Artbeat Radio staff* We hope you enjoyed this episode of Artbeat Radio. For more information, please go to our website. Ableartswork.org. Thanks for listening and tune in next time!
Kanika: In our final “At Home with HOMER'' episode, I want to focus on something we've strived to incorporate into every one of our conversations -- How can we simplify information for families with easy, quick, applicable, tips for parents that help instead of overwhelm. In the spirit of that, I would love to hear in a more general sense about what you think parents truly need to focus on and more importantly, what parents can confidently forget about! Stephanie: Yes, I love this question, because this is truly my goal. Simplify, streamline, cut out the noise and find the 80/20 approach to parenting. Stephanie's Tips: Enlist your kids! Skills, reaching, tying your shoes. Feel agency and mastery in building those skills Double duty - math and meals Complex - you look at outside solutions Focus on the connection, not perfection Episode Links: WEBSITE: LearnWithHomer.com INSTAGRAM: @learnwithhomer FACEBOOK: /learnwithhomer
If you break down the supply chain in its simplest form, basically what you have is brands procuring products and then delivering them to customers where and when they need them. Sounds easy, right? But if you've listened to this show long enough, you know that's not the case. We've heard countless guests tell us just how much the supply chain impacts their business, and they've described a number of challenges they have encountered thanks to supply chain disruptions. One thing they all had in common — they had no answers to the problems they were facing.That changes now. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, I was so excited to finally get some insight on the supply chain from a couple of guys from Blue Yonder, Omar Akilah, GVP of Product in the commerce suite, and Eugene Amigud, GVP of Product Management and Architecture. Blue Yonder is an end-to-end supply chain platform that enables companies to tackle all the problems in the supply chain, and little side note, it's currently on track to be acquired by Panasonic for a measly $7.1B. From planning to execution, to transportation management, to commerce, to promising a customer when they're going to get it and making sure that you fulfill those promises, these are just some of the things Eugene and Omar have insider knowledge of. They dug into all of those topics and more and they shared how they help brands solve issues at all stages of the supply and fulfillment process. Regardless of the issues at hand, Eugene and Omar have heard, seen, and solved for it all. They also see the trends evolving in real time, including how important same-day or next-day delivery will be in various verticals, how and where A.I. and ML are being implemented, and what kind of difference edge technology and data will have on the entire buying and shipping experience. Eugene and Omar explain it all in this awesome roundtable episode, enjoy!Main Takeaways:Stitched Together: The supply chain is made up of specific pillars that can be optimized in specific ways. The way to level up and personalize the supply chain experience for brands is to stitch together the pillars and tools to make each pillar more valuable. For example, using machine learning to help do more accurate real-time inventory and then incentivizing purchase through automated couponing will lead to more sales, and also more data to further input into an ML algorithm to keep making the system better.Knowing the Needs: Supply chain optimization is all about understanding the unique needs of a company or an industry. For medicine and pharmaceuticals, speed of delivery is critical — people need their medicine now. For grocery, being able to schedule your food to arrive on the days you need it for the meals you're cooking is most important. Once you identify what the major need is, solving for that becomes a bit easier.Gaining an Edge: The use of edge technology and data, combined with other execution tools like sensors, A.I. and ML, can change the shopping experience for customers and the supply chain experience for businesses. By bringing everything to the edge and utilizing new technology, real-time freshness and weather and harvest data can be used by businesses to update their inventory or upcoming orders and to inform customers of critical product information.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hello, and welcome back to up next in commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO at mission.org. Today, we have an epic round table with two men from Blue Yonder, Eugene and Omar. Guys, welcome to the show.Omar:Hello. Thank you.Eugene:Thank you.Stephanie:Yeah. I'm very excited to have you on. So today I'm very happy because we're finally tackling something that so many of our guests have been saying is an issue. I mean, hundreds of episodes in, and almost all of them that said supply chain is one of the biggest issues in e-commerce, but no one has had to figure it out and they always say hi, can someone come and help us with this? So I'm really excited about the conversation today. To start maybe Omar, if you could give us an overview of what is Blue Yonder.Omar:So Blue Yonder, if you think about it is really an end-to-end supply chain platform that enables companies to tackle all the problems that you talked about in the supply chain. From planning to execution, to transportation management, to commerce, to orchestrating in order to where it needs to go, to promising a customer when they're going to get it and making sure that you fulfill on those promises. So if you really think of all of the various components of the supply chain, we basically power that right from the bits and bytes that need to be in the warehouse during the time that they need to be there to planning the labor all the way to getting it to a customer.Stephanie:And what are some of the brands that you guys work with? Are they all just big brands or there some small ones in there too? What does that look like?Eugene:We work with various brands. Some of those include pretty well-known it's going to be lululemon or CVS or the worked with the [calls], [Mesias], Urban Outfitters, and so on. So pretty well recognized brands.Stephanie:Yeah. [inaudible] small guy. It's no big deal. That's awesome. So I want to talk about the landscape today of where supply chain is, because like I said, we hear that there's all these issues. There's delays. We're having a heated conversation earlier, before we were recording around our couches all being delayed. And it's very sad. So I want to hear what's going on today, or maybe what has been transforming over this past year to get us here.Omar:Yeah. And I think, again, if you take it a step back, Stephanie, I would think about it relative to every company is trying to offer a brand product value proposition. So I have my brand, I have my products and my assortments. I'm trying to price them the right way so that they resonate with you or create some differentiator in the market relative to either the quality or the price or the uniqueness of the offering. And then I'm trying to make sure I can get it to you when you need to get it. So if we think of supply chain, instead of this big, hairy monster. That's essentially what I'm trying to do, if I'm trying to make products that you love and get them in your hand when you want them from a consumer perspective. Now, to support all of that, obviously there's a element of either procuring this product from another source or I'm making it for you.Omar:That's where the supply chain varies tremendously, depending on who you're talking about in the automotive industry versus the pharma industry versus other industries. It's all about the components are still there. I need to make something or I need to procure something. I need to be able to get it to where I need it to be. And place it in the right place relative to my demand. So I know you're in Austin or I'm in California or Eugene's in Boston. And I need to make sure that the inventory is where he needs it to be, or you need it to be in order to get it in time. I need to be able to promise you that, that inventory is there and I need to be able to deliver all my promises. So if we break it down to the essence, that's what it is. Now, the complexity comes in each of the functions. If you look at each of these functions, they become domain centric functions where I need to go very deep, where I'm using machine learning.Omar:I'm using analytics to figure out, okay, how much of a product do I need to sell? During which seasons? Where are my best suppliers? Who can I get it from at the best cost? How does my network look for inbound? Am I going to get it from overseas? And then I need to go through an ocean in order to get it to a port and then truck it somewhere else? What does all of that look like? And that's where the right tools and the right software solutions become key to helping you answer those questions. Does that help?Stephanie:Yes. That makes perfect sense. So when you come in, for some of these big brands will say, I don't know, CVS or something, or anyone, where do you even start? How do you start the audit process? And maybe what are the biggest surprises? What are these brands missing, where they're like, oh, if we only knew about that 10 years ago would have been way easier.Omar:I think you'll see you Eugene and I we're riffs a little bit. I think it's a couple things Stephanie, first is the problem points that they have. We see a lot of... And everybody's a little different. Number one is, with COVID and with the fact that we all have these, and I would say this came before COVID-Stephanie:[inaudible].Omar:People just forget about that. Folks, sorry. Yes. There's a podcast, phones, phones, telephones. And more specifically the fact smartphones, where we now have a browser in our hand, and we want to understand a lot more than what we did in the past. In the past, it was more about, "Hey, you know what, J.Crew is a cool brand. I want to go into the store. I want to check it out. Now I want to browse their catalog. I want to see what's available near me. I want to see whether or not I can get it today." So typically where we start is the problem points that companies have relative to the strategy they're trying to implement and what stressors that have. So one could be, I need to expose how much inventory I have in the store and make it available to a customer.Omar:Another could be, you know what, I'm doing that, but I need to be able to optimize my inventory better, put it in the right place so that it doesn't take so long to get Stephanie and [inaudible] their couches. Those are the type of things that, depending on the problem point, and given the fact that Blue Yonder has such a robust portfolio, we start from wherever their pain point is in the supply chain. And we're typically, revert to it as the supply chain experts in these areas. Eugene:Just to add to what Omar's saying, me being in the industry for a quite long time, I took things for granted. But then if you talk to somebody outside of the industry, you always have to educate what is actual supply chain? How does it work? Everyone says, look, I just placed an order online and I get the box back. But then they partially because of COVID, what happened was government started talking about supply chain. Saying, look, if you cannot physically go into the stores, but you can come and do a pickup from the store where you order something online, you pick it up from the store has been there forever. I mean, that's why I've been doing it probably 20 years ago or more. But somewhat not as spread out, general public might not have understood it well.Eugene:And now everyone has to do that. And I was fascinated literally the spot of the news coverage, where there will be COVID numbers and the other updates, it would say, okay, physical stores for non essential brands can be open for pickup or can be open for shipping. And the reverse was, let's say stores are closed. And our customers cause that Eugene we've got we have seasonal merchandise and you have to get rid of it. What do we do? The customers are not coming into the store. What I do with that? The answer is you can ship from those stores. You can use your stores as a warehouses and again, old concept to a degree, but it just became so much spread out. And those are some of the difficulties we started ordering, discussing, helping customers to say, look, how do you handle these scenarios?Stephanie:Do you see these customers that you have actually being able to identify their problems? Because to me, if I'm a brand I'm like, I don't know what I don't know. So I don't know what J. Crew's doing versus Bombas versus these DTC companies who maybe are mainly and have always used their retail locations as fulfillment centers. Do they actually understand the problems they have?Eugene:Yeah-Eugene:Very often is a common. That's where you start. They see a problem of saying my inventory is not moving. And we have them in some of the first questions they ask us saying, look, how other customers do this? Just because of how our product used across multiple verticals in different domain, [inaudible] people do ask us all the time saying what's the best way to implement it? So now actually we find a lot is customers work with us. Not just to buy product. They say, look, bring the best practices. The lessons learned, what's the fastest way to implement that? Yes. We all know somebody else's doing ship from store, but how do you roll it out? Do you roll it out across all stores immediately? Do you pick a market where you offer some competitive differentiation, et cetera?Omar:Yeah. And I think, sorry, just to add there, I think Eugene's point is a good one. I'd look at it in two categories, generally, they know what they want to impact from a strategy perspective, they might not know how. And that's where trusted partners come into play, but Eugene's point, you typically know, you know what, I want to make the customer experience better to my customers. I have an issue with stale inventory sitting in my warehouse. I have a cost problem with how much it costs me to fulfill orders. I need to bring that down. So the problem statements are typically known. To your point, the solutions may not be. So do I go and address order optimization to fix my shipping problem?Omar:To Eugene's point, if you ship out of stores, hey, you're shipping from a closer location. You're going to get a benefit of potentially lowering your time to deliver to your customers. But your transportation costs may go up a little bit. So how do you cater for that? Do you look at other ways to do it? And that's where we would suggest, well, have you done a network model where you've assessed your ins and your outs and make sure that they're optimized accordingly? Do you need a micro fulfillment center? Do you need to ship directly from your sources? Those kinds of answers come out after that problem statement has been clearly identified. So the problem statements, I think, are very clear to your point. They may not know what the solution is to those, and that's where we typically help.Stephanie:Yeah. So is there a shiny star client where you were like, ah, this one, every time we're going to go with this playbook where we're going to implement these 10 key pieces and maybe there's a little customization based off their product. Is that a good way to think about how you guys work or is it custom every single time?Omar:I don't think it's custom every single time. I think to your point there are definitely key pillars of the supply chain that need to be aligned. And again, all of our customers, I would say are actively working on all of those pillars. Whether it's inventory planning, inventory, placement, network modeling, the commerce experience, speed and convenience to their customers. Those are all common pillars that every company is trying to figure out whether they're B2B or B2C. It really doesn't matter if they're common. Do I have the right products in the right place, fast enough to meet the demand that I have when I have it. And am I engaging my customers the way that they want to be engaged and am I promising them what they're going to get when they're going to get it, all that kind of good stuff.Omar:So I think at the end of the day, the pillars are common. What happens that uniqueness in the sauces? How do you address it for each customer? Eugene:So like Omar was saying, the pillars are common. I call them building blocks. I think what also makes us very different is the what is the absolute burning pain that the customer is experiencing. And you see different, there are some, let's say retailers, their margins are absolutely through the roof and all they care about is how do I get this product to customer's hands faster. They may not actually worry about extra three dollars and shipping just because I want to get customer to have a today or tomorrow one good example of some of these scenarios is not margins, but speed is a pharmacist. So if you think about pharmacy, if I want my order to arrive within an hour probably I need it. I need this medication. So that's one example. So absolutely I have to find the closest location and try to fulfill their orchestrate my supply chain so that I can ship it within an hour.Eugene:And the flip side is some other retailers where a good example is grocery, where I may want to get my order delivered on Friday, just because that's when I start cooking and so on. And so you can see the difference. One is immediacy. And another one is actually, I want to plan accordingly. And so you can think of supply chain being orchestrated very differently based on the customer. So from our perspective, so we have this pillar, some building blocks make them very flexible from technically to call the microservices, to make sure that you can use those and build within your whatever customer is looking to achieve. And again, those goals could be very, very different. Everyone is talking about everything going digital. The grocery going digital, this whole Omni channel scenarios. But if you look at every one of them in detail, they actually quite unique. Many of them are very unique and our job is to make sure that whatever customers are trying to achieve we enable them to do so.Stephanie:Yeah. Cool. What are some of the new trends that you all see popping up? Because I'm sure you have a lot of people coming to you and they're like, we need to do this right now because we heard other brands are doing this, or this is the way of the future. What trends are you hearing that are maybe new and even just the past couple months or so?Eugene:I think [inaudible] that's really hard this year to me is a same day or hourly delivery. That's one. Everyone talks about it. It's actually remains to be seen how hot it will remain going forward or not. And again, if I look at the Madison delivery, it's there to stay, grocery maybe. And then some that probably it will come and go. Because we see many retailers they'll enable same day delivery, but the margins are just not there or in that charging customer $20 for same day delivery of a shirt, it may not stay there. So that's an interesting one. I think it will evolve over time, but the same day delivery is definitely a very hot, a common topic that customers ask us all the time.Omar:Well, we can riff on that for a bit Stephanie, because if you think of COVID and the COVID impact. So every company that offered goods to customers wanted to get it in their hands as soon as possible to replicate the in store experience. Because you're browsing the aisle, you're looking. So now I'm focusing on my e-commerce experience, I'm focusing on my digital experience to try to mirror that. So that you can actually get it. And what's the other part of that is putting it in your basket and leaving and being able to have that item that day. So now, to Eugene's point, if you look at it, a category by category perspective, is same day uptake going to be the same across all the different industries and all the different categories.Omar:I would agree with Eugene, probably not, because now that folks are getting mobile again, we may rely on it for pharmacy. We may rely on it for grocery. We may rely on it for essentials. And we want it when we want it, but now for non-essential goods, do I really need it same day? I may be willing to wait. So that becomes the balance and the dance from a customer engagement perspective where you want to offer them the options but they may not necessarily be the option that they we'll take up every single time. And so there's a balance to Eugene's point on that cost to serve. I think the other cool trend or the other trend that I'm seeing in a Eugene and I reverse roles for a sec. You talked about the same day delivery, and I'm going to talk about the use of machine learning. So typically Stephanie, he's the tech geek and I've done-Stephanie:Yeah. We just flop [inaudible].Omar:Yeah. We just totally flop. So what I would say is like super cool that I'm seeing quite a bit in industry is the usage of machine learning to solve the problems that people cannot easily. So let's look at grocery for a second, or let's look at any other industry where products are very volatile as they're in the store because you got a lot of people coming in and out, but yet you want to promise against that store potentially because you don't want to have a distribution center that fulfilled a product to a customer to Eugene's point, if I want to deliver same day, I want to get it out of your local Safeway or Lucky's or whatever it may be. You can get it straight into your hands. So how do I factor for whether or not something's in stock or not?Omar:So that's where things like using machine learning and understanding how often they get replenished to how often a product is being demanded, how often a product is actually there, when it says it's going to be there using a brain to determine all of that probabilistically, high probability that it's there becomes easier than to do the traditional path of, I have five units at the end of the start of the day, and I sold three units in it now two. So being able to use applied machine learning and artificial intelligence in the supply chain, and I just use inventory as one, but you can think of it relative to planning. You can think of it relative to assortment residents during different seasons. Should I offer a pink jacket because of this type of season where it's going to be cold, but it's bright. So people are actually going to like the color pink more, or those kinds of things become super, super to me, exciting in terms of trends.Omar:And we're seeing it more, more, and more of the conversations are, how are you tying machine learning and artificial intelligence into your planning tools, into your commerce tools? And then we're being asked, how are you tying planning into execution? How are you bringing those two things together? So that to me is super, super exciting. I know it's exciting to you, Eugene too. We just flipped roles. We're excited about the same stuff. We're brothers from other mothers-Stephanie:[inaudible] get of my territory [inaudible].Eugene:No that's-Omar:Yeah, yeah. Exactly.Eugene:And to me to continue right to what Omar's mentioned is, to me that's almost like evolvement on visibility. So before many talks about control towers. So that's another kind of topic and now expectations are changing to say, look, from control tower and visibility I need to make it actionable. And how do you make actionable for all this visibility you actually apply in machine learning. And then if you make it actually can make it urgent and relevant to the current customer. So that's another trend that we see quite a lot now is saying, look, we have the control tower. We have this ability now, how do you make it actionable? My PO is not a writing for now another two months.Eugene:The couch discussion we had a little earlier, before we started would be good to practice practical notify customers saying that you probably do not get the couch and maybe recommend another couch or provide a different date. So of just showing this ability because of the supply chain now is being so rapidly changing, how do you react that the speed that consumer or businesses expect?Stephanie:So I have two thoughts there. First, I'm going to go with the training piece. Whenever people talk on machine learning, I obviously think it's going to blow everything out of the water. It's going to help a lot. But then I also think the people on the ground have a lot of that local knowledge where they know what's in style based off the people that come in. So how do we think about training the models where people can actually help with that and influence the outcome. So it's not just a computer guessing and applying the same algorithm to Austin versus Washington state. And then whereas people they're picking inventory, I'm thinking of these consignments jobs here who pick this awesome inventory and they're so close to what people in Austin want versus what someone in DC would want very different or San Jose. Omar, no one would want something that's here. Probably. How do you [inaudible] all that?Omar:We're weird too. We're weird [inaudible].Stephanie:We're all weird in our own way.Omar:Yeah, yeah. Come on, [inaudible].Stephanie:Very different kinds of weird. Yeah, how do you think about that customization piece and training so that people on the ground floor can help influence the outcome of those models?Eugene:Yeah. So a couple of things. So in general, and it lists in the industry, we work with people just don't trust machine learning to begin with. Part of the job security part of it is uncertainty. My favorite comment was one customer and we were trying to talk about machine learning and he said, look, Eugene, would you put your child in a school bus that's driven by machine learning? And that was a fair question-Stephanie:I would. I drive a Tesla, I'm all about it.Eugene:No. But he didn't ask about the car, he asked about school bus. A little bit more complex. So it was a tricky question, but a fair question. And I think the takeaway there is you need to build a system that users can trust. And there are various ways of doing it. One is training. So how much data you need? So very common question. I said, look, we don't have the data. You'll ask us for two years for some data, we don't have two years worth of data. And now it's actually worse because the last year of COVID data is very often useless.Stephanie:Yeah. We talked about this actually with Stitch Fix where she's like, we had the VP of data science come on. And it's just like, if we use this last year of data, we would have all the wrong models because everyone wants athleisure and yoga pants. And she's like, and that will not be the trend in the next year or two-Omar:In the next year.Eugene:[crosstalk] where they had stores closed all 2000 or 3000, whatever stores, the physical walls. So you can learn too much from that. So to your point, training, I couldn't think of more relevant than more right time question than now, about training. So you have to be very careful of what data use, what is [inaudible] they're used to train that, but also the way we think about that, we actually give users manual controls together with machine learning and a lot of insights onto machine. So we don't just spit out the data and say, well, trust us, that's the best way. But whenever we make a decision, we try to capture all the decision criteria that was used during the time. And it's almost like degenerated audit for it.Eugene:So that is the best way you found to build trust to people who use it try to business owners of those components to say, look, you made the decision because of that, or can I change few levers manually because I don't have the enough historical data. So then you are playing with some levers to begin with while you collecting historical data, and then you start trusting more and more the machine learning and you are adjusting those levers and say, look, now it's less manual and more automatic. So the rollout, the transition, the insights, all super important. And again, many of these are very urgent. We're talking about customers can say, look, in two months, I want this up and running. I may not have historical data.Eugene:So, there's always a combination. Enough historical data to train. So you say, look, we'll start training, you will start collecting the data, doing cleansing and whatever, but you have some manual ways to control it while you're building more and more trust to your machine learning data. Omar you want to add?Omar:No, no. I was just going to say, I mean, you hit the nail on the head and I think Stephanie, one of the issues again is, I think now the application of AI and ML in retail or in manufacturing or in the different industries, is relatively new and so are the solution providers [inaudible]. So to Eugene's point, giving transparency was a problem. In some cases, they thought that look, they aren't using my peers and even us to some degree. But that's not the case with us. But if I show what's happening on potentially exposing my solution to you, which frankly, is what you have to do. Because in order for me to trust you, to Eugene's point, I have to understand what you're doing, and why you're doing it, so that you build what Eugene highlighted which is confidence.Omar:And being able to say, hey, look, if you're not confident above 90% in this decision and I would argue your point on self-driving. If you can't drive this thing 99.9% to the rules of the road, I'm not going to trust you. I'm going to grab it. But if you can, and you prove to me that you can, and that you have, over the past year, you have, then you know what, yeah. I trust you. So the ability to actually understand and have the control of what it's doing, and be able to have the control of, yes, I want to accept you or no I don't, becomes critical to machine learning [inaudible] Yeah. Absolutely critical. And-Stephanie:Yes. And what I love about that it's leveling everyone up in the industry because then everyone is like a data scientist. Everyone is understanding the weighting of the different variables and how to play with it and put their own human element into it. I guess we're really leveling everyone up in the industry.Omar:And it's not creating it and the thing that I think is interesting is everybody says, hey, you know what, This is my secret vow, but the point is you get to innovate on top of it. You get to use data science to really create unique experiences for your target segment which could be different than your competitors target segment. That's how you get to differentiate as well. So the ability to truly understand your market, truly understand your supply chain, truly understand what you can improve within it becomes... Again, to me, I geek out with Eugene on that quite a bit. Because I just think it's super, super cool. That and same day delivery of course.Stephanie:I love that. I mean, it seems like transparency and visibility are the way forward in this industry. I'm even thinking about same day delivery. Does it matter? Does it not? Maybe depends on the industry but probably what matters most is the messaging behind that, of where is my package. It can be 20 days out in the future as long as I actually can go and look into that. Are you guys seeing some trends around companies really try to put everything forward when it comes to being very transparent around where things are, what the process looks like? So customers are like fully in the loop?Eugene:Yeah. I didn't. At some degree you summarized by Blue Yonder bought Yon tricks right in the company we founded. At the core of it is you have supply chain and when we got together, we said, look, if you take the supply chain and you bring up, which could be scary because it puts a lot of pressure on supply but if you bring it up, front and center, and make it transparent and visible, that's where the power is. So that the core that's really why we came together with Blue Yonder and Yon tricks to try to achieve that. It's also the technical side of me. That's where the complexities are because when you show this transparency, if you think of a supply chain, it historically tend to be more of a background jobs. So there's something in the background that gets your box out, et cetera.Eugene:Now, if you want to take all that and expose it front and center, it can no longer be a background. I cannot say, well, customer, I'll tell you where your order is in 30 minutes. I need to respond in five milliseconds maybe, because it needs to show on your mobile phone within some low millisecond response times. So the technical challenges to do that is actually quite interesting network excites us and we talk about it a lot is the architecture. You can't just take an old program that was written back in the day and say, look, now it's exposed to the front end. Now it's about sides. Now you can compete with Amazon. It doesn't form the plan. All my talks, quite a lot about some of those vertical integrated supply chain in the industry. So you may want to touch on that, but that's really irrelevant to what you said.Stephanie:[inaudible].Omar:Yeah. Yeah. I would start first, maybe Stephanie, with of what you said and I'm going to go back to machine learning for a second. In understanding customer behaviors, there is definitely a balance between what you're willing to deal with in terms of time and speed, and what you're willing to pay for depending on the product assortment, and what it is, and when it is, when you're buying it. So number one to your point, accuracy in reliability is absolutely tantamount to any kind of promises that I'm engaging in. And I think you're just seeing that across every retailer that's now trying to build it. Every reseller now, every retailer now, again another trend that you're seeing, you look at the product details page, guess what you're seeing now, order now get it tomorrow, order now, get it in 10 days, you're seeing dates now.Omar:You're not seeing date ranges anymore, five days, four days, you're seeing July Wednesday, July 3rd. To Eugene's point that now puts stress on the supply chain to make sure that that happens. But you're no longer seeing three to five business days. And if you are, they are actively looking at how do they make that a different proposition. And then to your point, there's analysis being done on the backend branching. Will Stephanie still buy this thing if the lead time is greater than this or not? Right from analyzing trends, do they know? For these type of products, I really need the offers same day delivery. I need to make sure that it's available within 24 hours and get it in our hands in three days. If it's more than three days or four days, or five days, she doesn't buy for abandonment and analyzing what that does to your shopping cart and behavior.Omar:So that's one, the second use to what Eugene was talking about is now, these different pillars of the supply chain, the power of being able to go deep within them to surface those promises, but then stitch them together. To actually provide a unique value proposition to you, and I'm going to say a word that people aren't going to like and influence your behavior to what I want you to do, becomes super powerful. As an example, I'm in the shopping cart, you have three items in your shopping cart. Those three, I understand that they're actually going to be expensive for me to fulfill, I can incent you and you've seen this with colds and others to go and pick up in store, and I'll give you a coupon. And I know that when you walk into the store, you attach more. But now I've actually connected two things that are typically not connected, which is, pricing and promotion, with delivery execution. Typically those are separate.Omar:And in the old world they were completely separate. Now I'm tying them together. So the ability to actually create these domain centric microservices, that are loosely coupled, that can work on their own, but then once I integrate them together they work seamlessly in the response times required, at the scale required because we're not talking about that yet. We haven't talked about that but one of the big things is build the internet, the website has an SLA of how quick things need to come back. And how high it needs to scale with execution systems, were not necessarily built for that. So being able to actually scale to those kinds of volumes while providing very deep intelligence on the supply chain, is not an easy problem. It is a problem we solve, we're very proud of the fact that we solved that, but it's not an easy problem to address.Omar:So the power of the domain centric microservices that can be a single call, regardless of who's calling it, the integration and the stitching between the two, coupled with the intelligence on top of it to understand what behavior you want, and what behavior I want from you becomes truly, in my opinion the secret to success.Stephanie:Yeah. I love the idea of stitching things together. It have made a perfect little model in my mind around what's happening. What are some of the... Maybe like one or two case studies of a company like Kohl's, or whoever you want to highlight coming in, getting all of this working together, and then being like, well, here's the results that happened in however long it took.Omar:Sure. So I think there's a couple of things here and Eugene, I'll rely on you. So one, industry examples, obviously Amazon. You see it all the time. As you think of... And again from a Blue Yonder customer perspective, you think of grocery, you think of all of the different, retail clients that we had at Yon tricks. They're all on this journey to connect and I use Petco as one of my key examples. You look at their ability to deliver. Not only commitments to their customers, but they've actually been able to make them things like, free same day delivery in certain markets and free one to two day delivery. It really helped them turn the corner where they rapidly added capabilities. So time to value becomes a very, very important on anything that's doing, because these transformation projects are huge, and they take a very long period of time.Omar:But if you think of what Petco has been able to do in a short period of time to highlight Petco in a minute, or again, we can talk industry wise about what Amazon has been able to do with whole foods and delivery, you can see Albertsons and Safeway and what they're doing right in terms of innovation there. But if I highlight Petco for a second, you look at the ability that they were able to turn on 1500 stores into ship from stores. They were able to, without going into all the detail but being able to do all of that and surface them into customer value at the time that customers needed it, and be able to pivot and even pivot strategies along the way as they were understanding customer behaviors, that becomes what makes me smile because that's exactly what we want these platforms to be able to do. And hopefully that answers a couple of key points. We can go deep on each but, yeah.Stephanie:That's great. I mean, pivoting is definitely seems like, you have to be able to do that in this day and age you got to be able to go quickly, move where your customers are going, because you never know what's coming next. When it comes to what's coming next I want to hear what do you guys think are the biggest disruptions coming into supply chain? What are you thinking around blockchain, or what other crazy ideas are you thinking, or like, this is going to come and impact everything. And Eugene, maybe this is your-Eugene:I'll start and then I'm not going to have it. Well, one part of [inaudible] is as it's known the Panasonic intense to acquire a Blue Yonder. And one interesting part of that, and that's primarily an industry. But somewhat related to that is edge. So you can do a lot with... So we talked about visibility, we talked about machine learning. The part is missing in all this equation and throughout the industry, is the edge intelligence. So now if you can see when customers walking into the store, and again, they're point solutions here and there. I don't think it's been as broad as we would like let's say, customer walks into the store. And you can just scan the face. And have understanding of the mood of the customer, what recommendations and what offers are there. On inventoring, again, knowing where the items are in real time, not just saying that, yes, the [inaudible] is arriving 20 days from now.Eugene:But actually have a sensor on that specific item and knowing that it's going from China to maybe west coast on the truck to Minneapolis somewhere. So with the edge data, you can machine learning and visibility and all this execution becomes on steroids. That's one trend that I think we'll evolve quite a bit machine learning in general. We'll just spread out. On top of the execution side, automation is a big one, again, we think about it in the context of an edge. So you come to the store to pickup and you have this bag automatically available to you. It's rolled out on a robot. So those few Omar, you want to add a few more?Omar:No, no. I think you spot-on. I mean, even if I expand what Eugene just said, think about freshness as well where I actually can use the edge technology via temperature sensors to actually tell you how fresh a particular product is. And if somebody takes it off of a shelf, I'm automatically replenishing either from my back room or creating an order because you know what, my plan of what I was going to be replenished has now spiked given the demand because it was hotter in a given area. So using weather and different spikes that may occur. So when you think of edge, and when you think of applying other intelligence in like sensors, robotics, those kind of things, automation process efficiency become key. On the other side of that when you think about the customer engagement and being able to truly reach the customer, to me, what becomes super, super exciting is you think of getting people products and we're already seeing it which was interesting is that, a couple of years ago, being able to see delivery day was a big deal.Omar:Now, you're able to select time, "Hey, I want it between this time and this time." And I don't think that going to go away. I think that you're going to see brands do everything they can to look at a customer's lifetime value and pull out all the stops relative to engagement. And how I engage with you, whether it's the stuff that I talked about relative to coupons, relative to loyalty programs, relative to same day delivery, time slots, all of those kinds of things, but being able to truly understand my customer lifetime value with a customer and be able to cater specific needs around them. Also, becomes a second key trend that I believe you're going to see all the companies moving to, and you've already seen some of it with loyalty programs and other things and differentiated benefits as a result. So I think those two, I mean, I think we're very excited and obviously I've already told you, I'm super excited about how things stitch together.Omar:And we're actively building those stitch components. Real time demand, into planning, into the internet of things, to understand and edge, to understand what's actually happening collaboration with suppliers in real time, so that you can actually order and adjust plans dynamically, extend your assortment as needed, their little like I could geek out for a very long time, but there's a lot I think that is going to come in this supply chain that you'll see over time. And it's all catered around making Stephanie's life easier when she's buying her couch. Right?Stephanie:All right. So the one thing I also want to bring up, you mentioned earlier about an acquisition and I wanted to touch on that because you guys are interesting. You worked at Yon tricks before you had the company Yon tricks before you got acquired by Blue Yonder. And now Panasonic is looking to acquire Blue Yonder for, I think it was $7.1 billion with a B. I want to hear about that journey because that's very fun. And I haven't had many companies on the show. You can talk about that.Eugene:Yes. That's quite interesting, with a year ago, exactly a year ago, because it was in July, Yon tricks was acquired by Blue Yonder. And this was an interesting transition exciting a little bit nervous, et cetera. But we were able... The acquisition was the strategy was of investment and growth. It was very well understood the supply chain needs to have this transparency to the customer, bring it to the front end, et cetera, from commerce perspective. And that was pretty much investment going forward. And I guess we are little bit fortunate within the Blue Yonder because other parts of the Blue Yonder obviously didn't go through that acquisition, but we just did. And so we understand the process maybe a little bit better. It's a little bit fresh in our minds. I'm very excited actually about Panasonic, because to me that looks very similar trend, but like you said, on a much bigger scale.Eugene:It's a investment strategy clearly, it's a growth strategy, and bringing the supply chain with the edge, arrived with the sound of the automation, bringing it all together. It's very exciting. So to me, we were the micro experiment within the Blue Yonder and now that becomes a macro experiment between Panasonic and Blue Yonder. So again, you'll find me as one of the most optimistic people. Whenever there's acquisition, people are always a little bit nervous and concerned. But because we just went through the journey and whatever we were able to achieve in one year, it would be absolutely impossible to achieve the same without the acquisition because when we were a startup, we were self-funded and we could grow organically, et cetera, but just with this acquisition It accelerated up. And now I see that. And I'm imagining you are assuming everything goes as planned as announced the possibility there is quite exciting.Stephanie:Omar, anything to add?Omar:think it's very, very exciting. I would say we were that micro spark into a rich strategy that I think the region leadership team at Blue Yonder had in terms of where they see the industry going and I think it's a testament to their vision. So, I mean, again, a Panasonic acquisition, if you think about it, traditionally, it would be like a supply chain company coming together with Panasonic. How does that make sense? But then when you think about the application opportunities within manufacturing, the ports importation within the four walls of a retail facility or store, warehousing, robotics, all of that kind of thing. It makes a lot of sense. So I think I'm very excited about it.Omar:I think again, to your point and to Eugene's point we've written a wave that's been tremendously fun for us. Eugene and I worked together at target and Yon tricks and beyond. So being able and the greater Yon tricks' team which was a family coming into the Blue Yonder family and being welcomed as well as we were. And then now being a part of this new chapter in this new journey and being able to help write those stories. Yeah. It's very humbling and it's a very fun thing to be part of, to be honest. It's pretty cool.Eugene:And that ties back to [inaudible] again, what you're talking about, the edge With Panasonic financial, the other part of it, you asked, what are the new trends? The other trend and I forgot to mention last time is B2C moving to B2B in terms of expectations. So now when we in a B2B if I'm in a manufacturing facility and I'm ordering PLS. I'm in the IT department, I'm ordering servers, et cetera, the expectations of those consumer shops so much on the retail websites, which are putting all new capabilities, we don't expect any more to... We are shopping at some against some ERP system. We just blue screens or whatever else.Eugene:So this whole digital revolution It's capturing B2B now. And that's, we really see it accelerating whether it's direct to consumer from the manufacturer. So whether it's a B2B or all these other flavors. The three PLS, et cetera, this digital revolution is taking over from what we've seen in B2C, what we all as people just used to and spreading around there. And I think that's also quite exciting. And with Panasonic empowering some of that makes it even more powerful.Stephanie:Yes. I love that. And you definitely see that in all the industries too are trying to approach B2B in the same way they're doing B2C and some industries that's perfect. And some maybe not, but awesome. Well, it's been a pleasure having you both on such a fun round table, such a good vibe, where can people hear more or learn more about Blue Yonder and you guys?Eugene:Thank you Stephanie for your time.Omar:Yeah. So Stephanie, obviously through our website Eugene and I, of course are all over. So, also LinkedIn, people can feel free to ping us there. As well as through again our Blue Yonder website and the different category pages of the different solutions that they need. So that's definitely available, but this has been a lot of fun. Thank you very, very much for your time.Stephanie:Of course, thank you guys.
Most people probably know Cuisinart because of the company's kitchen appliances like the food processor, air fryer, or coffee maker. Cuisinart's products are everywhere — in kitchens around the world, in retail stores, and yes, online. In the last year or so, Cuisinart has put a much greater emphasis on the DTC part of the business -- walking the tightrope of being there for retail partners, while still making sure that there is enough inventory to meet the demand coming from online. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Mary Rodgers, the Director of Marketing Communications for Cuisinart, explains the steps the company took to make the pivot to DTC without leaving retail partners in the lurch. Mary also talked about how the marketing and online pushes for products went from being planned out months in advance to changing from one day to the next. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:From Months To Weeks To Days: Sometimes, the world moves so fast that planning in months-long cycles places you at a disadvantage. When demand, retailer needs, and inventory is shifting at a rapid pace, you need to come up with a plan that allows you to stay ahead of the curve, even if that means changing strategies from one day to the next.Eyes On Your Own Paper: Some brands will look to their competitors to see what influencers they are working with or how they are running their campaigns, and then they will try to copy that approach. While this is tactical, it is not strategic because you are placing blind trust in another brand's team and vision without even knowing if what they did paid off. You have to do your own homework and think about your customers' needs and build a strategy around that rather than just trying to keep up with the Joneses.More Than Just A Product: Brands have to think beyond the products they sell and understand how the customers will be using those products. Often, especially in housewares, consumers will be using one product in concert with another or as part of a recipe. By understanding the life of the consumer beyond purchase and coming up with content to connect with consumers after the fact, brands can create a more fruitful and loyal relationship with their customers.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show, we have Mary Rodgers who currently serves as the director of marketing communications at Cuisinart. Mary, welcome.Mary:Hi, I'm so glad to be here today and join you. I'm really excited about talking all things marketing.Stephanie:Yes. I can not wait. So I'd love to kind of, before we get into Cuisinart and your role there, I want to hear a bit about your background and how you even entered the world of housewares and cookware and all of that.Mary:So back in the day, I actually worked for a retailer and they worked in the housewares department and I went up through the ranks there getting to the level of assistant DM. And so that wasn't my favorite thing is, was involving a lot of scheduling people and logistics. And that was kind of my foray into the home goods' area. And then I also did work for publisher for short period of time because my background was basically literature and journalism up to that point when I was studying in college. And then I transitioned into marketing at that point in the publishing world.Stephanie:Okay, cool. And when did you get introduced to the role at Cuisinart?Mary:So I worked for a company who is much more of a legacy company. I work for a company called Farberware. They were really well known. They had a manufacturing facility in the Bronx. And they basically did everything there. We did product development, engineering. It was a really great learning experience. And my previous boss, I worked for another company called Dansk, who is now owned by Food52, they just bought them recently.Stephanie:Cool.Mary:And my boss there went to Farberware and he asked me to join him there. And then that got sold and dismantled in '96. And I had always had Cuisinart on my radar. I thought it was a really great up and coming young, kind of small organization that I felt had a lot of growth potential, which turned out to be true. And so I actually reached out to them. And I didn't know it at the time, but they were looking to fill a marketing communications position for quite a long time. Their previous person in the job had left. So I was the only candidate. But they loved my background and obviously my experience in housewares and also the fact that I had pretty deep product development experience. That wasn't the direction I wanted to go in permanently. I mean, I'm glad I know that process and I've done it, but my real expertise is marketing communications.Mary:So it's really interesting because when I joined in '96, as you can imagine was very, they really hadn't done any real marketing, not much advertising. They just really were just scrappy entrepreneurs. I think of ourselves, is that still today, but for different reasons. And it was like, the media channels then were like five channels unlike today. So obviously, as you can imagine over time, things have changed dramatically compared to when I first started, when we were so focused on things print advertising. And we matured into things like understanding the value of TV advertising. I actually built a model for the company to show them the impact of TV advertising on sales and trajectory that you can get from that.Mary:And so we forayed into that and really started building out, strengthen multiple channels and not just one. And so, today obviously it's like a whole new world. And I also like to say I consider myself a modern day marketer because there's so many things you have to be, not just aware of, but understand, now that you didn't then. It's kind of like, back in the day, you knew what the impact was on business, but now you really know what it is because you have hard data, where in the past you would rely on your retailers or sell through retailers. And so things are much, much more sophisticated now. And you also have many different avenues to test and learn too.Stephanie:Yeah. Seems like too, over the past couple of years, I mean, especially the past year, I'm sure everything's had to be rethought, replanned and planning cycles kind of go out the window. Annual plans turn into quarterly, turned into daily. And how did you guys adapt to that, the changing consumer preferences of all of a sudden people are at home, they're cooking, they need all the things to make the recipes? And I'm sure a lot of things had to change on your side as well to going to keep up with that.Mary:Yeah. One of the biggest challenges we had in the last, basically year and a half, the challenges are similar now, but for different reasons. So basically, we keep our eye very closely on trends. And when I get up in the morning, I'm reading all kinds of articles and information and just everything changes on a dime now. So you have to be on top of it all the time, but we also started to hear things from our retailers, like they were looking for goods that they maybe weren't looking for before, like bread makers, waffle makers, more coffee makers, coffee grinders because people during the time when lots of places were closed, they still wanted a great cup of coffee. They had to make it for themselves basically.Mary:So what happened for us was, and I'm really very proud of our team on this because it took a lot more effort because in the past we didn't have to worry about like, "We're out of inventory of this, we're out of inventory that. We sold out every last ice cream maker we had." In the past, we always knew we had stock and buffer stock and we never had to drill down. If we knew something was out of stock, it wasn't like 10 or 12 items, might be one-offs or something. So we ended up going from an annual planning phase to quarterly, to monthly, to weekly, to daily. And we spent a lot more time and effort on operational issues, just moving inventory to our D2C business, which became a whole hoo-ha.Mary:And then also just making sure that we had inventory. We at least had certain amount of retailers that had inventory of an item. And with every marketing program we did, we did that. So it took a lot of juggling. We had to push things out. We had to keep our eye on incoming inventory when it was going to be available, when retailers were going to have it. And so it became very tactical to be completely honest with you. Like something that you think is your strategic, but it doesn't matter, at the end of the day, you're going to have all the strategy you want if you don't have the goods, right?Stephanie:Yeah.Mary:And we also, I personally noticed this with some of our retail partners, because a lot of the retail partners in the very beginning went into complete shut down. They shut the stores down. But they can't easily turn things off. And so they were running campaigns for things they had no product, which is the one thing that makes me crazy is to know people are spending time, money, effort, and resources marketing something that you can't sell because you're not going to convert if you don't have it. So whatever data you do get is not going to be very valuable at all. And then it becomes no history. Right?Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).Mary:So you look back at that program, and you're like, "Well, it didn't do well." And then you have to remember all the things around it that happened. The reason why it didn't do well. And then you just wasted a lot of effort for no-Stephanie:No return.Mary:... benefit.Stephanie:Yeah. So when thinking about a daily planning process, what were some of the key lessons when you look back, you're like, "Oh, this would have helped make it easier," and are you still doing that today right now? Because that sounds insane, looking every day at the trends and hearing from the market and being like, "Oh, people want this, and now it's shifting here and we need a marketing campaign around this." And also getting all the backend right and making sure that you've got the inventory and it's all tied together. How would you set it up today? And would you still advise on daily planning processes?Mary:Yeah. So I would say to you, it's not the way we like to do things. But it was just, we just didn't want to be spending time, money, and effort on something that wasn't going to produce for us. So we felt it was necessary. And I would still do it today because we were, I mean, we are nimble. So the fact that we could say, "Hey, bread makers are doing really well right now. Let's make sure we're making people aware that we have bread makers and we're selling them." And I mean, that was not that big of a challenge for us, but when we ran out of bread makers, I had to say to our team, I'm like, "Well, you know what? Even though you don't have a bread maker, you can still mix dough in a food processor or you can use one of our stand mixers." And so change the storyline basically and look at it from a different direction.Mary:Or the other thing we did is when there was a yeast shortage start giving people ideas on other things that you can make that don't have yeast without having to go into the whole sourdough trend which would have been, not exactly making bread today. Right?Stephanie:Yeah. I love that. That's like, making do with what you got and just shifting the storyline. I mean, because I think the amount of searches I've always put in to be the replacement for soy sauce, the replacement for eggs, and really leaning into that trend of being like, "We can't help you here, however, you don't even need that thing. And now maybe you do need it." How do you get your team thinking in that kind of mindset? Because I'm imagining when you come to daily planning processes, you really have to decentralize the entire team structure to let them make these quick moves and throwing campaigns and setting them free to do what they know is best.Mary:Yeah. So I mean, my style, my leadership style, I'm not a micromanager. I don't believe in micromanagement. My personal belief is that when you empower your team to own their business, they're more committed to it. And so that's the approach I take, but I'm definitely involved in all aspects of the business and guiding them in those ways. Trying to help them think a little bit differently about their approach. But at the end of the day, they're the ones coming up with the alternative content based on those comments. I'm not the one doing that. I'm definitely letting them own all of that themselves. And we work with a lot of external agency partners. So we work really, really closely with them and they are also working with each other.Mary:So it's not a siloed system, basically. All our agency partners know each other. We are really good at making sure that we're having constant lines of communication open based on whatever's happening in our business. And also down to any aspect of marketing that we're using to promote product. And then the only thing I would other say is that you had asked me earlier about what's changed compared to last year? So I'm sure you've heard that the marketplace, the supply chain marketplace is still highly disrupted, but for different reasons now. So the reasons now are basically raw material shortages, huge increases in the price of containers, cost of containers.Mary:And most people in the durable goods category, they are bringing goods into the country. And then a lot of people are spending time trying to diversify their supply chain in order that they're not heavily reliant on one point of reference for their goods. But that's also something that can't happen overnight. That's something that has to be, it's long-term. That's a longterm position. But we're already hearing in the marketplace that some competitors are basically not going to have inventory of certain items. It's not going to happen. So we also then look at those opportunities and try to capitalize on those opportunities because if we do have supply of similar product in the same category, we are going to try to help out our retailers and make sure that we get them supply to fill those holes for them. And so our team, we have a decent-sized planning team that work really closely with the division heads to make sure that they're focusing on the items that have the greatest need.Stephanie:So how do you create a open conversation with retailers or other partners to figure out what they're missing? Because it seems like in a way, once you would structure a partnership where they're like, "Oh, you always give me bread makers. That's what I know you for." I would think that they wouldn't think like, "Oh, I should share that I also need this isn't this," because they're so tunnel vision on like, "My partner does this with me." So how do you even go about developing that relationship? Or they will say, "Here's some gaps right now in inventory that we just can't get, can you help us?"Mary:Yeah. I mean, that happened last year. So those conversations were had over the last year and a half. And our sales team works very closely with their retail partners. And so they're having those conversations on an ongoing basis. And it also helps out our retailers and it also instills us as making sure that we're helping them protect their business too, because I'm sure you realize this, if you went around six months ago and you went into some of the retail establishments you would see empty shelves and you would see big places in the home goods' area, where there was not a lot to purchase in person.Mary:And so those are ongoing for us because we also work really close with them planning ahead because encouraging them to make sure that they get their forecasting done months in advance so that we can buy against that forecast and protect their orders so that they have good supplies, especially as we go into the back half of this year, which for us, my team calls it our Super Bowl because that's our peak season basically. And so we want to make sure that all the stars align. And our marketing is pushing the items that we can focus on, but we also make sure that, like I said, inventory is essential for us.Stephanie:Well, if that's so, is there anything, any big bets that you guys have made, or that you're implementing right now, especially around supply chain or something that's just totally different than how you used to do things, and you're not really sure about the outcome, but you think you're ahead of the game? Because I've heard a lot of people come on the show and talk about this as a big issue and there's room for disruption in the whole logistics and supply chain and warehousing and all of that, but I haven't heard many people be like, "We're doing it this way now and it's working." Or, "We're going to explore it this way. And we think there might be opportunity around adjusting these things."Mary:Yeah. I mean, I have those conversations all the time. It's like, "Okay, we need to get our fall marketing plan locked down," because, and you know this, it's not something you turn on in a day. It has to be those big campaigns, tent-pole type things are planned months in advance. And so I was already having those conversations a month ago, basically like, "These are the items I think we should focus on, but I also need to have confidence that we can have product." So we honed in on the items that we're pretty sure that we can generate demand, but also have appropriate supply of goods. And we're also making sure that we are doing some other things which involve our retailers, like aligning our retailers so that they are working in the same playbook we are because it's, I call it compounding interest. That's kind of how I look at it.Mary:I tell our sales team, "Look, if you were smart, you would take advantage of this. This is what we're working on. And we were very transparent about it with our retail partners and our sales team, because the more we're all pushing in the same direction, we are going to be more successful." And we're also doing a lot of other things like digital audits and making sure that our digital shelf, not just for ourselves, but for our retail partners are clean and tidy and neat and organized the right way and they have the right data specs and content and all of the things that they need to make sure that they're successful on their side. So it's not just about the marketing that we're doing, but it's the support that we provide to the sales team and the retail partners that extend basically.Mary:And like I said, I call it compounding because for every one of those partners I can get in line, the more powerful the campaigns are across the board.Stephanie:Yup. I mean, I definitely understand that. It's like, "Why wouldn't you all be kind of rowing towards the same end point? If you guys are having a big campaign push why wouldn't they also invest in the same thing instead of having diverse efforts?" What are some of the biggest gaps that you see on retailer websites when you're saying you want to make sure it's clean and tidy, they have all the right information. What are some big missing pieces that when you go in and you do your digital audits, you're like, "Ah, once again, you're missing this or you're doing it this way. And we know that it's best to do it this way." Because I'm sure you're not the only one who is struggling or finds those kind of things on the retailers websites.Mary:Yeah. So basically our focus has been along naming conventions and search. Those are the two things that we've put a lot of effort into. So on-site search for retailers, every retailer could be using a different partner for search or self-developed search, or however doing it, it's just that, it could be different for every retailer. So that has been a big focus for us. And then the other thing too is making sure that any content that we're developing much more. So in the lifestyle area, that we are making that content available for all of our retailers and sharing out because that's become a big, I don't want to say burden, but it's been, every retailer has different specifications. Like, "I want seven lifestyle images and I want this and I only take this size and only take that size." And just the whole logistics end of it because as retailers are not developing content for every product that they sell on their digital shelf. They're not doing that. They're repurposing content.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, how do you know, first if they're using it, using it in the correct way? And also, do you see them putting their own spin on it? Because there's been a few times when I've seen, maybe I go to Cuisinart and I'm like, "Oh, that was an epic video product placement." I just associate it with you guys potentially. And then maybe I go to, I don't know, HomeGoods and same content. And I go to Macy's, same content. And then you start being like, "Wait, who started this content?" I've seen that happen a few times with brands where they're all reusing the same stuff. Are you encouraging your partners to repurpose it, put your own spin on it, put your own voice on it, use it how you see best fit, or are you just like, "Here's the box that you need to work within?"Mary:Yeah. So how we protect ourselves against that is we develop our own custom content for ourselves. So that's how we set ourselves apart.Stephanie:You're the original. You like [crosstalk]?Mary:Yeah, instead of... I mean, sure, you realize this is duplication of that, it doesn't necessarily help with SEO related things. But retailers have so many products and they're so big. When you think about, what one retailer, or how many SKUs they have online versus an in-store environment, they're heavily reliant on brands to use that content there. They're just not going to develop that themselves. The sheer amount of resources that they need to do that is, it's not going to happen basically. And obviously we've put more emphasis on it ourselves because not only, do they need the content, but we need more content ourselves because we're not just using the content on our website, we're developing it for social, for digital, for every avenue, for work that we do through our PR agency. It's used in every channel.Mary:But like I said, the way that we differentiate in that area is that we are also developing custom content for ourselves. And we do also have retailers that they will change up their hero copy and this and that. I mean, when we do those audits, we also make sure that the information is correct and they don't go off the deep end. Stephanie:Yup. Yup. I can imagine there being a lot of value in what they're seeing on their side around the kinds of content that's working. Maybe they're getting some kinds of content from you in one way, and then different styles from another brand. Is there any data sharing there where they give feedback of like, "Oh, we see this toothbrush brand doing this and it's working really well. Our customers like this." Do they ever share that feedback and then help you rethink the content that you all are headed or going to create?Mary:Yeah, interesting that has never happened, but what we have done ourselves is that we obviously keep our eye on what content performs best and then we produce more of that type of content. So like most brands, user-generated content tends to perform much better. We work with a lot of influencers who obviously built custom content for us. And that's the stuff that performs much better than... I'm not saying our stuff doesn't perform, but in comparison, that material. It's also, somebody, it's brand appropriate, it has the proper brand essence to it, but consumers like to see other people's material and they gravitate towards it. And they're more engaged in it. And so we put more of a focus.Stephanie:Yeah. Are there any big bets that you all are making in marketing campaigns or content that you're like, "This might not pay off or this could be taken the wrong way, but we're going for it?"Mary:I mean, not really in that sense, but in the sense of social shopping, we're putting more of a focus on social shopping and being able to track that. And we also just launched a campaign and we had positive ROI on it. So that's where everything's going. It's like making sure you have a positive ROI that you are testing and learning and being able to quantify. It's the benefit of the digital world. You can actually see the results of your efforts and what they produce.Stephanie:So earlier you mentioned influencers. And that's something on the show that I've heard a lot of mixed reviews around of what's an influencer? Who actually classifies as that? When does it deliver results? And how are you guys going about finding the right influencers and partnering the way that you get a long-term ROI?Mary:Yeah. So we've been working in this area for quite a long time. We don't focus on celebrity influencers. That's not our thing. We are most interested in aesthetic and brand alignment and also the fact that our consumers are very oriented around food and food is a big part of their life and they're very interested in recipe ideas and things like that. So we have a whole, we've developed an entire set of guidelines for influencers and also for any work that we're doing in social media for ourselves and for our licensed partners.Mary:And we have also over time found a few influencers that we've had ongoing partnerships with instead of one-offs. I'm sure a lot of people that you talk to talk about where this is going, where the influencer marketing field is going, because obviously there's a lot more brands using it in comparison to even one or two years ago. It also, when you get into that situation, you can be driving a pricing and a few other things. And those are all obviously concerns for everybody. And then also the fact that you also want to have separation with competitive brands which is a big concern. And we stay on top of all of that.Mary:We're not currently using a platform to vet influencers. We don't do that. We work with our PR agency Magrino, and they are basically doing the research and handpicking appropriate influencers. I mean, they know our guidelines and they know what we're looking for. And we also work with the influencer and also get their stats from them and making sure that they're in line. We also get contacted by a lot of people directly through our social channels, or even just through email wanting to partner with us and we explore all those opportunities, but at the end of the day, it also has to align with our needs and our guidelines and also the needs of our consumer.Stephanie:Yeah. We've heard quite a few brands saying, "Anyone can be an influencer essentially, and it's not the big celebrities of the world anymore. It's anyone who has even a couple of thousand followers, if those followers are engaged and ready to buy." Are you seeing those more, the micro influencers working better than just, like you said, you don't even go for celebrities? So what do you look for when you're trying to find someone who's going to be a good fit for the brand and also deliver good results?Mary:Yeah. I mean, our biggest thing is engagement. That's what we are interested in. We're interested in engagement. We also have a certain level of followers that we're interested in, not in the small thousands per se, but those are all key vetting points for us. And then also we check their handle, make sure that the work that they're doing is aligned with what our consumers want to see also. We don't want to see overly promotional. We want to see some separation. We also want to see, like I said, engagement is a key factor for us too.Stephanie:Yeah. And it seems like that's where the world as a whole is headed around organic content, authentic UGC, not the way that it used to be even just a couple of years ago around, you see a channel, wherever it was and being like, "Oh, obviously their whole goal here is just to sell, sell, sell." I rarely see that working anymore. And if you see people doing that, they quickly start falling down the ranks of, "Why am I even here if you're just selling this one haircare product the entire time, and there's no other content. I don't feel connected with that." So it seems like everything's kind of shifting in that direction.Mary:Yeah, it definitely is. And people want to be inspired. That's why they're on these channels. They want to be inspired, they want to educate themselves a lot of times. People are very visually inspired and they want to... I mean, I even know myself the types of things that I use social media for, it's education too. It's about, I happen to study Italian, so I'm very oriented. I follow a lot of people in Italy and cookbook authors and things like that. And I'm there to learn. I'm there to be inspired by their knowledge and the recipe ideas. And it doesn't matter, it just matters what the consumer's passionate about. And that's what you have to deliver to them. They don't want to be hammered over the head every day with, "Buy my blah, blah." I mean, that's not why they're there. And then, as you said, what happens is over time they tune out.Stephanie:Yup. Are there any, what maybe some would call competitors that you'd be open to being shown up against, because I see that being a world where you're like, "Oh, I really want this influencer. They're really big in the food scene, but they also use a semi-competitor products." Are you all okay with that? Or are you like, "Oh, it has to be semi-exclusive," or, "You can't feature other competitors on your channel as well."Mary:Yeah. We wouldn't do that.Stephanie:You wouldn't do that? That's hard no.Mary:We're too competitive.Stephanie:Yep. Hey, I like it. That's great.Mary:Yeah. I mean, we even go to the point where we, "When you're taking photos, we don't want to see competitive product in the photo." I mean, and I assume people over time also do the same thing. But yeah, we're very competitive. We want to see separation. We don't want to work with somebody who is like, been all over every competitor known to man. And hey, I know for a fact that people probably go on our channel and see who we're working with and use us as a free game for not having to find their own influencers for all I know, and we don't do that. We don't do that at all. I would not encourage that. That's kind of the lazy man's way out. But yeah, we don't do that.Stephanie:That's not a long game [crosstalk].Mary:No, it's a short game. And the thing is, it's like, if you're in this for the long haul, you're going to do it from a strategic perspective and not a tactical perspective. And to me, that's tactical because you're assuming whatever I'm doing is going to work for you. And your brand's, different brand. Your consumers have different needs and wants. That's what you need to focus on.Stephanie:Yeah. And it's putting way too much trust in another team that you don't even know what they're talking about. Why they're doing that. You don't even know what they're partnering with that person.Mary:And the other thing is, you don't even know what the stats are, how it produced, how it performed. I mean, now at the end of the day, you really don't. So we don't do that. It's not even in my mindset to be completely honest with you, but I'm not saying that other people don't take that tactic.Stephanie:Yeah. Yeah. Got it. Earlier you were talking about creating these shoppable experiences. And before the show, I mentioned also headless commerce and you're like, "Oh, I mean, is that even a term anymore? We've been doing that forever." I want to hear what you guys are seeing around what some would still say is a trend. And we've had some people be like, "That's not even a thing," or, "It's here to stay." And I'd love to hear your perspective since you guys are the maybe OGs in this. You've already been doing it.Mary:And it was one of those things where we did it for a different reason. Well, it was similar reason, but different. So this is like years ago, our shopping cart aspect of our website is completely separate from the web property and the reason it was done like that was that we were working with a fulfillment company. We've been selling direct-to-consumer for years and years. It's just that we use a fulfillment company. Consumer have this shopping experience on our website, but the orders were sent to a fulfillment organization. They fulfilled them. And we kept the consumer in our ecosystem because I wanted it to be able to own the data.Mary:So this was like more forward-thinking. Now, this is like all the trend. People are like, first-party data, first-party data, but that's how I protected my first-party data years ago. And so in a way, thank God I did it because when we wanted to bring the D2C business back in-house in late 2018, I didn't have to restructure my entire website. I basically just had to plug in a shopping cart basically at that point. And then last year in the middle of the year, we transitioned our entire web property to Episerver, it's a DXP, and still kept the shopping cart separate. And what we ended up doing, it was you made as much of the site [CMSable] as possible so that the marketing team can virtually do any day-to-day operation that we need to change a price, add a new product, build a landing page. We just finished building out blocks so that we can build custom landing pages. We can literally do anything ourselves.Mary:And so the idea was we wanted to be a masters of our own domain basically, because in our previous situation we used one web development company and they did everything for us. And unfortunately, over time as the brand became more mature, it didn't make sense for us anymore because we really needed experts. We needed experts in SEM, SEO. We needed experts in web development, in the latest best platform to use. And we also wanted to be more in control of our business. So we didn't have to open a ticket with IT. And the SDP emails me, is like, "Hey, I think we changed the price on blah, blah, blah, can you fix it on the website?" I'm like, "On the fly." Kids do it in 10 seconds, and not even... So this way we're in control of our destiny, basically. We're not heavily reliant on any one thing or any one agency. And this way also, if we decide to change agencies, we're not stuck.Mary:And that's one of the things that is really important for us and for our business. And not having to get in line at the deli stand. No seriously, I say I'm a point A to point B person. I don't want to have to go through five people to do something. I want to be able to control my destiny and the destiny of the company and the brand. And that's how I look at it. And that's how, it's more work for us because now instead of dealing with one agency, we're dealing with multiple agencies, but that's what's best for the company. And that's what's best for the brand because when you get to a certain level, you need to be reliant on experts in the field.Mary:And this is where vertical integration is not necessarily the best thing for your business. And so it depends. I know some people are all up for vertical integration, but what happens over time is when you're not continually developing those people and making sure they stay best in class and they only have one client, you get denigration over time, basically, in my opinion.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, there's no incentives to keep doing better and better if you're getting paid the same amount to, essentially, if you can make it less work. And I mean, and they're not going out to the market and shopping it and doing our piece. They're like, "This is what we got right here. I'm doing a flat line thing for anyone." Obviously it's like, "Would have stepped in with our hand." But I mean, I also think about it's the company, the age of the company and where they're at in that life cycle. And it seems like it always starts with, you've got the founders and then it's very dispersed and you're hiring all these agencies and, "I need social, I need this, I need that." And it's all over the place. And then you start to bundle it back up again and bring things in-house.Stephanie:At what point do you think that companies should start considering pulling things back in-house, controlling their own destiny a bit more and not relying on just one or two agencies to control what's happening and where they have to wait in line at the deli stand, as you'd say?Mary:Yeah. I mean, I think it depends on your business because for where we are and where the brand is now, it's more important for us to be working with what I call best in class. And the thing is, unless your organization is continually investing in talent and adding head count and all those things that companies are not necessarily looking to do. The sheer amount of people you need to keep that train running is probably unreasonable. And so for me, I can't even imagine us bundling this all back and bringing it in-house. I just think our needs are greater than that at this point. But I'm not saying it'll never happen. Things change every day, but at the end of the day in my experience, when you have some of these in-house organizations, it slows down your business. It's slow. It's like, "Okay, here's a common service area. There's nine divisions. And we all have to use the same point, the entry and get in line."Mary:And it's like, things never happened. It's like the slow boat. It's not easy. And the other thing too, is what ends up happening sometimes with organizations is, "Let's have so-and-so do it." And they have no expertise, they have no experience, they have no knowledge. And so that person's not really the right one to be there, but they're handed the thing and it's not necessarily the best outcome. So for me right now, I'm not intending on rebundling and bringing anything back. And first of all, the sheer lift on that would be insane. And you're also talking-Stephanie:And you also let the team go and hire too, which I love. I mean, the team be on a find a cool vendor and find a cool agency to work with it, and maybe executives would have never had time to even stumble on. I mean, that's how we even got our start with Salesforce, was one team within Salesforce betting on us and being like, "Let's try this company. It's small, but they want to make a podcast. Let's go for it and partner with them." And just getting that one opportunity to then spread within the company and do a good job and prove yourself. I think that's how a lot of innovation can happen by just letting the teams go and source those cool opportunities or companies to partner with.Mary:And the other thing too, is you have to remember when you're working with agency partners, they have other clients that you learn from. They are bringing you ideas that they've seen possibly be successful with other clients in completely different industries. And so there's a lot of built-in advantage there. There's built in knowledge, there's built in advantage. I also think that they understand our business. We're teaching them over time, our business. And so they're invested in it. They're invested in making sure that we're successful and we're doing the same. I think sometimes when you vertically integrate, the motivations may be different. And there's maybe not necessarily that hunger over time. And so depending on what that situation is like internally depends on how successful that is.Stephanie:Yep. I totally agree. Love it. All right. Well, let's shift over to the lightning round. Lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Mary?Mary:I'm ready.Stephanie:Awesome. All right. So pull out your crystal ball, what one thing will have the biggest impact on e-commerce in the next year?Mary:I think social selling.Stephanie:Yeah? Tell a bit more. What are you thinking?Mary:Well, because it's a new channel. It's getting to the point where we have ways to prove it out. I believe that it's definitely a new area. When I look at statistics in social selling, it's like the last year, I think it's like 57% of the consumers bought something off social office, social channel. I mean, that's a big opportunity as far as I'm concerned.Stephanie:Yeah. That's where I source a lot of everything, by Instagram, TikTok, I'm like, "Oh, cute shirt, cute outfit. That makeup set, you said, that's good? Okay. I trust you." Yeah. I definitely agree on that. What is your favorite Cuisinart product outside of the air fryer? And me, I was like, "I know she's going to say that again."Mary:That is by far my favorite product, but I have several. So we have a product called the griddler which we've had in the line for a really long time. We have a couple of new versions of it. And so that's, now I'm going to go into the pitch, but-Stephanie:Do it. Do [crosstalk].Mary:It's an indoor grill. It has, basically, can take you from breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It has reversible plates. You can make a panini. And the great thing about it as the plates go right in the dishwasher. So you make a meal in minutes and there's little cleanup. So that's another one of my favorite products. And I couldn't start my day without my Cuisinart single-serve coffee maker. We have multiple coffee makers in this house, but don't judge me, I happen to work for a company that makes a lot of great ones, but we use the single-serve one when we're in hurry, but we also use a grind and brew when we want to linger over a pot. So definitely coffee would be, can't start my day without it.Stephanie:Wow. So many products you need to invest in. I don't even know where to start. Great. What is one brand that you watch that helps you stay creative or innovative, or you keep an eye on what they're doing? And it does not have to be in the cookware industry of course, it can be very different.Mary:Keep my eye on a lot of companies. So it's hard to distill down. And I would say, a lot of them are not in, I mean, not that I don't keep track of my competitors, believe me, I do, but they're several. I would say Peloton is one of them just because of, I mean, they've been in the news a lot lately, but that's not my reasons. The community aspect of it, I think that's what the product is really about. It's not really about the physical products. So I think that's really cool. Obviously, Apple, who doesn't keep their eye on Apple. I would also Amazon because they're into everything. There's every day I open the news and I'm like, "What don't they do basically."Mary:So let's say that's a few of them. Then I also keep my eye on a lot of startups, small startups, especially in the food industry right now. I really love what's going on in plant-based food and there're so many food startups out there. I really am very intrigued by the work that they're doing.Stephanie:Yeah. I love that. We just did a whole episode too on why your best ideas can come from looking outside your industry and how that's a lot of innovations happen, especially when you have a similar problem that maybe has already been solved. If you're thinking like, "Oh, I have something around employees in this and how to set it up. And I'm in the food industry. Let me go look at the, I don't know, space industry and see how they think about this or even military or something. How do they do team structures?" And yeah, it was very interesting to think about how other industries can influence creativity and solving problems.Mary:Yeah. The other thing too, what I think about is, there's so much work going on in the plant-based food business. There's so many competitors. The same thing with meal kits. At some point consolidation has to happen. But the other reason I keep my eye on that is, we have to be as people who make appliances, we have to be helping our consumers understand how to actually prepare those foods when they get at home and they're using our equipment and all those types of things. I mean, if you just look at conventional meats versus grass-fed versus organic, they all cook differently. So there's some work that has to be done there to educating the consumer.Mary:So that's another reason why I keep my eye on the food industry. And just food in general, it's changing so fast. And also people have much more, such interest in ethnic foods and discovering new foods. And there's an entire process of what happens to consumers when they travel somewhere and taste something new and try to recreate it at home. So I keep my eye on all those types of things.Stephanie:Yep. That just made me think about something that needs reinvention that maybe you guys can tap into, the microwave. Why does it still have presets that just say potato, popcorn. I'm like, "I don't use any of those. And this is 2021. People make many different things, not just baked potatoes and meat or whatever it has on there." So if you also helps with that.Mary:It's funny because, I'll tell you something about myself. So we have multiple air fryers, there's digital ones, which have a zillion options. I have the, this is going to make me sound analog instead of digital completely, but I actually like the dials because I like to decide myself how it should be cooked. But yeah, so I agree with you though, like, "How many cups of coffee do we need to reheat before we know that's what it is?"Stephanie:Yup. Yup. Man.Mary:Baked potato popcorn.Stephanie:Yep. [crosstalk].Mary:But they're also the most used functions, which is, kind of drives why they're there.Stephanie:Wow. Yeah. Okay. Maybe I'm just not their typical user.Mary:Maybe you're not making enough baked potatoes.Stephanie:I know. I guess, I need to get on that. What am I doing with my life? All right. And the last question, what one thing do you not understand today that you wish you did?Mary:Oh, Bitcoin, please.Stephanie:Yeah. I've had so many people say that on the show.Mary:Cryptocurrency, I don't get it in. And after watching Elon Musk on Saturday Night Live, I still don't know anything.Stephanie:Man, I think this is just going to push me to start a crypto podcast because so many e-commerce guests have said that and trying figure it out and how it's going to impact their work or their point of sale systems or payments or any of that, or even supply chain, which I think it's going to have a huge impact on.Mary:Yeah. It's interesting. Because I think I'm smarter than the average doc and I just cannot follow that at all. It's not that I haven't tried, but I definitely need an education there and I'd appreciate if you help me with that.Stephanie:All right. I will find a sponsor. Anyone come on in and sponsor the show, I'll get it going and Mary is going to be my first guest to ask all the questions.Mary:I'm there.Stephanie:Well, all right, Mary. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure chatting. Where can people find out more about you and Cuisinart?Mary:So you can find out more about Cuisinart at cuisinart.com. So follow us on all the social channels under Cuisinart, except for on TikTok, it's cuisinart_official, which we're just starting that right now. So we're testing the waters as they say.Stephanie:It's going to be air frying all the things on there I bet. That'll do.Mary:Exactly.Stephanie:That'll be hot on that channel.Mary:Just started. So we're just getting our feet wet. And then you can follow me on LinkedIn, it's Mary Rodgers. Easy to find.Stephanie:Perfect. Thank you so much.Mary:Thank you. It's great being with you today. It was a lot of fun.Stephanie:Same, and I agree.
If you look on Twitter or do a quick Google search, you'll find a ton of chatter about the foolproof DTC playbook. Everyone has ideas about the surefire ways that young DTC brands should be setting themselves up for success. Alex Kubo is here to tell you that those playbooks aren't as written in stone as you might think. Alex is the VP of ecommerce and digital marketing at Burrow, a DTC furniture brand, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, he explained how and why the Burrow team threw out the playbook when certain aspects of it fell flat. For example, Alex talks about the lessons they learned about the signals that pricing sends, and why it's critical to put the right price on your product to attract the right customer even if that means pricing higher than the playbook says. Alex also dives into what it means to actually be customer centric and how Burrow stays in constant communication with customers. Plus, we discuss why marketing toward buying events or using a spray and pray strategy across a dozen channels is about as useful as setting your money on fire. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Sending The Right Signals: How you price your product or service is one of the most significant ways you signal to customers who you are as a brand and what value you bring. If you price too low, you risk being lumped in with brands that don't necessarily fit with the type of products or value you bring to the table.More Than Words: Saying you are customer-centric and actually being customer-centric are two very different things. To be truly customer-centric requires regularly talking to and learning from your customers and then building experiences and products based on those conversations. You can't just assume you know what customers want, you have to do the work to find out.A Horse of a Different Color: There are best practices and guidelines that many companies follow to get themselves off the ground. Sometimes those playbooks work, but in other cases, you have to toss out what everyone says is the right strategy and go in a new direction. Whether that's in your social strategy, your pricing, or how you're getting feedback from customers, don't be afraid to buck tradition and do something different.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Welcome to Up Next In Commerce. I'm your host Stephanie Postles, CEO at mission.org. Today on the show, we have Alex Kubo joining us, who currently serves as the VP of E-Commerce and Digital Marketing at Burrow. Alex, welcome.Alex:Thanks, Stephanie. Excited to be here.Stephanie:Yeah, I'm very excited to have you here. It was cool reading a bit about Burrow's background and starting at Y Combinator, and I was thinking it might be fun to start there, back in 2016. What did it look like starting the company, and then we can get into today?Alex:Totally. So, I was fortunate that I actually met the two co-founders of Burrow while were on the same business school program in Philadelphia. And back in the fall of 2015, actually, Kabeer and Stephen, the two co-founders and my classmates were both furnishing their apartments as they moved into Philadelphia for the program, and they had two very distinct but related experiences. Kabeer purchased a sofa from West Elm in Philly, and it wasn't going to arrive for about 12 to 16 weeks, which I think, nowadays, people are pretty used to seeing those timelines, but Originally, it was like, "Whoa, this is not Amazon." And so, Kabeer actually used the cart, the dolly in his apartment building and rolled it to West Elm, and picked up a floor model and brought it home, because the lead time was going to be longer than his first semester, so obviously, that was not going to be a great experience.Alex:Stephen went the classic IKEA route, right, where you don't come in to grad school with a ton of money and need to furnish your space quickly. And so he did that, and then ultimately, it's a waste down the road, right? IKEA furniture, you can't move because of the quality of the materials and that sort of thing.Stephanie:[crosstalk]. Yeah.Alex:Yeah. So, the question ultimately became, why can't you have that higher end quality that you might find at a West Elm, or Pottery Barn, or Crate and Barrel, but the convenience, the modern day conveniences that Amazon has made the default expectation of consumers, so fast, and free shipping, and easy delivery process, and be able to modularize that design so that you can set it up and not have to deal with like the IKEA hex key or any of these really cumbersome assembly processes? And so, that concept was born. And out of that came a series of product innovation that ultimately, Stephen and Kabeer got into Y Combinator with just a pitch deck and no product and used that accelerator to develop the product, to prototype the product, and ship it.Alex:A funny little anecdote is that from the time they incorporated the company to the time they shipped their first product was shorter than the period of time that West Elm quoted Kabeer to ship his first couch.Stephanie:Oh, wow. That's great.Alex:Yeah.Stephanie:And what were you doing when they were going through Y Combinator?Alex:I was actually working on my own concept in the health and fitness space and ended up calling time on it right towards the end of the summer because of a number of challenges that I was having on my end, and joined up with Stephen and Kabeer to help build out the demand side of the business. And I had a relatively intimate knowledge of the business and where they were at because we were in all the same classes working on our own businesses. And I had helped them tangentially with sourcing components during our first year of the program, because I have a background in mechanical engineering and they didn't have any background in physical hardware. And so, there was already the groundwork for relationship. And then I was trying to move my own discipline into more of a consumer facing and ground level marketing and product marketing role, so it actually made a lot of sense.Alex:So, we set it up as a brief relationship to make sure that the working relationship was there, which it turned out very quickly, it was. So, I have been tasked or had been tasked with basically just building demand and ran with it since.Stephanie:So, since then, what does the world look like now compared to when you started and you were building up demand? I mean, I'm sure you guys were trying out Facebook and all the traditional platforms that everyone's like, "Every brand should be on Instagram and Facebook, and if you're not here, where are you?" What did it look like then and now?Alex:So, now it's a much more disciplined and much more properly positioned business than it was in the beginning. Two critical mistakes that were good healthy mistakes to make in the early days were, number one, brand positioning and product positioning. We had this idea in our head that... and sort of the classic Warby Parker pricing story of like, they wanted to price it $45, but their advisors and professors advised them not to do that because it would signal the wrong value to the customer. We had a similar experience where, for some reason in our heads, we had to price our couch under $1,000. And we made that decision because we wanted to be hyper competitive on price and make it the default, obvious solution.Alex:The problem that we failed to acknowledge is that consumers nowadays have very limited time to understand the differences and nuances between products. They're not stupid, they're not lazy, but they do have very limited time. And so, you have to be very clear and explicit with them, and part of that is signaling. And one of the most powerful parts of marketing that I think is most often overlooked is a focus on pricing and what that does from a positioning standpoint.Alex:When a lot of shoppers were seeing our product under $1,000 and the fact that it shipped in boxes, which we were very forward with, because we focus so much on the attributes of the product and less on the experience around it, which is another step in our evolution, that people immediately equated those two things, low price and ships in boxes, with a more expensive version of IKEA. So, then it was us talking to IKEA shoppers, and you're not going to convince an IKEA shopper to spend another 300, $400 on a sofa, right? What you need to do is talk to the West Elm shopper, the Pottery Barn shopper, the Crate and Barrel shopper.Alex:So, we actually, for a number reasons, increased prices in late 2017, about half a year after we launched.Stephanie:How much did you increase them by?Alex:Originally, the sofa was priced at 950. By the way, much different cogs, profile as well, at that point. We increased the price to 1,095 to start. So, it was a pretty meaningful difference on a percentage basis, and especially when you talk about margins.Alex:Interestingly enough, everything you learned in microeconomics about the relationship with the supply and demand curves went out the window, because we increased the price and demand shot through the roof.Stephanie:Wow. Did you get it in front of new people? What else were you doing to get it-Alex:I mean, we were doing a lot of the same things in terms of building full funnel architecture on paid social and paid search and that sort of thing, and again, applying a lot of those early D2C playbook type approaches, which ultimately turned out to not be the best approach for us. But nothing changed substantially from a marketing perspective. We were still reaching a lot of the same people, it's just that we were now signaling to those people that we belonged in the comparison set with a higher quality piece of furniture. That helps also, because a lot of our value props, it's much easier to convince somebody who has shopped at one of these higher end brands and had to wait super long or had to go to a showroom and deal with a frustrating shopping experience with this overbearing sales associate, pay for shipping, and ultimately, have to be home to get a piece of furniture delivered, and either take a day off from work. Again, much different world back then than it was today.Alex:But it's much easier to talk to those kinds of people who've experienced those pain points and tell them, "I'm going to take all of that pain away," than it is to talk to somebody who's never experienced those pain points and doesn't need the higher quality piece of furniture, again, the IKEA shopper, and talk to them about all these future pain points that they've never experienced but that we can help them avoid. That's maybe one of the biggest lessons learned, is that people do not think much about the future. They're often very, very focused on the present. And so, as much as you want to talk about why you should go to the doctor every year, why should you should go to the dentist every six months, it's like, people are not going to react until they have a problem.Alex:So, we've experimented a bunch with what is the leading value prop. So, we talked to consumers, and one of the ones that we talked about very early was this concept of modularity and how, when you move into your next apartment, you can just purchase another seat instead of buying a whole new sofa to accommodate the new space, or rearrange the existing configuration that you have to fit the new space requirements. Problem is, people are not thinking about that. They don't really care. They can't think that far in advance of two to three to four years down the road when moving into the next apartment. And so, we've deprioritized that in terms of communication and lead with other things that are more immediate, like fast and free shipping.Stephanie:Yeah. Got it. So, you're mentioning earlier that the D2C playbook didn't work for you guys, where now, even these days, you can search that and you'll find a bunch of the playbooks and people are still saying like, "This is what you need to do to be successful." What were some other things that you did back then that you completely reversed and you were like, "This doesn't work for us"?Alex:Yeah. So, I think, first, was not acknowledging how complex and lengthy the shopping journey is for a piece of furniture online. Obviously, it's a big investment, it's also mutually exclusive with something else, your home, right? Let alone the high price, you're not going to just buy another couch when you have an existing one in your home, right? You need to think about getting that out or you have to do it right at the right moment with a moving event or something like that.Alex:So, the first thing that we had to realize is that what we can't do is architect our funnel around existing attribution technology or just rely on optimizing towards purchase events in digital channels. What we had to do is to look upstream and find correlations and causation between different upstream, midstream, and bottom stream events to really architect a healthy full funnel. And so, most of our campaigns are not architected towards purchase events, they're architected towards or optimized towards something more upstream.Stephanie:[crosstalk] for a couple examples.Alex:Yeah. I guess one interesting one that we've learned over time is there's a pretty clear correlation between add to cart and purchase, and the cart abandonment rate is relatively steady. We do things over time, obviously, to improve that, but it's not something that fluctuates wildly over time. And so, one of the things we can do is just optimize towards an add to cart versus a purchase.Alex:The other benefit of that is it often can happen in the first session. So, when you see a lot of the privacy restrictions right now and a lot of the issues with cookies going away and that sort of thing, it helps us. We've actually always been architected to bear that burden a little bit better than some of our other D2C peers.Alex:And then the other thing, besides the purchase journey, was also that we were just doing way too many things at once. We had, and we still have today, a very lean team. The difference between now and then is that back then, we thought the best approach was to spray as wide as we possibly could and activate 10 to 15 channels with me managing all of them, by the way, and not doing a good job.Stephanie:It sounds very chaotic and not fun.Alex:Yeah. Not at all, not at all. And only until we really peeled back and just focused on a handful of things and did them really, really well, that's when we actually started churning results, but more importantly, honestly, that's when we started actually learning what was working. Because previously, we were just spending a lot of money, we were generating sales, but we didn't really have a clear idea of where they were coming from, again, because the purchase journey was so complex, right? It wasn't a problem that we could solve by just putting an attribution layer in somewhere. We had to really hyper focus on one or two things and do them really, really well.Alex:The concept of growth in the past has generally been focused on the top line. And what that means, often, for a lot of companies, is to just go into as many different channels and try to tap into as many different demographics as you possibly can and then find out what's working and what's not working. I think the issue is that the broader investment community has wisened up to that, right, and they're holding us more accountable on a unit economics and customer economics level, versus just month over month top line growth, which in reality, it's just a vanity metric, right?Alex:So, it is more favorable to take a more disciplined approach, albeit potentially slower top line growth, to really uncover those median sites that you can actually build a solid foundation on and grow a real, scalable, profitable company on versus just something that's just, scaling wildly at the top one but in reality it's just lighting money on fire.Stephanie:So, for a higher priced product like Burrow and a longer buying cycle, what platforms would you advise other brands to look at and optimize for and which ones would you pull back from?Alex:Yeah. So, I think if you acknowledge that it is, there are a lot of things that people have to learn about the product, a lot of things that people have to get comfortable with and confident in the purchase. You think that a lot of these shorter form mediums, like paid social, paid search, right? It's just a quick second and a half interaction with an ad, they're not going to be as effective for a product like ours, and that's true. What we have indexed up on are things that are more storytelling mediums. So, the earliest insight into this was we partnered with a small podcast in late 2017, and it's sort of one of those micro ones, it's not on a network, and just talks about fantasy football. And we just got introduced to the gentleman that runs it, and did a small test, and the results were incredible.Alex:Part of what we've learned over time from that point, rapidly scaled the podcast program for us is that it's highly dependent on the host, and the reason that it's highly dependent on a host is because the efficacy of that channel comes from the quality of the storytelling. And that is really what benefits our brand, is that if we go and we send a podcast host a product and they have the same amazing experience that our customers have, they can talk about it in a much more authentic way, but also, a much more individual way. We've actually matured to not providing very detailed scripts to a lot of our podcasts hosts and just telling them to talk about what has been most exciting for you, and that really brings out the energy in the advocacy for the brand from the host. So, I'd say it's really about focusing on storytelling mediums. So, I lumped other video, long form video into that as well. A little bit less of authenticity, but also helps communicate a lot of these little value props that add up to the major value proposition.Stephanie:So, the other thing that comes to mind is branded content. I mean, I'm thinking about something like Formula One where now the results are out, everyone knows it worked really well for them. It was very, I would think, pretty organic, didn't feel like it was just a brand push. How are you guys thinking about other kinds of content like this?Alex:I don't know if we're at the stage yet where we can start thinking about that sort of thing. I think that Formula One is a great example of taking two powerhouses and linking them together where the sum is greater than or the whole is greater than the some of the parts. So, we're thinking a little bit less about something like that and creating more on a micro scale, I would say, brand and content.Alex:So, when you talk about something like the influencer arena, I am probably the biggest advocate against using influencers in the context that they are used today. And first of all, just to clarify, a true influencer is not somebody that says, "I'm an influencer" on their Instagram profile description, right? A true influencer is somebody that can speak to a community and elicit a response, and often, within a specific category, right? So, I'm not going to give a beauty "influencer" a furniture product and expect him or her to have an outsized impact on the sales.Stephanie:Stephanie:So, you'd focus on the niche influencer who might only have 1,500 followers or something, which is something I think I talked about early on this show, of going through the comments of Instagrammers and seeing, are the people in there asking, "Where can I buy that? Where did you get that from?" Or are they just like, "That's great. Cool. I love that." What kind of engagement are you getting will show if that person has influential power over their community or not.Alex:Totally, totally. And obviously, it's going to vary by a vertical too. This is sort of an extreme example, right? Again, going back to the very considered purchase, even our ability to measure the impact of that is going to be super limited. So, we've actually leaned into the influencer community for, more so is, partnering with actually photography influencers. One of the bottlenecks and problems with our vertical is that our products are very large and our photo shoots and video shoots require massive studios and massive crews that are very, very expensive. Meanwhile, all of these people out there that can already take great pictures and already have really interesting homes need furniture. And so, we can often partner with them in a much more economically scalable way to get a huge diversity and huge volume of content created that can showcase different styles, different aesthetics, different home types, and different personalities, and just build this library of content instead of having to book homes ourselves and go through the whole production process.Alex:So, we've actually been doing that for a while just purely based on economic reasons. But it's interesting to see that now, I think there's going to be a massive shift towards organic for a number of other reasons. When you talk about a lot of the privacy regulations that are going on right now, over the last 10 years, the control of the voice or the conversation has shifted towards the consumer and towards the user. You see like case examples of this with like GameStop, for example. The retail investor just had a massive impact on the market from such a small player, right? Because the control of the conversation momentum is shifting away from the brands that have the big budgets and towards the customers that have the voice, the authentic following.Stephanie:That's the influencer of the year right there.Alex:Yeah, totally.Stephanie:And Reddit. And that's probably where all the other influencers are, an area that I haven't even thought to go, but we've had guests come on previously where Reddit is how they figured out how to build their business, which I haven't even thought to go there. Alex:Totally, totally. I mean, it makes total sense, right? It's experts that are talking because they're passionate about what they're talking about, right, not because they have a vested interest or they are trying to make money off of it, then that's where you get that authentic content from and the actual truth.Stephanie:So, how do you go about incentivizing that or structuring it so it can come in? Because I'm sure a lot of brands are like, "I want my customers to talk about me and take pictures and do all the things," and then they just sit there and nothing comes in. So, what are you doing behind the scenes to make that happen?Alex:So, it's less about focusing so much effort on trying to elicit that response just by trying to elicit it and more about really focusing on that product innovation and that experience that will naturally have that effect on people, right? You don't want somebody to talk about your product in a positive way because you're paying them to talk about it in a positive way, you want them to really advocate, because that means that not only are they talking on the channel that you want them to talk about it, they're also having side conversations. And when people come over to their homes and they're asking, "Wow, where did you get that beautiful sofa from?" They are talking not just about, "Oh, I got it from Burrow," they're also saying like, "And it happens to have these stain resistant fabrics, and it has all of these great other materials, and it was modular, and it was super easy to get it delivered and get it set up." And that's what you really want to go off of.Alex:So, I would say the biggest focus should be on nailing that product innovation and nailing that customer experience, and that's how you can count on that customer conversation to be generated rather than trying to chase down your customers and get them to talk about it in a less authentic way.Stephanie:Yeah, I agree. I think that the days when people on Amazon are like, "I got paid for this review," or something, those will be gone very soon, because I don't know about you, but every time I go through a threat and I see that, I'm like, "Don't trust you, don't trust you." I just want to see the normal person who's reviewing it at their own goodwill, or not, maybe they're mad, but I want that. I don't want someone saying, "I got a free product for this review." That just seems like those days are gone.Alex:Yeah, totally, totally.Stephanie:So, the other thing I want to talk about is product development. I saw that your co-founder and CEO said, "Every single product we've ever launched has exceeded expectations and projections, and that's a testament to our customer-centric research-driven design process," which I want to dive into that and hear. I'm sure many brands are like, "I want every single product of mine to be a success, and I want to expand my skews." So, how do you guys go about designing and crafting new products?Alex:Well, I think one thing that we should clear up is the concept of customer centricity is used so broadly and inauthentically, I think. A lot of brands will claim customer centricity and they'll think that they're being customer centric because that's who their customer is and they just need to make money off of them, and so they'll say that they're thinking about all their needs. The problem is they're not actually talking to the customers, they're assuming on behalf of the customers that they know what that customer needs. Or they're just testing messaging, which is fine. That's been the traditional approach of, "Okay, if I play up this feature or this benefit versus this feature or this benefit, and this one does better, that's what the customer must want," right? But it almost becomes a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy there.Alex:We take it to a much deeper level, not just with our customer community but also our lead community, all of our email subscribers that have yet to join and make an actual purchase with us, and actually going to them and asking them very specific and lengthy questions. I remember the first time we sent out a customer survey about one of the next products that we were going to launch and just wanted to get their input on like, "Is this the right product?" Number one, and B, "What are those little things that really bother you about this product?" And did a ton of just open ended response analysis based on that.Alex:The biggest surprise for me from that was the response rate. For a quiz or rather survey that took probably a solid 10 to 15 minutes of someone's time to go through and really complete in depth, which they did, the response rate was astounding. And that opened our eyes to, "Wow, this needs to become a regular occurrence within our work stream."Stephanie:How quickly were you sending this to them? Was it a week after they got their product and are trying to set it up, or what did that look like?Alex:Well, there's a couple different ones. So, what we have is a couple different touch points that are automated or triggered based on somebody actually making their first purchase with us. So, we had, obviously, a post purchase survey right away, which I think is one of the most underappreciated and can be most impactful survey points that people do, or brands do, rather. We also have an NPS survey, which going back to how do you elicit a response from customers and activate customers, NPS is going to be your biggest indicator of how much of that is happening in the background. And that is actually backed up by an element on the post purchase survey where we ask, "Were you were referred by a friend? Does that friend own Burrow furniture, or do they not, or do not know?" And that can also give us a really solid indication of the impact.Alex:So, beyond the triggered survey points, we also do intermittent studies, and it's almost on a monthly cadence now, of either focuses on new categories in general, or we've already identified the category, we've already identified the specific product and we're trying to nail down colors, color combinations, finishes, specific features, doing conjoint analyses on like, what is most important to this set of consumer? I mean, we've really taken it to a super, super deep level.Stephanie:Have there been any products that you launch based off consumer feedback or maybe early launches where it's like, "Oh, they led us astray with that one"? Because I'd be like, "I want a fluorescent pink couch." And then I'd be like, "Oh, I had a little too much wine that night. Sorry about that."Alex:Yeah. Fortunately, we're pretty good at statistics and we can identify outliers and not get swayed by them too much. There actually have not been. And I think it speaks volumes for this concept of authentic customer centricity where... and you can also cross-compare between the customer set and the subscriber set, right? The subscribers are a great audience because they have not purchased anything from you, or at least the subscribers that are not customers, and there's a reason why, right? Versus the customers, they did find something that you offered already and they've already bought into the brand, and they're responding to you because they're still engaged. And so, that's one set of needs that you need to fulfill.Alex:And then there's the other set of needs, and oftentimes, there's a good amount of overlap, which is great for us, and oftentimes, there's not, and that's when we need to make choices around what does that offering look like and who are we really chasing with that?Stephanie:Yep. The other thing I think you mentioned in the past was around how you start thinking about zoning and mapping out what else a person needs in their room, which means like, "Oh, brilliant, okay, if someone got a couch, a little swivel chair, and obviously, they need pillows." And I want to hear, did that method work, and how have you expanded that since you first started trying it I think maybe a year and a half ago or so?Alex:It did, totally. I mean, you take one concrete example of this is with the advent of coffee tables for us. We first launched the sofa and then we launched our first line of coffee tables, and those were specifically designed dimensionally to work best with the sofa styles that were selling the most volumetrically. So, we knew that there was a high rate of match, right, between them. It wasn't like we were designing for something that we were only selling like 5% of our assortment or something like that.Alex:Where that took another level is in 2019, we launched the corner sectional, and then arrangements and configurations started getting a lot more varied and a lot more... opened up actually, additional demographics as well, with more suburban, satellite city homes with larger room spans. And that opened up a new category, and so what we had to do is to figure out, "Okay, well, if you have a five-seat corner sectional, none of our coffee tables really make sense for that. And so, how do we create a coffee table that works perfectly in that configuration for that customer specifically?" So, that's when you saw in late 2020, we released our Kettle and Signal collections, which are more of a round geometry versus a rectangular geometry. And that happens to work really well with things like a Double Chaise Long King Sofa, where the chaise is wrapped nicely around the round coffee table, or the corner sectional, it creates a really nice conversation pit type feeling.Alex:So, it is very much about understanding how our pieces interact. And then the next level that is, what are the types of rooms that people are using it in? What are the actual dimensions of those rooms? And what logically, could somebody need the most, given that room design and size?Stephanie:It seems like a lot of brands are missing that right now, because oftentimes, I mean, whether it's furniture or a lot of other things, I'm like, "Where is that matching dresser set? Or where is the pillow that goes with that?" And it feels like having to go around and look in different places and trying to find it myself, I'm like, "Why am I doing the work? I just want a kit which is like, 'Here's all the five things that match together.'" But why is that so hard? I don't get why can't brands do that?Alex:I think one of the biggest examples of this is that company brand list that skyrocketed, but they were launching things in such unrelated categories that there was no bond between them. And companies nowadays need to think a lot more about lifetime value than they had to necessarily, in the past. Acquisition cost is growing, and they can no longer just rely on first purchase profitability in order to sustainably scale their business, and they need to think about building a relationship with the customer. And that often comes from creating relationship and being the default brand or site to go back to when they may have that next need and finding that perfect accompanying piece, right? Versus just like you buy cleaning detergent from the company, and you come back and, oh, they're offering soccer balls or something.Stephanie:Pillows.Alex:Yeah, it's like, "Okay, well, that doesn't make sense."Stephanie:Yeah. Which makes me think, I mean, it seems like the world is headed towards a more curated world right now. Maybe back in the day, I would go to a Wayfair or something like that and I'd be like, "Cool, I'm fine with scrolling, scrolling," five years later, still scrolling and looking for what I want. It doesn't seem like consumers want that anymore. So, how do you see the consumer journey and preference adjusting now where maybe a couple years ago, that would be totally fine?Alex:Yeah. I think it's almost a byproduct of the ease of standing up a company nowadays. It is exponentially easier to start a company, a direct to consumer company than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago. So, because of that, the market has just blown up in terms of the number of companies. And so, the paralysis of choice has shifted from like going to an old school Sears or Macy's and just having like a million different options, or as you put it, like a Wayfair, and just tens of millions of options, to now having to build a relationship with a brand and trust that that brand is making the right decisions. And so, that's why we offer a very select assortment of fabric colors, leg finishes, arm styles. In reality, we can house tens of component skews and offer tens of thousands of combinations to the customer, but what's ultimately the most important thing is that we do it in a way that is still a very simple and clean experience for the customer so that they get that sense of they're creating their own product, but not to the extent of being overwhelmed.Alex:I think of myself on old school furniture sites and staring at the screen from two inches away trying to figure out the difference between this gray and that gray, and I'm like... and then you request swatches from them and they come 10 weeks later.Stephanie:Yeah. I've recently been through that experience. It's not great.Alex:Yeah. No, it's not fun.Stephanie:They arrived and I'm like, "What was I trying to buy, again?" [crosstalk]. I mean, it seems like you guys could also have a very localized approach where, like you mentioned earlier, if someone is looking from a very suburban area, like my hometown in Maryland, where my expectations there would have probably been to have a huge wraparound couch, I've got this big living room, versus being in San Francisco or Austin, where now it's like a little bit more limited space, and what can I fit in these small areas? [crosstalk] think about that?Alex:I mean, the first step there that we're taking, it's more from a content driven approach. So, that goes back or loops back to the way that we're treating influencers and leaning into the photography community and the different styles and aesthetics that they have. Because what we are creating are based products. They are beautiful but they don't belong in an architectural [inaudible] editor's home, right? They're not the one-off piece that you design and custom build for 15 grand or something.Alex:And what's beautiful about that is that they stand up to any environment that you're putting them in, whether it's a very eclectic like Austin ranch style home, or the fourth floor walk up apartment in New York, or a more sprawling home in Houston or another geography like that. And leaning in with more of that stylistic approach than necessarily sub-segmenting, "Oh, we're only going to show love seats to this geography, or we're only going to show these massive sprawling corner sectionals to this other geography," because people still have varying needs, a lot of people have multiple rooms. So, we don't want to limit, necessarily, the assortment, but we are trying to diversify constantly the styles and aesthetics that our products are showcased in.Stephanie:Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. So, for the last big point, I wanted to talk about the industry as a whole, like the D2C industry, commerce, what kind of things are you seeing or preparing for behind the scenes for what's to come?Alex:I mean, we could talk about the elephant in the room, which is-Stephanie:Let's talk about it. Yeah, let's do it. I haven't really talked too much about that, because it's been so up in the air, and when's it going to go through? It's more official now, so let's do it.Alex:Oh, yeah, it's official. This is a tough thing, and I think it's a reckoning for a lot of these companies, again, where it's been so easy to start a company and just go on Facebook, and you'll generate some sales, and go to a VC and you'll show 100% month over month growth, and they'll throw a bunch of cash at you. That's changing, and I'm thankful for it as much as I curse the fact that we don't have this GPS anymore, I'm very thankful that we don't, because it's forcing us to mature as marketers. And we're fortunate also that we've had to embrace this appreciation for marketing 101 and really lean into principles and not just trust what the ad platform are telling us, because it's a whole shopping journey.Alex:So, we've built a very healthy, full funnel approach proactively, even without any of this talk about these privacy regulations. That has helped us create something that can stand up in the face of this. There are a lot of companies that have not done that, they've not invested in really understanding marketing 101 and how to build a healthy full funnel without having that very granular level of insight or having automatic triggers in their campaigns and stuff. So, I think that is the most important thing, is like there is a day of reckoning for marketers everywhere in the D2C space to take a step back and really appreciate the principles of marketing and evaluate your program architecture overall and make sure that it's in a healthy state, and not just because your add to cart rates or your conversion rates are really high from this one campaign in this one ad unit, but really, overall, how is your program operating? Where are the weak points and how can you supplement those?Stephanie:Yeah. So, if you were starting over day one today, what kind of things would you look at? What metrics would you look at? What kind of things would you put in place to start building up that healthy funnel?Alex:Yeah. I think we would look at... I'm trying to think if I didn't have all the information that I have today, but I think what you would look at is the abandonment rate through the funnel, right? Of the people who click through to your site, how many of them end up viewing a product? Of those people, how many of them end up adding it? Of those people, how many of them end up actually proceeding to step one of checkout, step two, step three, step four? And find out what that makeup looks like.Alex:And obviously, you're going to spend a lot of time on conversion rate optimization and trying to improve the outputs of each step of that funnel. But that paints a picture of, okay, how broad do you have to invest at the top of that funnel if your ultimate target at the bottom of the funnel is X? And what does that reach look like? And what are the best mediums to do that to actually elicit a response and get people onto your site or into your store or signing up for whatever service you provide? So, that, I think, is what I would take as step one.Alex:The other one is, I would just consider, for the vertical that you're in and the product that you're trying to sell, how much of a story do you need to tell? And that will help inform how much you will need to invest in more storytelling mediums than more immediate click to buy type mediums. Also, how visual is your product? That will tell you how much you have to be content driven versus leaning into things like search or audio formats or anything like that. And that can really help govern your channel choices.Alex:And then the last thing is just, don't fall into the trap of doing too many things at once. There's always something to be said to acknowledging the resources that you have and trying to build a architecture that is best for that set of resources, not just the one that happens to be doing really well for the other portfolio company that your VC backer is constantly in your ear about, you have to focus on what is going to work for your company, your vertical, your customers specifically.Stephanie:Yep, yeah, I love all that. Is there or are there any tools right now that you're very excited about that are either new or just time tested, you're like, "We're going to keep using these forever because they do wonders for our marketing efforts"?Alex:I think a lot of it is less about tools and more about information sources. So, we've partnered with a number of different companies over time to do things like customer enrichment and really understand our customers to a deeper level, again, going back to that concept of customer centricity, not just talking to them directly, but also learning much, much more about them. And I think one of the biggest traps that a lot of companies fall into is they think of their customer as an average customer, and the problem is they're failing to acknowledge that customers are not one monotonous group, they are a system of clusters and cohorts. And what you really have to do is understand what is unique and important about each of these clusters and then create a messaging architecture, channel architecture, product offering that really speaks to each of those clusters individually.Alex:So, from a tools perspective, it's more about these data enrichment, customer data enrichment type platforms, and then using those to create these clusters and cohorts and really understand those customers. Again, for us, an attribution platform, not super helpful because of the complexity and both mix of offline and online activity that it takes to get to the purchase point. Much more about really understanding the customer and then applying a marketing 101 approach to it.Stephanie:Cool. Yeah, that's great. All right. Well, let's shift over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer.Alex:Oh, boy.Stephanie:Ready, Alex?Alex:Sure.Stephanie:Oh, boy. What's one thing you don't understand today that you wish you did?Alex:Shoot. Where do I start? I think I would like to understand more about the global supply chain. I think over the last six months to a year maybe, we've seen, very intimately, the impacts of a broken or strained supply chain, and I think that there's a huge opportunity for D2C companies to innovate on the supply chain side. We focus so much on how do we innovate on the customer side that we focus so much less on the supply side of the business. So, I think that is where... and it will become increasingly important for marketers and supply ops to be speaking and working very much hand in hand to grow a company together. So, I do wish I had more of that background.Stephanie:Yeah, that's great. And you guys just raised around, and I think that money, a part of it, was to focus on international supply chain effort, right? Figuring that out better.Alex:Yes, totally.Stephanie:So, you're already right in the right spot, the right time. You'll have to let everyone else know the insight. You have to come back and tell us what you learn next year.Alex:Yes, definitely.Stephanie:What's up next on your reading list or podcast list?Alex:There's actually a couple books I think that I want to reread. I'm one of those weird people that really likes to read technical books, and so there's a couple of conversations we're having right now about pricing in this book called Power Pricing that I love to read. There's also one by a gentleman named Douglas Holt called Cultural Strategy that I think is one of the most foundational and important books, especially for the world today. And again, how the customer controls the conversation, and understanding how to position your company and your messaging around cultural movements and ride momentum versus trying to create that momentum yourself as you have in the past. The last one is Shoe Dog, actually.Stephanie:Yes, such a good book.Alex:Amazing book. This would now be, I think, my third time reading it, but it is a way to, I think... A lot of people have been talking about languishing right now and the fact that we've been in this environment for so long and we're yearning for that personal interaction, and so tired of being in the sedentary and fixed on a digital screen environment. And I think Shoe Dog can help reignite a lot of that passion, right? Because it's like, "Wow, this multi-billion dollar company started at such a microscopic level." And it really helps you understand the power and the capability you have as an individual to create something like that and can help really reignite that passion.Stephanie:Yeah, that's one of my favorite books. Actually, we have a podcast called The Story that tells the unknown backstory of people who change the world, and we highlighted him in one of the episodes because we were like, "The story is too good not to tell, and tell, and tell until everyone hears it, and gets motivated and starts their thing today."Alex:Yeah, totally.Stephanie:That's awesome. I feel like they need a movie out or something. Do they have one?Alex:I'm sure there will be. I'm sure there will be.Stephanie:There has to be one. Too good of a story not to. What's one thing you're secretly curious about? [crosstalk].Alex:TikTok, I think.Stephanie:Are you all on there?Alex:We are not. From a demographic perspective, in the past, I would say a year and a half, it hasn't made sense. The program is continuing to grow, the demographic adoption is continuing to expand, and so I am interested in what it looks like going forward. I think it is also a challenging medium for a lot of brands that are really attached to high production quality content, because what scales the best on that platform is very lo-fi content, very organic and authentic content. And it creates this shift for a lot of companies in the way that they think about creative. So, I'm curious in that we are actively learning about our potential approach to that channel, but also curious about how does that platform and program evolve over time. I've not heard great things about the ad platform that they've built so far, which is partially why we've been hesitant to really go after the channel, but that will evolve. They will crack that code. And what that looks like, I don't know, but I'm certainly curious.Stephanie:Yeah. We've definitely heard 50-50 on TikTok, some brands saying it works wonders, but they're the ones creating their own content, maybe not an ad partner programs. I also think from a consumer standpoint, how it's going to evolve, because at least me personally, I think I got signed out and I couldn't remember my password-Alex:Oh, no.Stephanie:... and I just never signed back in. I'm like, "I'm not sure I really like it then, or maybe I know that just scrolling is not good for me."Alex:Yeah. That was me with Clubhouse, actually.Stephanie:Oh, same.Alex:I loved Clubhouse for the first seven days and was on it constantly and I have not been back on it for [crosstalk].Stephanie:Yeah. I think it got crowded. I mean, now it's just so busy, so many people talking about so many things, it didn't feel curated. I started feeling like that to me too where it was 50-50 of like, "I like these videos, and next nine, I don't like." I think there has to be curation to keep at least us involved, it sounds like.Alex:Yeah, totally. I mean, honestly, that's what happened with the podcast world too, right? It became everybody launched their own podcast, and then there's so much content. The biggest problem with podcasts now is discovery. The only way you learn about what to listen to is through your friends.Stephanie:Yeah.Alex:And so, that concept of discovery is such a challenge for podcasts right now, and I think that's what Clubhouse is going through at 1,000 times faster through the learning cycle.Stephanie:Yeah. I think the next couple of years will be interesting, because I mean, they've been talking about discovery issues back to even when I worked at Google, figuring out Google podcasts, and that was an issue back in 2017. So, why hasn't this been solved yet? It should be so much easier.Alex:Yeah.Stephanie:All right. Well, Alex, it's been awesome having you on the show, such a fun conversation. Where can people find out more about you and Burrow?Alex:Burrow.com would be the easiest place.Stephanie:What about you? Are you on LinkedIn? What if people want to talk to you?Alex:I am. LinkedIn. Alex Kubo. I'm not sure if you can actually search me and find me, but I'm sure you could.Stephanie:I'll find you. Don't worry. All right. Thanks so much, Alex.Alex:Thank you so much, Stephanie.
From starting a hedge fund to owning the DTC beauty market in China is a career path you don't hear too often. But that's the winding road that Julian Reis has traveled and along the way he's picked up some critical intel about the ecommerce world and Chinese trends that he shared with me on this episode of Up Next in Commerce.There are a bevy of factors to take into account when entering the Chinese market. From the vast differences in the way consumers shop in China to the sheer volume of consumers that can make a huge boom in sales in a matter of moments, there is a lot to contend with. And how does a brand even get in front of a consumer without traditional ads or email marketing? And what about social media? Or regulations? Julian explains how to take all that information into account and build an ecommerce strategy that lets you win abroad. Plus, he dives into how his company, SuperOrdinary is working with top skincare brands to enter the Chinese market, and some of the experiences that can be expected when embarking on this new path. What a fascinating discussion that was so different than any interviews I have had so far, enjoy!Main Takeaways:It's All Chinese To Me: Brands might want to expand to the Chinese market and believe that there is a huge opportunity there, but rushing into the market without doing the proper research could be a huge mistake. Despite the fact that a lot of information is censored in Chinese, consumers there still find ways to access the content that is important to them. Brands need to get more social awareness, learn about what Chinese consumers are interested in and let their actions reveal whether or not you have a product-market fit before trying to make a splash in that market.Platforms vs. Pages: There has been a bifurcation of ecommerce between platforms and webpages. The debate about where to invest more is coming down to how you see your customers acting. SuperOrdinary's theory of the case is that platforms are the way of the future because at the end of the day, customers spend more time on Amazon and Tmall than on a company's website. Therefore, more focus should be on creating content that drives engagement on those platforms. Boom and Bust: In China, the volume of consumers is so much higher and there is so much more emphasis on influencers and celebrities, that if something goes viral, a brand could do millions of sales in a matter of seconds. Being prepared for that kind of boom is very different from working in the U.S., where you prepare for steady growth over a longer period of time.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show we have Julian Reis, the CEO and Founder of SuperOrdinary. Julian, welcome.Julian:Thank you, Stephanie. Lovely to meet you.Stephanie:I'm happy you're here. I'm glad you're not in Hong Kong. I was a little bit worried at first. Like, it's got to be 2:00 AM for this guy, talking on the show. I mean, I would have also appreciated that, but that's okay. Before we dive in to SuperOrdinary, I want to hear about your background because you have a very fascinating background, and I want to hear what led you to the beauty industry.Julian:Great. Thank you for having me. Well, first of all my background, I'm half Australia, half Chinese Portuguese. I was born in Australia, and at the tender age of five I moved to Singapore, where I followed my parents. My dad was working for Pizza Hut. And my twin brother, who's identical, we grew up in Singapore and we kind of were brought into this world to experience all these different cultures, and really thank my parents for giving us such an international upbringing. We all went to these international schools in Singapore, and then Hong Kong, and really got a flavor for all the different Southeast Asian countries growing up. I went to study in the UK to confuse myself even more, and studied economics at University of Nottingham. And Justin, my brother, was in London at the London School of Economics. And we kind of had these parallel paths where we didn't know what we wanted to do after university. And I was always intrigued by the financial markets when I was at university. I always thought that ... This was at the time when we still had analog Internet, dial-ups. I was always curious to see how people were thinking about this global economy.Julian:I applied to probably 150 jobs after university, and got very disheartened that I couldn't move to Tokyo, which I had this dream to always live in Japan. And I found myself finding a job eventually in New York, at J.P. Morgan. I was one of 3,000 applicants to the markets training program, which was a rotation through JP Morgan training program. And I still don't know how I got it, but I was so thankful. I went to New York without even an interview, and basically phoned from downstairs and told the graduate recruitment officer that, "Hey, I'm downstairs. You might as well see me." And suddenly, I got the job. I feel very, very lucky for that.Julian:Went from there to, as a trader, I was trading derivatives in fixed income, which is straight derivatives. And that really started to shape my career, about thinking about the macro markets and how you need to think about the world. And after three years, I moved back to Asia and found myself working at Deutsche Bank and building my career as a proprietary trader.Julian:And then I realized that I would love to try and build my own business. And in finance, you either work at the lease investment banks as a trader ... Because the idea of a hedge fund was still very new. And when I was 27, I decided to go alone and start my own hedge fund. And tried to rustle up as much money from my friends and family, and realized I didn't have that many friends and family. And started my first hedge fund, which was called Pagoda Capital, which was one of the first macro funds in Singapore. I got acquired by Tudor Capital a year later and became CEO of their Asian business, building out their macro strategies in Singapore and Australia.Stephanie:How did they want to acquire you after a year? What were you doing? You must have been doing something amazing.Julian:You know, it was kind of interesting at the time because we were one of the only funds in Asia doing what we were doing. And there clearly was ... And this actually dovetails into what we're doing now because we saw this opportunity to build a business around the Asian markets, and many of these big, large, successful brands or hedge funds in US wanted to get exposure to this market. And the way they did that was find like-minded individuals who were trading, and eventually we came together and built this business. And Paul Tudor Jones is still, to this day, one of the guys I idolize the most in the world. And that gave me my introduction to the financial markets.Stephanie:Very cool. Okay, so your hedge fund gets acquired. You're working there for a bit. And then what?Julian:And then what? I moved to the UK again, working at a new hedge fund which I founded. And I realized that the common thread to all of this was that I really enjoyed building businesses. And I really felt like from zero to one when you're building a business, it's all about hiring the right people and building successful partnerships. And after a couple of years of working in the hedge fund industry, we entered 2008, which was obviously the financial crisis. And what became really apparent and important to me was that this was not sustainable, and that it was really exciting to see what other opportunities there were for me in my life. And at the time, was a very difficult time because to change out of a career or something that you'd been trained in to move to a completely different industry was very scary. And I thought long and hard about making that decision.Julian:And I met this lady who was starting a Groupon startup, and I said, "Listen, if you decide to do something in beauty, come back to me because I think there's a really big opportunity." And I started to see that the Asian population or the communities were really interested in foreign brands. And I was a founding investor of a company called Luxola, which was the ecommerce 1.0, distributing brands in Southeast Asia. And after two years, was acquired by LVMH to become Sephora's digital presence in Southeast Asia. So, really got an understanding about learning, about building and investing in the beauty side.Julian:And then I thought, well, why not try my hand at building my own brand? So, moved to the US to start a brand called Skin Laundry, which is a skincare brand focused on disrupting services. And really proud of what Skin Laundry has become today. It's now in five countries around the world, in the Middle East, London, Hong Kong and all throughout the US.Stephanie:Did you sell that?Julian:No, I didn't. The brand is still operational. I still remain one of the largest shareholders in the business. But really brought a management team in to really accelerate the brand. I think it's a very unique concept, and continues to be a loved brand by the customers. And I think by working and building a brand on that side, really started to, when I was back in Hong Kong and I noticed in China many of the brands that we were exposed to whilst we were in the US were not available in China. And that's where SuperOrdinary was born.Julian:I moved to Shanghai three and a half, almost four years ago now. And kind of just wanted to study how brands are being bought and sold in China. And then the light bulb went off and said to me, "This is an incredible opportunity. All these digital native brands that we see in the aisle of Sephora and Ulta and Mecca, why aren't they available?" So, I started the company and started hiring my first-year employees in a country that I had very little experience in. And I didn't speak the local language. I could only speak pidgin Mandarin. And I said, "Well, this seems like a big enough challenge. Let's go."Stephanie:That's a niche, [inaudible] opportunity. All these brands should be in China but they weren't. I mean, what are some of the top reasons why brands maybe don't even think about bringing their products to China? Because from the outside, it does feel scary, and regulations. And does the customer there even want what we love here? Seems like very different things that they love versus maybe what I might like. What are some of the reasons that you hear brands are like, "I've never thought about that before"?Julian:Well, I think the first thing which you kind of touched upon is the regulation. First of all, animal testing is obviously something that many of the brands, or most of the brands in our portfolio, goes against the DNA of what they believe in terms of cruelty-free. Luckily on May the 1st, animal testing regulations now be announced to have gone away, which is incredible because it just opens up this huge, untapped, physical market domestically.Julian:I think because of that restriction, it was very difficult for brands to enter China, and so everyone hears of these stories about Chinese tourists coming overseas and bringing back suitcases of products in the suitcases, and reselling them locally. And I think what happened was that the government obviously realized that this was happening and said, "Rather than smuggling products into the country, let's create a channel for these products to enter the country on a legitimate basis, and let's make sure that they're real products, authenticated, they're registered, and then they can be sold."Julian:But in order to do this, this channel which we call the cross-border channel, only limits the amount of products that you can sell to an individual consumer in China on a given month or a given year. There's a quota in terms of absolute R&D value. Whilst it's an exciting channel and it continues to grow, represents close to 20% of the ecommerce market, obviously there are restrictions for that. We started our business as a cross-border business which allows us to work with brands anywhere from Farmacy to The Ordinary, to Drunk Elephant, Supergoop!, and we really have an incredible partner portfolio. And to be able to build their presence in China by creating a profile for them on social media in all the different channels, on Tmall, and really build a brand from zero and continue to grow them there across multiple channels. That's how we started.Julian:Now, we currently have globally close to 300 employees in the company now, most of which are based in China. And I think what we do as a business is really provide that one-stop-shop service where we really build your brand. Where we call ourselves not a distributor. I would almost call ourselves the general manager of your brand in China, because we do everything that you would do as a brand owner by operating your brand in a foreign market.Stephanie:Yeah. What are some of the tests that you do to figure out what the market here even wants this? Because that seems like a big thing. If a brand comes to you and they're like, "I'm selling this," and you're like, "That might not even go well here." What are some things that you think about if a brand should even try to enter China.Julian:Yeah. I think, I mean that's the million dollar question. And I think what we do, we've gotten a lot better at it because I think the consumer there is very discerning, even though a lot of the information about that brand is not readily available on Chinese social media. There are ways to get it, and people do find out about it. What we typically do for any brand that wants to work with us is really have initially a conversation to really understand what the point of difference of the brand is. And really just see if there's a product market fit. We do a lot of desktop research around the brand, not only in its home market but in China to see how big that opportunity is. If someone comes to us and says, "Oh, we want to launch blonde hair dye in Shanghai and we think it's a big market because it's big in the UK," we have to question is there a demand for people to dye their hair blonde.Julian:And I think that's what we do, and we've gotten better at, is we test a lot of the products within our team. We have experts in each of the categories that we manage who really are our first port of call in terms of trying to see if there's an understanding or a demand for this product. Remember, all these brands have zero social awareness, and as the market's got more and more expensive to launch a brand, it's really important for us to make sure that if we get behind it, we're going to be able to spend the marketing dollars to get the brand to where it needs to be for it to make sense financially.Julian:After two weeks of very deep due diligence on the brand, we'll go back to the brand founder and say, "Listen, we think your hero product in America is this, but you know what? Actually in China, we think it's A, B and C." That helps us have this conversation and once we get to that point where we think that there's an alignment, we then start working on financial terms on how we would work together.Stephanie:What's interesting is that your background in the hedge fund world seems like it would be so helpful when coming and analyzing brands, and looking for opportunity.Julian:That's right.Stephanie:And looking at competitors and stuff. I mean, it seems like a perfect fit of how you came about even into this world, which is really fascinating.Julian:I think the hedge fund world really gave me an appreciation of data, and really thinking about data in a different way than I would normally do. For us to, whether it's analyzing the influences that we work with, or analyzing the livestreaming broadcast that we'll do tonight with Austin Li, or analyzing LTV and CAC on the brands that we manage, it's really become you're heavily reliant on it because if you don't rely on it, then you start to not make better decisions.Julian:And what we've done at SuperOrdinary is using that data that we give our brands, our partners, visibility into the consumer in China. And that gives us informed decisions on what products to make next. And I think that's really exciting for our brand partners, to know that this product, this moisturizer, may be too viscous on the skin. Or, this tint doesn't blend well with this lipstick shade. It's too bright. All of this information helps guide their product development. And for us to be successful, they have to be successful in their product development. So, data has become a really big part of our business model.Stephanie:Is there a different way they have to go about collecting the data there? Versus in the US, maybe you would do surveys, you would just directly ask, you would do your email marketing stuff. How would you go about collecting that data in a way that keeps you safe?Julian:Well, I think everything you learnt about business in the US market, you leave at the door when you walk through Shanghai Airport. And I think that's where you have to really come in with eyes wide open to say, "How is the consumer interacting?" First of all, there's no websites in China, so you're working through these platforms. And we have a market in the US where you have a very large amount of websites in the US market, whereas in China you have zero websites. But you have all these platforms. The world's bifurcated between platforms and D2C websites.Julian:And our view at SuperOrdinary is that platform is where the markets head to. The websites are where you discover your brands, you learn more about the content, you go to Instagram, you go to Sephora. But at the end of the day, where do you gravitate to? Well, where you're buying your products, on Amazon, on Tmall, on Lazada. And this is where I think we really try to create this vision of where SuperOrdinary is headed. And it's very important that our brands believe in this strategy too, because this is the direction we think beauty is headed.Julian:In China, I think to your question collecting data, the data that we get is readily available. You can see what people's revenues are by looking at Tmall data. But I think what's interesting is that we have a lot of other platforms, like the equivalent of Reddit and Quora that allow us to see what people are asking about brands. They're looking up ingredients. They're looking up what squalane means. They're asking what hyaluronic acid does to your skin. And that kind of data there is really important.Stephanie:I mean, how would a brand even think about getting in front ... I know you're talking about platforms and different ways to think about it. So any brands here are used to paid media and email marketing and Instagram and all that, so I know you have to just completely turn off all those ideas and start from scratch. How should a brand think about entering a new market? Even trying to get their product there is one thing, but then trying to get the word out, especially if they aren't working with a firm like those. How would they even go about that?Julian:Well, I think that historically, when a brand has entered the market it had a number of choices. One is to go through a multi-brand website that sells products and posts it into China. The problem with that is that your product may or may not get to the end consumer, so there's a lot of risk. That channel is obviously a very small one.Julian:Two is to go in it alone. Go to China, hire a team, spend 10 million dollars. Really go nuts. And after five years, you'll have lots of learnings. Pretty much what I've done, and figure out oh my gosh, there must have been a better way to do this. I'm not only spending a lot of money, but I'm losing time.Julian:Really, the way we approach our playbook ... And it is a playbook, because it is after many years of learnings, is making sure that you focus on the brand and what it stands for, making sure that the messaging behind the brand is consistent. You don't want 16 different platforms saying 16 different things about your brand. And also, the other thing is there's no such thing as seeding. You can't just send out 100 packages and expect to receive 100 posts. So, it opens a pay-per-play environment. And that's because the cultures are very different, too. Understanding the culture is very important to know where is your consumer spending most of the time? I think it would shock most people that 88% of the beauty market is Gen Z and Gen Y, Millennials. And more than 50% are purchasing products on their mobile phone. And they're looking to spend more and more on skincare and color.Julian:I think understanding that just helps you frame how do you, again, those consumers. Where are they spending their time? They're spending their time on TikTok, or Douyin in China. They're spending their time on Little Red Book to discover ... And so we at SuperOrdinary have a very large team now that speaks to over 40,000 influencers or KOLs, directly or through agencies. And I think because SuperOrdinary has a very exciting portfolio of brands, we're able to authenticate the types of brands we work with. So, we're able to work with the very best livestreamers in China. We're probably one of the most active in the livestreaming area. And that creates a lot of awareness around the brand.Julian:Building a brand from zero to one is the hardest part. It's the most expensive part of the curve. And then year two, year three should be easier. Getting it right is very important, so providing a very concise go-to-market strategy, making sure that the messaging, whilst it's in local language and it feels local to the consumer, is not different to what it is in the US. We don't want to be talking about a brand and not be in line with the brand guidelines, but making sure that the emojis, the hashtags, the cute names around the products really make sense to the local consumer. There's a lot of hard work that goes in before we even launch a brand. It's not just putting it on Tmall and then putting a price, which is traditionally what a lot of the local TPs have done. We really feel like you have to take a much stronger brand view about building that channel.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, totally agree. What are some of the biggest surprises, maybe, that brands have? When you're going through and you're working with them and maybe you say, "Okay, but we need to do it this way," or, "This is what they're expecting," or, "Influencers are the way here. It's not just a nice to have like it is here. It's like, this is the way to go." What are some of the surprising things that brands maybe aren't expecting when you work with them?Julian:I think volume. Volumes can get big very, very, quickly. It's not uncommon that you will enter a livestreaming event and will do 3 million in sales in 20 seconds. The market is that much bigger. But at the same time, in the US we're used to growth, very steady, 10, 20% every year. And that's achievable. And in China, something could happen where a very big celebrity will go to London and find your product and talk about it, and then boom. It's all gone in China. You cannot find it. And it's just because the absolute size of the market is that much bigger than the US, and that when the community is all on their phones buying and following these influencers, it's very much an influencer-led market and celebrity-led market. I think that shocks a lot of brands. Why doesn't it have some steady growth?Julian:I think they also realize, the shock, the difference is that it's how text-heavy the interaction with media is. While here in the West we're very visual, in the East it's very much about information. Before you even get to the ingredients, there will probably be seven pages of text telling you about the product, the storyline. And then at the end, there will be some more information about the product itself. It's really important to realize that's how they shop. I think that's another one.Julian:I think yeah, I think also the market there moves very quickly. It's very saturated as well, because everyone sees China as almost like the Holy Grail during the COVID environment. I can't tell you the number of times people have asked me, "Oh yeah, this is a must have." Also, I think on the downside is just measuring people's expectations lower. Just because it's a big market, doesn't mean your first year you're going to do 10 million in sales. It's really about it takes time to build a brand. Five years, minimum, in the global market, so why should it be any different in China? My advice is really be patient with your brand. If you give it the love and tender, loving care over the next five years to make sure that it's there in five years. You don't want something doing this and doing this.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, that's what I was kind of thinking when you said okay, you could do 3 million in sales in a matter of seconds. How could a brand think about setting up maybe a longer-term strategy there? Because when I'm putting on my US-centric view, I'm like okay, you've got SEO stuff, you're getting to the top and you start ranking, and then people see you more because you've proved that you're best long term, and Amazon do the same thing. And there, it feels like if it's so based on maybe influencers and celebrities, because you can have these blips of when you can get in front of people. How do you maintain a brand there long term, where it's not just crazy sales and then to until you have your next celebrity or influencer talking about you again? How do you think about that?Julian:I do think that's a billion dollar question. Really believe.Stephanie:I do those in my head, billion dollar questions.Julian:Because I feel like China has gotten to a cycle or a rhythm of doing shopping festival after shopping festival, whether it's 11.11, 12.12, 618, Secretary Day. These events become so gravitational for the consumer because they know they're going to get the best offers on those days. Naturally brands, if you don't participate in them, you miss the traffic which helps get you more and more awareness.Julian:I think channel dispersion is important because you don't want to be so focused on one channel versus the other. But I think with the opening up of the market with the removal of animal testing it's going to allow us to become a much more measured approach. And what I mean by that is just imagine if you could only sell your brand through Target. And you live and die by Target's traffic. Of course you're going to play along the rules that Target might have given you to go and say, "Oh, here you go and sell that."Julian:If you can imagine that you can leave Target now and open up in all these different retailers in the US, now you have a lot more control about your brand. Just like that in China, I think we're going to have this opportunity to build brands in a much more succinct manner, and open the doors that we think best represent the brand and not have to scattergun it through all these different social channels.Julian:And also, it's fair to say that the consumer now will get to touch the brand and the product for the first time in these physical stores. And it's not just Sephora. There's seven to 10 other competitors in China which have got insane new retail experience, so I think the market there is 10 to 15 years ahead of the US in many ways. And that's another shock to most brands, is like, "Oh my God. This really, truly exists?"Stephanie:Yeah. What are some of these experiences that are so far ahead that maybe we should be looking into?Julian:Yeah. I think the consumer, when they go to a retail store in China, traditionally you go to a Sephora which is really much about it's glossy black, it's got music, you've got these beauty assistants that will come in and they would really sell you the product. China has also gone the other way, where they've removed all the beauty assistants and you go in there and it almost feels like a ghost town. But you get to try all these product and sample sizes. There are examples of that. And there's a shop called Harmay, H-A-R-M-A-Y, you can Google it, have a look. It looks like a museum. And they're 10,000 square feet, and it's very Instagram-able. That's a word. But it's one of these things that I think has really changed the way that people are interacting, because people want to drive traffic towards the door, there has to be a reason. Especially when you can buy everything online.Julian:I think that's really exciting. And I think I always get asked the question of, why is livestreaming working in China versus US?Stephanie:Yeah. That's a big one. Whenever people have come on here and talked about ... We had one guest who taught Harvard, and they brought a livestreamer from China over to show how many Harvard t-shirts they could sell, or hats or something. And it was insane. But then also it was like, I don't know if that would work here. I don't know. I just doesn't feel like a similar market around how it was happening. I don't know, it just didn't feel very familiar.Julian:Yeah. I think culturally, in the US and the West we don't like to be sold to. And that's why Instagram is very much a place where you build relationships with the other person. I think that's fundamentally where the big difference is. And remember, livestreaming in China is a business. These livestreamers are starting work at 6:00 PM and clocking off at 2:00 AM, and they do that 365 days a year because it's a business. And they have tens of people underneath them that are helping them bring in product to talk about. I think when you think about this is your starting block, and when you think about in the West, I don't think people will approach livestreaming in the same manner.Julian:I think at the end of the day, the winner in livestreaming in my view is that it will be the platform. I would make a bet that Amazon would probably be the leader eventually, because they're the ones that are going to be able to fulfill and deliver multiple brands and multiple products to the consumer in a very fast fashion. However, it's exciting to watch all these new platforms come about into the space.Stephanie:Yeah. Are there any other trends that you see happening in China right now that you're like, this could work in the US? Or, this should definitely be brought back because people would love that here?Julian:I think China's done a really incredible job of cross-collaborations with really interesting partners, like very nonsensical to the West. I don't know. In the West, you'd see a clothing brand pair up with a skincare brand. But in China, they'll go KFC will do something with a perfume brand. Or, a bubble tea will work with Fenty Beauty. Really, they like to think out of the box in the market, and I think that's really exciting.Julian:I do like the idea of sampling. I think sampling is something that the US has always been involved with, these boxes that get delivered to the customer and these subscription boxes, whether it's Birchbox or BoxyCharm and all these different ones. In China, I see that there's this interest to go and try sample size products at stores. I think that could eventually translate over here, and I think that would be well received.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, I think about Costco. I wonder how much business they've lost because people like samples.Julian:They do, yeah.Stephanie:I mean, yeah. It seems like there is the stores that are okay with letting you try everything. And I know COVID mixed that up a bit and made it harder to do that, but I wonder if it will lean heavier into that because they think that's such a great way to sell. But it seems like some brands are kind of stingier, like I don't want to give this away for free. And it'd be interesting to have a case study of like well, when you get a sample, here's the ROI and the LTV just based off that one, little, teeny sample that you did give away consistently. Not just once a week when you send someone in to be an ambassador.Julian:Yeah. No, I think that's really exciting. I do love the idea that I think the US is incredible at creating these ideas. [inaudible] has done a great job and really given the consumer a more accessible way to try products. But we have to always ask ourselves the question, what's going to drive the end plus one customer to go to the next multi-brand beauty store? And I don't know about you, but how many times do I get ... I'm buying my groceries online because I don't to go and queue up. I mean, this is the trend and it's accelerating faster and faster.Stephanie:Yeah. Yeah, I agree. The one thing I'm thinking about now too is that it feels like in some ways, the US and Chinese buyers are the same, and in other ways very different. Thinking about the sale aspect where it's like, that's big in China. And actually, it's kind of like going away here. Why are we doing these Black Friday events? There's no point. And that's once difference.Stephanie:And the other one I'm thinking about is all these new D2C companies popping up where you see consumers here kind of falling in love with the brand, which is very different than maybe even five years ago. And maybe you didn't always know who the brand was behind the product. Are the buyers in China similar, or are they not really open to new brands? Or do they not really want to hear about the story? What are the differences there?Julian:I think for example when we started SuperOrdinary, we saw this opportunity to bring clean beauty into China. Which at the time, there was no social listing around clean beauty. If you checked out clean beauty packaging, clean ingredients, there was really nothing there. And that was very important. I think the US, where they're ahead of China in this respect, is the brand story, the mission behind it. What does the brand stand for? What's the why? I think those types of ideas are becoming more and more important in China. We're starting to see brands really care about the environment, the packaging, what they do. The say/do ratio, we call it. Julian:But I think one of the learnings we had, and it's why I think SuperOrdinary, we moved to the US to really build out the Amazon business. Because we saw the opportunity of what we were doing in China and reapplying that to beauty on Amazon. Everyone knows the story that there are rogue sellers on Amazon. There's plenty of opportunity. And over one third of all beauty purchases are now on Amazon. And it's like this dirty, little secret we all know. We're all purchasing our toilet paper, our mineral water on Amazon, so why don't we buy our skincare?Julian:We set up a team. We have a team just under 25 people here in the US focusing on building brands, the story, making sure their D2C websites look exactly like they do on Amazon. And it's just been really exciting, because in five years' time from now, I think if you ask yourself the question, "I want to buy a product today and I want it on my doorstep in 30 minutes, who's the player that's going to be able to do that?" And it's not your own D2C website. It's really the part that can actually have the tentacles everywhere that's going to be able to do that.Stephanie:Yeah. Yeah. That's going to be huge. All right, well with a couple of minutes left let's shift over to the lightning round. Lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. It's where I ask a question, and you have a minute or less to answer.Julian:Oh, wow.Stephanie:Are you ready, Julian?Julian:Let's go.Stephanie:All right. If you had a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be?Julian:I would invite Anthony Bourdain. I just think he's the coolest guy, and I really enjoyed his international aspect on traveling and eating. I love eating.Stephanie:Yeah? He'd be your perfect guy?Julian:Yeah.Stephanie:So, a show all about eating and food, then. I like that.Julian:Yeah, exactly. Definitely nothing to do with ecommerce.Stephanie:Yeah. That's good. Well, when you want to stay on top of new trends that are popping up, how do you stay on top of that? Where do you go? What are you looking at? Yeah, how do you know what's hot?Julian:I'm lucky enough to have three boys, who are 16, 14 and 12.Stephanie:Oh, so they know.Julian:Who keep me on my toes, yeah. I actually ask them, and they find everything on Twitch. I usually ask them, and then they frown at me like, "Dad, what are you doing in makeup?"Stephanie:You can ask makeup stuff on Twitch? Wow. That might be a new-Julian:Yeah, it is. It's true.Stephanie:What do they ask?Julian:Well, they just find out ... They know everything from men's grooming, and they get targeted. And it's so funny, because the young one, he said, "Dad, what's manscaping?" I'm like, "Where did you learn that from?"Stephanie:We'll talk about that later.Julian:I'm learning about new projects and new things all the time.Stephanie:Oh my gosh. That's awesome. That could be a whole, new trend there. Go on Twitch. Ask the people. They'll let you know what all the trends are.Julian:That's right.Stephanie:What was an idea that you thought was brilliant but ended up failing?Julian:Oh, I've got so many of those. I'm trying to think of the one that's the least embarrassing.Stephanie:You have embarrassing?Julian:During COVID, I was like, wow. I was thinking about everyone is staying at home. Everyone is on these Zoom class, why doesn't people create comfortable clothes? Maybe I should start a pajama company. And I quickly had a handbrake on that. So, I didn't do that. But I've also done other things. What else did I do? I invested in a pool cleaning company back in the day, and that was my first, real investment. And I had a very big learning from that because I gave them all the money upfront. And the second day, he never showed up for work. I'm like, "Huh. That was a bad trade."Stephanie:Never saw that dude again? Oh my gosh.Stephanie:All right, what's up next on your reading list?Julian:On my reading list. I guess I'm a creature of habit. I think one of the books I wish I read 20 years ago, it was available, was Ray Dalio's Principles.Stephanie:Yes. So good.Julian:I think he gives you this honest look at yourself. It's very introspective. And tells you how to build teams. I recommend everyone in the world to read that book over and over and over again.Stephanie:Yeah. He's such an interesting person. All his philosophies, and I think yeah, he came and spoke at Google when I was there. And just how he thinks about rating his employees, have you read about this?Julian:Oh yeah, of course.Stephanie:You get a rating.Julian:I know.Stephanie:And if you're this level, you actually just probably shouldn't speak up until you get to this level, but everyone gets access to everything.Julian:I know. The scorecard is like a baseball card. I mean, but it gives you a very different perspective about radical transparency. And also, teaching you how to take constructive criticism in a positive way, knowing that collectively the information in the room will allow you to make better decisions.Stephanie:Yeah. Yeah. Love that book. Well, awesome. Well, Julian, I've loved having you on the show. If people are trying to get into China and they're looking for help, where can people find out more about you and SuperOrdinary?Julian:Yeah. We have a website, SuperOrdinary.co. Not .com. Thank you, whoever took that website away from us. We'll find you. Or, reach me on JulianReis, R-E-I-S, @SuperOrdinary.co. Really, thank you so much, Stephanie. You're wonderful. It's so nice to speak to you.Stephanie:Thanks so much. It's been awesome.
Kanika: I heard you mention in a recent interview that it wasn't your job to “make your kids happy” and it stopped me in my tracks. I mean, making sure someone else is happy is a tall order (and might I mention impossible), but so many parents assume that role. I know I did. If happiness isn't the goal, what is? Stephanie: Yes, I can totally relate. It's so natural to assume that responsibility. But once you acknowledge that it's an impossible task and start focusing on the things you do have control over, a huge weight lifts. Stephanie's Tips: Give them power over their decisions, even the wrong ones. If kids are fighting you to put on shoes or a raincoat, once I said, “Okay, don't wear shoes” or “Okay, don't wear a raincoat” and when they felt the direct consequences of their decision, they were able to make better decisions in the future Give them agency over their success and failures Ex. not checking homework -- allowing the teacher to build a direct relationship with the student and hold them accountable Support them as they experience a full range of emotions You can't control their feelings -- sadness, elation and disappointment are all part of life, so instead help them develop tools to be able to cope with these emotions Build resilience Episode Links: WEBSITE: LearnWithHomer.com INSTAGRAM: @learnwithhomer FACEBOOK: /learnwithhomer
The future of commerce is being built all around us, and while so much of the industry changes on a daily basis, there are still some fundamental truths that anchor brands and allow them to find success in the digital and retail worlds. On this roundtable episode of Up Next in Commerce, I got to dig into exactly what those foundational elements are with Mike Black, the CMO of Profitero, and Diana Haussling, the VP and General Manager of Digital Commerce at Colgate-Palmolive.This was such a great discussion that touched on so many different topics that brands big and small should be paying attention to. For example, what are the three key levers that influence ecommerce sales? How should you be developing KPIs that will actually mean something and lead to more profitability and growth? Why is omnichannel the way of the future and what channels should companies be investing in? Mike and Diana have the answers, which they have gathered through long and impressive histories in the ecommerce world — Mike worked at Staples and Nielsen, and Diana has held roles at places like Campbell's, General Mills, and Hersheys. These two really know their stuff and they were so much fun to talk to. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! Main Takeaways:Pulling the Right Levers: There are three basic levers that influence ecommerce sales: availability, findability, and conversion tactics. If you can't ensure that you reliably have products to offer people, that those people have an easy way to find the products, and that they are given reasons to actually make a purchase, you won't be able to grow or increase profits. You Reap What You Sow: Being a first-mover on any platform is one of the investments that has the highest potential payoffs. Companies that took Amazon and Instacart seriously from the get-go have created a huge advantage for themselves in the ecommerce space. By having a head start in one place, you also free yourself up to explore elsewhere while your competition tries to keep up in the first spot you've already dominated.You Want Them to Want You: As a brand, you have to firmly establish a value proposition to present to customers, especially when you are trying to extract information or gather data about them. Give customers concrete reasons to want to engage with your brand and earn their trust so that they are more likely to keep coming back. Then use the data they give you to provide even better experiences and products over and over.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hello, everyone. And welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO at mission.org. Today, we are back with an awesome round table with some amazing folks. First up, we have Diana Haussling, who currently serves as the VP and General Manager of Digital Commerce at Colgate-Palmolive. Welcome.Diana:Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited for this conversation.Stephanie:Me too. And next we have Mike Black, who's the CMO of Profitero. Mike, welcome to the show.Mike:Thank you very much. Also, very excited.Stephanie:Yeah. This is going to be a good one. I can just feel it. I can see the energy between you guys. I can see you got a lot to say. So, it's going to be a good one. So, I would love to start as I always do with a bit of background so people know who we're chatting with. So, Diana, maybe if you could start with… I see you have a long history in the world of CPG work for… I mean the most well-known brands that I can think of, and I was hoping if you can kind of go through that journey a bit?Diana:Yeah. So, I've been lucky enough to work at four major CPG organizations. I cut my teeth with Hershey in sales and really was able to understand, not only retail, but direct customer selling. Moved over to General Mills where I stiffed my toe in the water in marketing. Loved working on those brands and getting a taste of a larger organization. And then I shifted to Campbell's where I spent the bulk of my time. Campbell's will always have a special place in my heart.Diana:I spent a lot of times there, ping-pong back and forth between marketing and sales. I created a couple of roles for myself. One of which was the lead of e-commerce, where I established the e-commerce organization there before leaving and coming to my new love, Colgate-Palmolive. Super excited to be part of the Colgate family. I lead a digital commerce team called the Hive. It had that name before I got there. But I'm attributing it to the Beyonce now that I'm there.Stephanie:I love that.Diana:I'm so super excited to be at Colgate. There's just a ton of energy and growth around e-commerce and our primary focus is on digital transformation which is a perfect segue for this conversation.Stephanie:Yes. I can't wait to get into that. All right, Mike, a bit about you.Mike:Yeah. So, I started my career in retail. I started my first real job was at Staples, the office products company. And I was responsible for public relations there. Opening new stores in different markets, and really got a firsthand look at how retailers, traditional retailers were being disrupted by e-commerce. The time that I was at Staples was right at the time that Amazon started to make its ways. And I could see the impact of that just in the way that Staples was going to market, and they started to really dial up their own e-commerce efforts to combat.Mike:So, it was really interesting to see that pivotal moment inside from a retailer, classic brick and mortar retailer go through that transformation. So, I started my career there, then I started working in startups. And I eventually found my way to Nielsen. So, I worked in the part of Nielsen where we tested new product innovations for CPGs and worked in their measurement and analytics. And while I was at Nielsen, that's my first exposure to e-commerce and first exposure to this new emerging space of analytics.Mike:And I knew this was the place I wanted to be. It was in the e-commerce space, the intersection of e-commerce and data analytics, and that led me to Profitero where I am now. And we're getting to work with smart people like Diana who is someone I listen to her speak, and then I take notes. And then I sort of borrow some of her wisdom, and she's someone I'm always learning a lot from.Diana:Right back at you, Mike. And if you don't follow him on LinkedIn, you should, because he leads all social for Profitero, which isn't in his CMO title.Stephanie:Wow. I like this. Diana's like your hype woman. So, this is a good match we have here.Mike:The feeling is mutual.Stephanie:Yeah. That's awesome. So, Diana, I mean I'm thinking about you starting an e-commerce team at Campbell's. And then coming to Colgate where they already kind of have one set up, and I'd love to hear a bit about what is it like now versus then? Because I can just imagine you being like, “This is important everyone and I need some budget for it and this is going to be a thing.” Whereas now, it's like obvious. Like, “Yeah. Jump in. Let's go deep and spread the word.”Diana:Yeah. I think, and I'm sure this will ring true to a lot of my fellow CPGers and the struggle on the e-commerce business. If you're at an organization, and this is a completely new space, but you have leadership that definitely sees the potential and the opportunity, it really becomes on you to not only operationalize, but really help leaders understand how to translate e-commerce, how to translate digital to a P&L, to growth projectors, to a strat plan. All those things CPG people are really comfortable with.Diana:And then also to really think about not only what your org needs to be like to get things off the ground, but where it needs to go in the next three years. And typically, you're not in the position where the organization truly understands how to make that work. So, there is a kind of this hybrid role that digital commerce folks have to play in emerging organizations where they're really helping folks navigate, what IT support do I need? What supply chain support do I need? Where should everything sit?Diana:And you can do it on your own, but you can also partner. So, there's a number of groups you can partner with. I happen to know that Profitero has done a lot in this space, and they have, basically, a journey for organizations that you can leverage. But it really is like starting from scratch and building a case for growth. I think the biggest question that you get when it comes to just starting up in an organization is how is this incremental to the business?Diana:And my pushback to that always is, it's not about incrementality. Incrementality is a bonus. It really is all about protecting your base business, going where consumers are going, and ensuring that you future proof your organization for the reality of what our new world is, which is omni. It's slightly different when you come into an organization like Colgate who already has a established e-commerce team or Center of Excellence.Diana:I definitely feel like I came to the land of the willing. Everyone, from the top down, is really excited and energized by the space. And that it's energizing, but it also means you have to redirect all of those good intentions and positive energy to the right focus and the right goal. So, some of the work when you're in a more established organization is really, how do I harness all of those resources when they are abundant? And make sure they're spent in the right places and they deliver. Because there's going to come a time where leadership is going to look back on that cash that they threw in e-commerce, and they're going to say, "What did I get for it?" And you better have delivered on it.Diana:I think the other piece is making sure you understand how to integrate across the organization. It's important to have a strong center, but it's even more important to make sure everybody understands the role that they play in digital, in e-commerce regardless of if they're on the badass teams like the Hives of the world.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean the one thing I hear a lot of brands struggling with though are around metrics. I mean from working at bigger companies in the past, I've seen people kind of come up with KPIs in a way that, it's kind of made up. Stephanie:So, when thinking about big and small brands thinking through like KPIs and metrics, feels like kind of a messy world where when you get to the bigger organizations, some of them can start to feel like they're just kind of being forced. Like, "Oh, see, we have it. And if you look in three years, maybe it's like not even relevant. And then the smaller companies are like, "Well, how do we even start?"Stephanie:And so, I'm wondering, how do you go about even thinking about developing KPIs, thinking about brand building, thinking about conversions. Is there some kind of allocation you had going into it of like, "Here's what should be spent on just holding down the fort, and here's what should be spent on acquiring new customers and thinking through the LTV and everything."Diana:For me, that's a marriage between two points. It's the external data and viewpoint. So, where do you have an actual right to win? Where are the white space opportunities? And where are their growth that you're not getting your fair share of? Really understanding that industry landscape is really critical to forming your strategy.Diana:What you want to avoid is just forming a strategy that's based off of internal goals and objectives, because you may not be able to deliver against that. It's a marriage between the two. Then, it's getting really clear internally on what winning looks like. There is a high cost to acquisition, but there also is a huge penalty if you don't ride the momentum and the wave of growth while it's happening.Diana:I use Skype and Zoom during the pandemic as an example of that. Skype had a foothold on the industry. Zoom came in out of nowhere and won the pandemic. You don't want to be Skype. So, how do you ensure that you position yourself and your brands, so you not only understand what the CEO and the board wants you to deliver, but also you're pushing on what are the right levers in order to get there? Because your brick and mortar business is not going to mirror your e-commerce business. It's going to be slightly different.Diana:And then you have to understand those points where there's intersection. So, right now, we're seeing growth across all modalities or modes of shopping. So, there is this real digital impact on the physical brick and mortar footprint. And the onus is on the digital commerce team to make sure they understand what that impact can do, and they're not only influencing the KPIs that drive e-commerce, but they're helping the brick and mortar business understand the KPIs they need to maintain competitive edge. But also to hold their shelf space, their promo space, and their capacity within the total retailer environment.Mike:Yeah. Just to build on what Diana said. I've noticed a shift just in vocabulary and positioning in the last probably three months with e-commerce leaders. They used to really talk about e-commerce as e-commerce, and it was really about winning in that channel. And I've noticed this language shift towards now repositioning around this idea of digitally influenced sale, and taking credit for all the work that you do online that drive sales.Mike:And you think about it, most, and it's true. Most shopping experiences are happening much… Even if you go in a store, you're researching online, you're looking at content. You're doing a search to see if it's even available at your local Target. And what comes up in that digital experience is going to dictate whether you go to that store or not. So, it's just so much more impact that I think goes into your e-commerce that I don't think e-commerce leaders were really fairly taken credit for. But I noticed this, Diana, you probably… And it sounds like you're starting to speak this languages.Mike:It's like almost every sale is digitally influenced now. And so, that investment, I think it breaks down the barriers between the brick and mortar teams when they start to realize that their success isn't independent. It isn't just e-commerce and I don't have to care about it. Actually, will have a full cycle, and you see some retailers, really, I believe the sticking point comes when you have a retailer like Walmart who starts to say, "Hey, you have to talk to me in the language of omnichannel."Mike:And now, when they set that tone and being as influential as you are, I see them starting to drive this different consensus. So, I think the metrics have changed in some ways, the language has changed and I think we're starting to reframe that it isn't just e-commerce, but just commerce now. And I think that's going a long way.Stephanie:Yeah. That is why we label the podcast, Up Next in Commerce, because we knew, we saw the writing on the wall, so just several notes, we were first. So, how are you going about even thinking about that tracking? I mean if you're saying a sale is digitally influenced, in my head I'm like, "How? How would you even know that?" So, what are some ways, either Mike that you see brands kind of attacking that problem or Diana, how's Colgate thinking about that?Diana:Mike, you got this one. This is your [crosstalk].Mike:Yeah. I'd say like basically, I mean the way that we think about your metrics really goes down to the levers, right? The levers that influence your sales in e-commerce, really comes down to like three basics. And there's some, the one is the first lever. Most important is that you're available. So, that your product is even listed and it's not out of stock. That was a major issue last year, and a lot of brands are still feeling that repercussion, and that has a lot of impact.Mike:So, if you go to Amazon, and you're looking for a particular product, it's not there. You better believe consumers are going to switch, and we saw that switching, and that switching is very painful online, because the loyalty can go, and then you don't have that repeat. So, first and foremost you think about, "Okay, we got to be available." It's just like being in store. You got to have the product there on the shelf.Mike:Then, the next big lever is being findable. And that's what's really interesting, when you're in a traditional store, you walk into a store, you knew that your product, you sold it in at the beginning of the year, the planogram. That, yeah, your product was going to be on the shelf, and they're just going to replace it. But in the digital store that changes every day, and we've done like 24-hour video views of search results on Amazon, and the products are just changing constantly shifting.Mike:And so, findability is really being keen to what terms your customers going to search for, and then being there all the time in the top of the results, and we have seen that if you're not on page one, and sometimes not even in page, in the first five spots, you might as well not even be there, because you're not findable. So, that's like your second lever.Mike:And then your third is really about your conversion levers. Having that content and having those reviews, and that's probably one of the most transferable things between the online and the offline experience, because there's so much discovery and learning and research is being done, and that's one of the things that Amazon has done a great job and recognized, they've given consumers so much real estate, so much space. Places for videos, place for content.Mike:And I think most of us, if we're going to look for a new product, we're going to start on Amazon. We're going to soak in that information and make informed decisions. So, if you look at it, it's all right. Well, my end game has got to be available. I got to be findable, showing them a search. I have to have good content. And then if those things are true, you start to gather metrics, and that's actually what Profitero is doing is we're able to help brands understand across all the sites you're selling. Are they available? Are they findable? Are they converting? And ultimately what we know is if you pull those levers, and you optimize those levers, your sales are going to grow, and you're going to outpace the competition.Mike:And to Diana's point, the very, very important thing that grounds all this is having a sense of your competitive growth, because you need to be able to define, like Diana said, not define success in your own terms. But you have to be able to see how your competitors are growing in that category, and if you look at 2020, everybody grew, pat yourself on the back. But if you knew that your competitor grew at like 2x or 3x, that's a wake-up call, there's something you're not doing that they're doing. And so, it's really important that you balance those tactical levers of the shelf with just this overall having sales metrics and not just looking at your own. And these are all data points that are now available through technology and Diana can speak about how they're actioned.Diana:Yeah. I would say the digital commerce starter kit is definitely, first and foremost, digital shelf health and discipline. That's a game changer. If you're not winning there, and you're not going to win, we spend so much time as marketers really focusing on our packaging and understanding the importance and the value of packaging.Diana:Well, in this new world, the digital shelf is your new packaging. It's your new end cap. It's your new aisle. So, how do you think about digital shelf and the discipline there really is going to translate into your competitive set, because now consumers can define what that competitor set is. It's going to really define your conversion rates. Does your content help consumers really understand how to use your product?Diana:And it's also going to impact your ratings and reviews. Does your content enable your consumers to have the experience that they're expecting when they see you online? So, it really does fuel all of the potential for your growth. And I said once you have that starter kit up and running, then you really have to take a step back, and think about, what are the other KPIs? We tend to really focus on marketing and sales when it comes to digital commerce. But this game is won and lost with supply chain, IT, and finance.Diana:So, starting back with supply chain, IT, and finance and setting yourself up to be profitable, to be deliverable, and to be flexible is really how you can break away from the pack.Stephanie:Yeah. I love that. What are some surprises? And maybe Mike this is a question for you. What are some surprising platforms or channels when you're talking about, everyone did well, but some brands maybe did double or triple compared to other ones? What are some surprises there that you're seeing or things that are happening right now, you're like, "This platform's kind of popping up or people are pulling off of this one?"Mike:Yeah. Well, just specifically in terms of platforms, I think, well, in terms of like retail platforms, I think part of it is I think last year was really about the relevance of certain platforms jumped up. So, I think most brands that took e-commerce seriously, took Amazon very seriously from the get-go, I think last year Instacart became the platform that everyone's, especially in CPG space said, "Okay, this is serious now." People were going there first and foremost, it was a lifeline in terms of getting delivery.Mike:And suddenly now, what that creates is an opportunity to be first in market. And I think there's an advantage with any platform to be the first mover, and there's reasons why. Amazon's a good example of a platform that favors brands that have good sales history. So, if you excelled, really, if you were like the first let's say pet brand a couple years ago to rock Amazon, what happened is that you were excelling at all your execution, your sales are going up, and you start to organically just get higher placement, because Amazon favors brands that are relevant.Mike:And so, if you're really selling, they're going to give you that top space. And you see that same dynamic in Instacart, and in grocery too, because what happens is on a grocery site, people usually buy groceries off a list. And so, the first time they place orders on an Instacart or grocery, they're building their list. And then the next time it's a reordered list. So, there's a huge advantage to be a first mover on a platform and to build that purchase history, because it drives your repeat rates.Mike:And so, what we saw last year was just a lot of brands stepping up, and saying, "You know what? We're going to capitalize this. We're going to be early. We're going to invest in ads. You were going to get it, get that top of mind share." And I think they're going to reap the rewards now for the rest of year. So, you can look at it from a platform perspective, sometimes being first to market on these platforms, taking e-commerce seriously can give you a long-term sustainable advantage.Stephanie:I wonder if consumers are changing because of this past year or two, it seems like consumers are looking for the newer thing, the D2C company that's kind of like just saw it on Instagram. I feel like even myself, I go to Amazon, I see a lot of brands that I know. I'm kind of like, "Ah, keep scrolling." I've known of these brands for 10 years. Of course, they're number one. They've been around a long time. Let me find this deodorant that just popped up. Oh, cool. It's natural. It has all the things that I want, but it might be pretty far down or I'm even getting to a place where I'm kind of skeptical that Amazon might not even have it. And I might just need to go to the website or maybe go to, I don't know, Target and browse through and try and find it. What are you guys thinking around that?Diana:I love everything that you're saying there, but the insights background in me is super excited around the fact that we all went through a life change at the same time. So, if you think about that, typically, when you have a baby, your consideration set changes, your lifestyle changes, which are open too. New households with second babies tend to buy a washing machine within that first week that they bring that baby home, because they're like, "Crap, I'm not dealing with all this laundry on my own."Diana:But we all went through that change, collectively had a baby at once and changed how we operate, how we think, what we're open to, what our consideration set is. So, insights teams out there should be real hype right now, because it's an opportunity for them to really take a deep dive in and rethink brand positioning and audiences. So, exactly what you're talking about, people are more open or more exposed or they realize how connected they are to certain brands, and then they were willing to go direct to that brand to purchase those items to ensure that they were getting, and they're going to sign up for subscription because they're not going to be out of that brand like they were, toilet paper, those first few weeks of the pandemic.Diana:So, I think it's a huge opportunity for brands to really think through, really around who your audience is, your target audience is? Are you capturing them? So, this is your defense strategy. Am I getting them? They're switching from platform to platform. I was getting them when they were going in the brick and mortar store, am I getting them when they're going into Instacart? Is my item showing up? So, making sure you're getting that first basket because the first basket is everything.Diana:Then, there should be a real acquisition strategy. Who do I have the right to go after because now they're open to me, they're open to my brand or they're open to new things and ideas? And that's where brands can really leverage their suite of their portfolio to really drive that cross shop. So, I think this is a huge opportunity if brands jump on it to really connect with consumers. I never used to work out before the pandemic, but then when I was stuck at home, in the same room that I sleep in, and then working in. I was like, "Well, I need to do something."Diana:Peloton got me. I don't like working out. I like the community. I like the gamification. I want to pretend that I'm one of their instructors with the jewelry on and super cool. And I'm not, so they totally got me. And now I'm working out three days a week. That's a whole habit that I never had before, and so it's just ripe for opportunities for brands to not only grow within their traditional channels, but to acquire new consumers in new channels.Stephanie:Yeah.Mike:Yeah. Just to build on that. There's no single consumer anymore, and there's no single retailer. I think there's, me personally in my own house, takes… We shop at eight different retailers to stock our house now online. There's certain things that Target does well, there's certain things Amazon does well. There's certain missions, when I'm in discovery mode like you described, yeah. When I want to go find something and be inspired, I might look at Amazon.Mike:When I have a mission where I just need to stock up, I might go to Walmart. I might go to BJ's or Costco. So, what's really interesting and what's really challenging is you can't just… The brands that are going to win are the ones that can do this well at scale effectively. They recognize that their consumer is everywhere, that they're shopping for different, in different occasions. Convenience, different factors, and they realize like you have to be everywhere, you want to be available and you want to show up.Mike:And I think that's the next play, and that's what makes omnichannel really exciting is you have those brands that maybe nailed Amazon, and they're comfortable, but the next level of this game is, all right, now we have to operationalize this at scale across all our retailers teams, and those brands that are on top of that in making those driving that change, internally to be there everywhere. Those are going to be the ones are going to pick up that market share in the next year, and next two years.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean how do you think about for brands needing to be everywhere? I mean I'm thinking about like you said, the shopper, when I'm at Costco, I'm in a different mindset. And I might want to see a slightly different version of a product whereas when I'm on Amazon or when I'm in Target which feels higher end maybe than a Walmart. How would you think about a brand should handle that now that they have to be everywhere, but also have very different consumers everywhere in a different mindset depending on where they're shopping?Diana:I mean that's where portfolio roles and retailers segmentations really come into play. It's not the sexy work, but it's the work that has to be done. And it can't just be done at a very high level anymore, it really has to be done at the SKU level, because there are some multi-packs they're going to pop in certain modalities at certain retailers, there's some SKUs that just have a better fit. The brand teams that are able to really get that portfolio role and customer segmentation right are going to be able to invest to win, because as retail media costs grow, the cost of service grow, dollars, that bucket of dollars hasn't gotten any bigger. So, it's about being smarter about how and where you invest and really thinking thoroughly through how what you're expecting to get from that dollar.Diana:So, sometimes it's going to be a ROAS, sometimes it's going to be data, sometimes it's going to be something else. But really having clear business objectives for every dollar that's spent.Stephanie:Yeah. I love that. Mike, anything to add?Mike:Yeah. No. I think, Diana, like portfolio strategy is it's funny like there's been this like sea change I think when early stages of e-commerce or at least my observation, there's so much excitement that you get the marketing teams are just spending dollars, right? It's about growth. We're just going to buy some ads. And then all of a sudden, you see this diminishing returns. All of a sudden the things you were spending ads on, oh, they're always out of stock or they're getting de-listed.Mike:And that's a symptom and really it's like this idea, and you mentioned Diana, it's like marketing and supply chain are the best friends in the e-commerce. It's a weird thing because I'm a marketer, and you think, but it has to be because unless… You almost have to flip the funnel. And I thought it's like you got traffic, you get conversion. And then you get to like profitability. You have to flip it. And I think that's the flip now is thinking about your portfolio from consumer dimension, profitability dimension across your retailers. If you don't set those clear lines up, you don't set that definition up, this has a downstream effect.Mike:And you see this a lot on retailers where it's like, "Okay. Well, I have the same products everywhere, so what happens?" Well, if Walmart drops the price, Amazon drops prices and suddenly that thing that you're spending ad dollars on, you can't even, it's not even there. So, I think this is like the next generation is like almost like, "All right, let's break it back. Let's work backwards now. Let's start fresh, and let's build that from the portfolio."Mike:And then, once we make that clean, we're just going to see this uplift and our cost to serve, our cost of marketing is going to be super-efficient versus just throwing dollars at it without a strategy.Diana:That's not just for the manufacturers. I also feel really strongly that that benefits the retailers. They don't want to comp prices back and forth. They want a unique value proposition for their consumers. So, how can you help the retailers achieve their objectives? If Kroger's going after young households, and young families, what's your solution to help them go after them? If Target's going after the black consumer, how are you helping them capture as many black guests as possible? How are you really thinking about not only the strategy, so it benefits you, so it also really does align with your retailer strategy?Diana:That's how you create a win-win scenario, and you avoid the competitive pricing pressures that we're all experiencing right now.Stephanie:Yeah. How do you find a good partnership with these retailers? Because I'm sure when they have so many brands they're working with and everyone probably wants to talk with them a little bit differently, and they have different ways that they want to help them or work with them, how do you think a successful partnership looks like or what does that structure look like?Diana:I think this is why the digital commerce space has to exist in this kind of hybrid world, because I feel like marketers take a really consumer human first mindset. Sales people tend to be very like sales for sales focus. In the middle you have to be this hybrid. I do take a customer first approach to an extent because you have to understand your customer strategies. Target's earnings call just came out this week or last week, and they talked about how 90% of all their sale is digital or physical are coming from stores.Diana:That's an insight for me to strategy. So, if I want to win at Target, I've got to understand how they tick, how they operate, and how I can help support their strategies, and their executions. So, it's really that intersection between, what our brand teams are trying to accomplish? Our sales teams targets, and our retailer strategies, and where we can actually play.Diana:From a Colgate-Palmolive perspective, I'm not going to be able to help them win in every single element of their strategy. But there are areas that I am going to be able to help them lead or give them a perspective that can influence other sections. And I think the more and more we play those roles, the more valuable that you show up to a retailer, the more inclined they are to partner with you.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean I feel like that's a life principle. You just did your research on the brand, the company, you looked at their investor reports, you look into the background of the people, and instantly they're like, "Oh, you kind of already know that I don't have to bring you up to here, you're already here." So, now we can get going, which is awesome.Diana:Basically all can be boiled down to the same dynamics of the dating relationship. Sometimes you go to the sporting event because your significant other likes it, and then sometimes they go to the thing that you want because you like it. And then if you have a mixture of alcohol and sports, you got me. So, there you go.Stephanie:I love that. I love that. Cool. Well, the one thing I want to kind of touch on too is around the world of marketing right now. So, I've talked with some brands that have had to kind of always work in a scrappy mindset. One of them was Anheuser-Busch where they're like, "Yeah. We can't ever have this one-to-one relationship. We always have to do other things to be able to reach our customers because we actually can't directly talk to them."Stephanie:And it makes me think brands like that might be pretty far ahead with all these changes to ads and privacy and retargeting and all that. What are you guys thinking is kind of like what are brands missing right now? What should they be doing to continue to have a close relationship with their customers and not lose out when they lose access to a big ad pull that maybe they're not going to have anymore?Diana:For me, I think it's a balance. I think you have to think about your consumer touch points across the board. Everyone's talking about the cookieless environment that's looming. We're all hoarding data. But I don't know how actionable everyone's making it. So, I think it's really around taking a step back and what's your learning agenda.Diana:You want to connect with consumers, but what's the value proposition for them? What's the benefit? And I think brands really have to think about and understand, if I'm connecting with consumers, what value am I providing them? And why should they give me their information? Why should they want to connect and engage with me? And if you haven't established that, then you haven't earned the right to have their information or their contact, because it really is all around creating a delightful experience for them.Diana:I think understanding all of the data inputs that you have and really thinking hard around, how do you leverage them to feed strategies, not with just within the silos of the space? But how do you integrate them so you're feeding your traditional media strategy with your D2 insights? You're feeding your supply chain strategy with some of the ratings and reviews that you found, even your R&D innovation.Diana:So, it's really around being mindful and thoughtful about all the touch points that you have and being able to action against them. But I think for most retailers and manufacturers, if you don't have a strategy to think about how you're going to leverage your data, and you haven't, you're going to miss the boat, because everybody's gearing up, and it's what's happening now if you want to stay ahead going forward.Mike:Yeah. And just to build on that. I think totally it depends on the consumer and what's relevant. But I mean generally, I think what I'm seeing from some brands a little bit of higher level thinking in terms of how they're engaging with consumers, even on social media. I noticed there was a time period where I would go on Instagram and I saw these ads. They're very tactical. There's just like these product ads like, "Okay, buy this widget, buy this thing."Mike:And you still see these display ads, but then I've seen a lot more ads are just more, they're helpful, their content. I'm a pet owner and I wasn't going through my feed and I saw those, it was an ad, but it was from a pet company, and it was really supposed to be like how do you, what are the attributes of a healthy pet? It was kind of an interesting, intrigued me. I have an aging pet, so I just think there's a lot more creativity, you can't… I think it's easy in e-commerce to get very operational, but you can't underestimate the power of creative and how important creative is.Mike:And I think there's a lot of brands that I've seen challenger brands that are leveraging humorous videos. They're really doing things viral on YouTube, they're building a personality around their brand. They're getting up on TikTok. They're leveraging every touch point they can at the top of the funnel to build, to be creative, to stand out. And now what that's doing for them is now they're training consumers to go to Amazon and type their branded, not type a general category keyword.Mike:So, I think what's happening is the mediums are changing, maybe it's not television maybe it's not that, but there's so many more tools for marketers and very agile to still tell stories. And so, I think storytelling is going to be, has always been important. And I think that brands that are going to invest in that and make sure that they're using all these other new platforms these video platforms are going to really be well positioned for the long term.Diana:Yeah. And I think what I heard from you too is this authenticity. And what consumers are really looking for because I feel like now especially within Instagram, people want to be sold to, to an extent, but they want to be sold to for me. I want you to understand who I am, what I want to see and deliver it to me the way that I want to." But I think people are also really looking for real content. So, a lot of the slick and shiny campaigns that work on TV, are not going to work in social. So, really understanding who your consumer is and how to speak to them in an authentic way. But also be able to convert them in three seconds or less.Diana:So, how do you make that from something content, how do you really think about making it real? Especially if you're talking to Gen Z, how do you talk to them so it feels like they're talking to their peer group in a very authentic way? Is really critical. And then, how do you make it every single touch point the opportunity for consumers to buy? Because the funnel as we know it, has really collapsed in a lot of places and consumers are coming in and out as they choose, and if you're not able to make your social shoppable. Then, you're really going to miss a lot of opportunities to drive conversion and acquire new audiences.Stephanie:Yeah. And I love the idea around storytelling. I mean that's kind of what our whole company's been built around is like this is what humans look for. And I think there's this really big opportunity in companies that have been around for a long time, like Colgate-Palmolive. I think since 1806, the story behind that maybe has not really been around of like, how was it founded?Stephanie:I mean we had on UPS the other day, and we were kind of going through the history of UPS. I'm like, "Whoa. They need to talk about this more." I mean founded by like a 19-year-old guy, and here's how like it even started with this bike delivery. They were on their bikes delivering things, and what it is today and all the pivots they've had to go through. And I think kind of getting back to those storytelling routes, especially for the more historical brands not only will kind of… I mean people want to hear those stories. I just don't think big brands tell it enough in a way that connects with people now.Mike:Colgate was the original startup.Stephanie:See?Mike:Right?Stephanie:This is what I want. This is the connection I need.Mike:1800 startup brand, right? That's a challenging brand.Diana:Well, you talk about purpose driven brands. I do think a lot of these more established CPTs don't really know how to tell that story. I think there was a time period and several years ago when like it was just something you didn't do, and if I look back on all the organizations I worked at that do a lot of good for the communities in which they serve, that wasn't the story that you told. It wasn't like the thing. But now people are expecting brands to have a purpose, and they are using their dollars to determine if that purpose is worthy or not.Diana:So, if you're not talking about it, then you're not going to get those dollars. And Gen Z is not having it at all. They expect you to stand up and not just talk the talk, they want to see you walk the walk and they also want to see what your executive leadership team looks like.Diana:And I think consumers are also expecting the role of big corporations has shifted. How are you making this world better? How are you involved in social justice? What is your role? I'm super proud of Colgate for launching a recyclable toothpaste tube that then they gave the technology to everybody in the industry, so now everyone can do it. Those are the type of we're here for the good of the planet, we're here for the good of society, and we're going to be good corporate citizens and contribute to that. That's what the consumers want, and those are the stories that larger CPGs have to start telling.Stephanie:Yeah. I love that. So, when thinking about, earlier we're mentioning like you kind of have to be everywhere. And one thing that I also wanted to get into was all around agencies. We've had on amazing companies, one, was this company avocados from Mexico, and they talked about we've been like the number two or three commercial in the Super Bowl, and we have all these crazy things that we do that really drive, not only conversions, but awareness of our brand and they're selling avocados.Stephanie:They said our agencies are the ones that really, we vet them. They're amazing. They helped us get here, and I'd love to hear your take on, in a world where you have to be everywhere, how do you find agencies to work with that'll help get you there?Diana:For me, I've worked with so many great agencies along the way. And what I found is for me agencies are always an extension of my team. I'm expecting them to push us to make us better. I also really want to empower them to bring us awesome, creative, and make us feel really uncomfortable, because that's when you know you're onto something, especially when your boardroom feels really uncomfortable. That's when you know you're really onto something.Diana:But I think in this new digital commerce age, it's important to have an integrated agency model, because there are different agencies that are good and serve a purpose for different things. You do need those major creative campaigns, and yes, the Super Bowl is still important to some brands, but there's kind of the day-to-day operations, and also the ability to really think about digital commerce and the integration with shopper marketing and understanding how different retailer dynamics works, and how to leverage the data that's critical.Diana:So, agencies that not only know media, but know performance marketing but also understand retailers are really going to rise to the top right now, especially as more and more media dollars are shifting to retail media. Now those agencies that can work together, so from the big campaign to the Super Bowl ad and bring it all the way back to the Kroger, the Walmart, or the Target. Now that is just perfect.Mike:Yeah. I mean agencies from my point of view are, they are an extension and what they're often doing is they're acting on the data and insights that maybe a e-commerce team isn't equipped to act on yet. And so, I think the best agencies are the ones that make data their differentiation. So, for example, you could have a handful of agencies are all really good at spending your ad dollars. But there will be a select few agencies that know how to get that extra edge from some data, maybe it's incorporating some out of stock data or competitive search data, and you want to find those agencies are always pushing the boundary for you.Mike:They're not just managing on the basic models of ROAS, but they're actually looking at, what are these new things we could do? A test and learn, how do we advanced your ROI? Actually show that the ads are growing market share. How can they use data? And I think that's going to be a big differentiator, especially since digital shelf data, e-commerce data, it's still new for a lot. But I think you're going to see the separation where you find these agencies that are data-led, data centric, and I think there's a huge opportunity. To Diana's point, where first wave of digital agencies were very Amazon focused. There's such a huge gap in skill set right now in like the traditional shopper marketing for digital commerce that I think agency are perfect position to start becoming your extension of your Walmart, your Walmart digital operators, your Target.Mike:I think that's where you're going to see a lot of agencies flourish is where the maturity to actually pull those levers still isn't there. They can come in and be leaders. So, I look at agency on two dimensions who is really driving digital data driven decisions, who are ones that I can really scale with beyond just the Amazons but into that next tier flywheel that I want to go. Who's going to lead me there, lead my thinking, and help me be the market share leader on that next platform?Stephanie:Yeah. I love that. Are there any tests that you do when hiring agencies that you're like, "This will let me know if you're what I need, if you're well-rounded, if you can kind of plug in with other agencies and cover everything?"Mike:Well, we work with a lot of agencies. We don't hire them but we partner with them. So, one of the things that we do when we… We've tried to build an ecosystem at Profitero of like-minded agencies that are data-led. And one of the things that we're trying to do is make our data accessible to all these agencies to be able to do things. So, what I've seen is agencies that are really going to, that show the most promise is the ability to be willing to do some test and learn stuff, to pick up some data points from the digital shelf and say, "Hey, we're going to try this."Mike:We're going to say instead of just putting our ad dollars across every product spread it evenly on Amazon, we're going to actually shift and we're going to stop spending on the products that aren't converting well, and we're going to shift it to these products that are converting well. We're just going to shift it up and we're going to try to see what happens. So, for me, for my perspective the agencies that we've been vetting and really partnering with and saying that these are best of class are the ones that are showing that competency and that ability just to try some different things and experiment and find a model that they can repeat.Diana:Yeah. I would say when I think about it from a digital commerce perspective, especially from retail media. I'm really looking for an agency that not only understands media, but they also understand the impact on sales. So, if you think about Amazon and getting the flywheel going, if you're pushing ROAS, if you're pushing certain levers that impacts your profitability, it impacts a lot of your negotiation power with Amazon. So, you need to be able to keep your ROAS to where it needs to be in your other traditional media KPIs while keeping top line going, which can be expensive.Diana:So, that's very critical. So, having somebody that understands that. Also, someone that understands the nuances and the inner workings of Walmart from a media perspective but also that my sales team then needs to go to a buyer or a DMM and sell this program in, to not only get more, whether it's more displays or get them engaged and excited about it. But it's not just a pure media place. So, an agency that understands that from a digital commerce perspective is really critical.Diana:Then, when it comes to more of our traditional content and execution, I like to do what I call media to shelf. So, regardless of who the partner is and most agencies can do this. It's how you can integrate and work with other agencies. So, the idea can come from either side, either the traditional creative agency, the digital commerce agency, the shopper agency. But how do you take the lane that you play in and make the concept work across all? So, how do you take that idea and make it so much bigger? Because our funding models are not changing, our buckets are not getting any bigger. So, we have to make every dollar work harder.Diana:So, I need a traditional media plan that not only drives awareness, but also can pull through to the digital or physical shelf. And I would say a measure of good traditional agency, for me, it's make or break by the creative director. They really do enable the work to either deliver on the brief or exceed our expectations and deliver on our business objective.Stephanie:Yeah. Love that. All really good points. All right, with a couple minutes left, I want to shift over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce commerce cloud. This is where I have a question, and you have one minute or less to answer. Are you ready? And I'll just kind of go back. Both have to answer the same question, so.Diana:Oh, boy.Stephanie:All right. Diana, you first. What's one thing you don't understand today that you wish you did?Diana:I don't understand why sales and marketing are so separate. I wish I could understand why each side didn't understand the other, but hopefully one day, we will be able to create, take the healthy tension and build a stronger digital commerce organization as a result.Stephanie:I love that. You and a lot of other companies, so. All right, Mike.Mike:Bitcoin.Stephanie:All right. You haven't even looked into it yet? I feel like now's the time to get in.Mike:I've tried and I get so confused, but I just have this fear. I have this waving fear of missing out, but then I realized that people are losing a lot of money too. I just don't understand how it works.Diana:I want to do over.Stephanie:I liked yours. What? You want to do over, Diana?Diana:I want a do over. You know what I don't understand? Why can't we have side parts anymore? I don't understand that. I like the side part. It fits my face frame. Why is that not cool anymore?Stephanie:Man, I feel like we can have more. Let's just stay on this question, so many things. All right. Next one. Something wise my elders taught me. Mike, you first.Mike:Something wise my elders taught me. Man, sorry. I totally blanked on that one. So, can you ask that question again?Stephanie:Yeah. Something wise my elders taught me.Mike:Yeah. I'd say that really it was hard work. That just sounds kind of lame. But I learned pretty early that no one's going to give you anything in this world, and you have to work really hard, and my dad was one of the hardest working people I know. He was an auto body worker and put in a lot of hours and really kind of like taught me this blue collar approach that I try to bring to my work. I love working. I've always learned to work hard and I try to always ground myself in that work ethic whatever I do. So, that's something that my elders taught me.Stephanie:I love that. All right. Diana, you're up.Diana:So, for me, I'm a black woman in America and a first generation from Caribbean parents, so it's really about using my voice and my power to have the courage to make space for people who look like me or people who don't have their voices heard. So, I'm really grateful for having parents, but also ancestors that taught me and showed me how to do that. YStephanie:Yeah. I love that. All right. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be? Diana, you're up.Diana:Oh, shoes.Stephanie:A podcast on shoes?Diana:Yeah. My podcast would be on shoes and it would be Sarah Jessica Parker.Stephanie:My space right-Diana:It would really just be for me and a way to get new shoes.Stephanie:I'm so confused.Diana:Literally the whole angle of the podcast would be to get free shoes.Stephanie:Just need shoes. [crosstalk]. Okay. Who would your first guest be?Diana:Sarah Jessica Parker.Stephanie:Okay. I love it. All right. Mike, you can't top that one, but if you want to try, what would your podcast be about and who would your first guest be?Mike:Cannabis.Stephanie:Okay.Mike:And it would be probably, I don't know, Willie Nelson.Stephanie:What would you guys be talking about or would you [crosstalk]-Mike:I'm fascinated by the business of cannabis. So, it's something that I've studied for a while. I started to do a little bit of research on it back in Nielsen, and this was like way ahead. But I'm fascinated by how an industry can just go so mainstream. How can one part be so regulated, then all of a sudden go mainstream? And I'm fascinated by brand building in that space and how brands are building, and even like huge bevel companies are getting in this space now. So, we're like fascinated about the entrepreneurs in that space, the ecosystem of that space, and if I had a separate podcast that was totally unrelated to anything I did, it would be about that, because I think that's like, that and Bitcoin, those are two booming things right now.Stephanie:You could just blend them all together.Mike:Yeah. Right.Stephanie:I thought you would say you would be in it for the free weed. Yeah. Give me free weed.Mike:Samples, yeah.Stephanie:Diana's shoes.Diana:Yeah.Stephanie:Lobby sitting pretty.Mike:Right.Stephanie:So, I'll send you Bitcoin for the first time, and then you'll have to go deep into the wormhole.Mike:Yeah. I'm really opening my heart on this podcast.Stephanie:That is why you're here. That's why you're here. All right. And then, the last one. I want to know how you guys stay on top of your industry. So, maybe, Mike, you first. What are you reading? Newsletters? Is it books, podcasts? What do you do?Mike:LinkedIn. I basically follow a set of people. On LinkedIn there's a group of about 15 to 20 people that I just trust that curate. They curate on a regular basis all the breaking news that I could just go to LinkedIn and I know that at any given moment, I'm going to find something that's really interesting on a different perspective. Yeah. That's my go-to. I wake up in the morning and look at LinkedIn. And then I think about, "Okay, what could I do to add value to LinkedIn that day?"Mike:And LinkedIn has become one of these like platforms that I managed my life around. I never thought it would be like that. But it's become like a valuable news source for me.Stephanie:That's awesome. All right. Diana, how about you? How do you stay on top of everything?Diana:For me, I'm fueled by curiosity. So, similar to Mike, I'm on LinkedIn. He's in my top 20 list of people that I follow that I get content from. I listen to a ton of podcasts, this one also. I am an avid reader of papers and research. So, whether it's from Kantar, Profitero, [inaudible], Edge, you name it, you've got to stay on top of it.Diana:And then it's really about networking. So, I have this mantra like I'll say yes. So, if somebody invites me to a round table, I'm going to go. If it's a bad experience I don't go back. But like I found this small community of e-commerce and digital commerce folks that I can just call or text or get information from. And a really cool thing that a bunch of women in e-com started is basically women of e-commerce, and it's a group of 25 of us, and we connect on a regular basis. But we also bought, each brought in a mentee. So, it's just ripe for learning, and Sarah Hofstetter, the president of Profitero is one of the members as well. But it's just such a great place to feed my curiosity.Stephanie:I love that. I see only more of that happening, these micro groups popping up. I know that that was something that I started experiencing here which is like women all being part of like a group text, which I was like, "Is this going to be too much?" And now, I'm like, "This is the best text thread I've ever been in." And it probably wouldn't have happened prior to this past year or two. That's amazing.Stephanie:Well, Mike, Diana, this has been such a fun round table. We'll definitely have to have you back for round two, because I'm sure a lot will change quick in a matter of months. But where can people find out more about you? Mike, maybe let's start with you.Mike:LinkedIn.Stephanie:Of course. And then, you just go to Diana [crosstalk]Mike:Yes. If you want to find me, you want to talk to me, that's the place to go. I'll be pretty responsive.Stephanie:Yes. All right. Diana.Diana:You can find me on LinkedIn as well.Stephanie:Cool. All right. Well, thank you guys so much for joining. It's been a pleasure having you.Diana:Thank you so much for having me.Mike:Thank you.
The best way to learn something is by doing, which is a lesson that Thomas Lotrecchiano's father taught him early on. Thomas and his father started Omigo together in 2018 as an alternate route to Thomas going to school for an MBA, and in the years since, that lesson keeps cropping up. Omigo is a DTC bidet company, and like many industry disruptors, its biggest challenge is educating the consumer base and converting skeptics into loyal customers. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Thomas explains how they have done exactly that by blending humor and educational content, building an infrastructure that allows them to ride the changing tides of demand, and by betting big on TV moving forward. Plus, Thomas shares some of the lessons he has learned from his father, who is an ecommerce gamechanger in his own right, having grown a small online business from a modest five employees to 250 in the early days of the industry.. Enjoy this episode! Main Takeaways:How Long Will It Take?: Getting consumers to adopt a new product, especially an intimate one, requires a great deal of education, patience, and listening. Just because your product works flawlessly and it has certain innate benefits doesn't mean that it will immediately be a hit. You have to invest in educating the consumer base and then listening to and incorporating their feedback into your products and messaging.Don't Overlook the Obvious: It's easy to fall in love with your product and spend time and money selling its unique features, but what actually makes people convert is if you can show them how to use it, how to install it, and lastly the value that can be derived from it. Those are the conversion areas that you should be laser-focused on, and highlighting any of the superfluous features can come later.Basic Building Blocks: There are three fundamental elements that DTC businesses need to start with before getting their company off the ground. They are: customer service, fulfillment, and a functioning, lead-generating website that has the ability to scale. Without these building blocks, your company is not ready to scale.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder and CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show, we have Thomas Lotrecchiano, the co-founder of Omigo. How's it going, Thomas?Thomas:It is great. You nailed the last name. Perfect.Stephanie:Yes. I'm so happy. I was looking at that like, "Oh, can I do this one?" So many tricky names on this show, but I'm like a 50/50 shot at getting them right, so it's all right. So I'd love to hear a bit about Omigo. I saw it's a bidet company, which was very exciting to me, surprisingly, because I've been to Japan before, and I remember entering the airport and going into one of the stalls, and it closed and music started playing. They had this beautiful toilet. I couldn't hear anything. I was in my own little spaceship. And the toilet was obviously a great bidet, and so I'm very excited about the world of bidets, but I want to hear a bit about how you guys even got into this.Thomas:I love hearing about people's first bidet stories, and they're always so different. A lot of people talk about Japan. Some people talk about [inaudible] or having to use their hand, or bum guns in Southeast Asia, or the traditional ones in Italy, and not having any clue how to use them. Bidets, bidets. So it started when my dad rented a new apartment in Raleigh, North Carolina, and they had an electric bidet seat there, and it was just like the ones that we're selling now. Very similar. So it was his first bidet experience, besides the ancient extra fixtures you see in European bathrooms that you might want to wash your feet in.Thomas:And he didn't use it for a month. Wouldn't touch it. My mom loved it immediately. And so, after some time, he warmed up and he sat down, used it. Basically, I like to imagine an epiphany where he sat down and some angelic music played and lights lit up around him and his life was changed forever. He wouldn't stop talking about it. I had been exposed to bidets in Southeast Asia. A little bit different than what we're selling now. But that's how both of us kind of got our start with a bidet, but the company came from when my dad just would not stop talking about these Japanese toilet seats every family gathering, whenever I was with him, I lived in the same city as him, and it just wouldn't wouldn't end.Stephanie:Yeah. Yep. Once you get that experience, I feel like it's hard to go back. I know when I worked at the main campus at Google, they were everywhere, in every bathroom. And to me, that's such a foreign concept, but there's so many different people there, that was just part of the norm. And I would always have friends come and visit me and family come on campus, and after just me being like, "Go try it. Don't be scared. You're going to love it," it's like it was a conversation for the entire week afterwards. So it was very life-changing. I mean, what's interesting, too, about your guys' company is that you co-founded it with your dad. Which I think is a very fun story and I want to hear a bit about that, because I see he has a big background in ecommerce, as well, and had a company that went from 5 to 250 employees, which you were working at as a teenager. So I'd love to hear a bit of the background there and what it's like working with your dad.Thomas:Yeah, absolutely. Super accomplished guy. Really happy to be working with him now. So just kind of how he and I got started, I'll fast forward to. There was a time where I was choosing a career path after I had done two years of service in AmeriCorps, which is a nonprofit, national organization: NCCC. And we had known we'd always wanted to work together. We're very similar people and we get along. We have a lot of the same thought processes. And so, it came a time where this bidet epiphany had happened, and he said, "Hey, I know that you're thinking about going to school for an MBA. Instead of getting an MBA, we're going to start this business together. You're going to learn more. You're going to actually get paid instead of paying. And it's going to start a new career for you." And I was game-Stephanie:Smart dad.Thomas:Right? Very smart dad. I trusted him, I believed what he was saying, and I knew from all of those years' experience, like you mentioned, that I was going to learn a ton. And so, the business that you referred to that he took from five to... I forget how many hundreds of employees, was called Canvas On Demand. And so, it is a digital or physical image-to-canvas art company, and when he started it, you only really found that in Walgreens. And so, he took it to the ecommerce space, which was... In 2005, selling stuff online was weird. It wasn't huge yet. You were still going to the store, picking things up. But I want to reel back just a little bit more. He started Art.com. He purchased the Art.com domain-Stephanie:Domain?Thomas:And started selling... Yeah, selling posters in 2001 with a different company. And that kind of set him on this online trajectory. Then, he launched into this Canvas On Demand company, which yes, I worked at as a teenager every summer, every holiday, I was probably the eighth employee, technically. From the beginning, I've been working with my dad, and I've definitely watched him run his companies and I've admired what he's done from afar and up close for years now, so it's great to work with him.Stephanie:Yeah. Very cool. So what does the separation of roles look like for what your dad does and when he's like, "And this is for you to run on your own"?Thomas:Yeah, so I would say that my dad is the big picture guy. He is really good at thinking outside the box, pushing the brand, and making sure that everything is in the right place, and then my job is running the day-to-day. So running the store, managing all of our agencies and merchants, and working on [inaudible]. And I'm really in the day-to-day of Omigo.Stephanie:Cool. And how challenging has it been to bring this product to the US, sell people on the benefits? How do you even approach that marketing? Because I feel like unless you've really tried it, it's pretty hard to convince someone who's never even thought about it to be sold on a product like that. So how do you think about introducing people to this kind of new product? At least in the US still feels kind of new.Thomas:Yeah, it's shocking. I still have to convince my friends to try it. I run a bidet brand and it's still work to get people that know and trust me to sit down and wash their butts. Washing your butt is such a foreign concept here and it is maddening, because, like you said, once you try it, it's almost impossible to go back. You have to get some sort of bidet in your home. And we knew it was going to be a challenge, but we know that that fact I just stated, once you try it, you'll never go back, and it's such a better way, cleaner way to go to the bathroom, that it's just a matter of time before it catches on in the United States.Stephanie:But it's been a long time. That's my thing. These have been around for [inaudible]. How much more time do we need? What kind of [inaudible] are you going to get yourself out there? What kind of marketing are you going to use? Are you going to pull a Poo-Pourri and really go hard with the unicorn type of stuff? Or how are you guys thinking about educating and selling this idea?Thomas:Yeah. Well, you need multiple people in the space to start disrupting and pushing this kind of taboo idea in people's faces, and what we've done is we took an educational approach. No one knows what Japanese bidet toilet seats are, and so we have this awesome product that does all these great things, makes you feel amazing, super easy to install, and that's the tactic that we went with was letting people know that it's not intimidating. So we use plain language to describe the installation. We let you know exactly how it functions. And then, along the way, we're using a little bit of humor and that expressive "how it makes you feel" experience, and try to get that across in our visual and audio cues.Stephanie:Yeah. And what kind of formats have you seen do best? Where you're like, "Oh, this one video that centered around humor did better than a pure educational one." What are you seeing connect with people, especially in the marketing campaigns that you're running?Thomas:Yeah. So humor has been a big one for us. We have one called "Bidet, Mate," and it's an Australian man and he talks about if you stepped in a lot of dingo dung, you wouldn't wipe it off, you'd wash it. So use a little bit of humor there, but he's also explaining exactly how this great product works, so it breaks down that wall of, "This is gross. I'm not talking about poop. But poop is funny, so let's make jokes about it." And then it says, "Okay, we're here. We're talking about it. Now, look at this awesome thing. Toilet paper is disgusting. You're reaching down and you're wiping yourself, so why don't you wash instead?" And so, [crosstalk] a good one. And an accent.Stephanie:Any accents you can get into marketing I feel like will probably have a good ROI. I don't know. Don't measure me on that, but it seems like it would. All right, so you're using humor. I sometimes feel like humor can go both ways though. You've got one side that can work really well, like I was saying, like Poo-Pourri and then the Harmon Brothers do a bunch of ad campaigns all around humor and a lot of them have done really well. But then, it also seems like it can be like a short blip of people are excited about the Squatty Potty, and then it's like, "Is anyone still using that thing? What happened to it?" So how are you approaching that balance between funny but then also, "This is something that you're going to keep for a long time"?Thomas:Yeah. So humor's a great attention-grabber. So I make you laugh. It's a little bit funny. You're interested in the product, and then we also have educational, but kind of... So I'll say I am in a video with my dad on YouTube and it is called, "Our Founder Spot and Why We Founded Omigo," and it tells you basically this story, and then, it lets us explain the product without being funny. And we think it's approachable and educational and real, coming from real people, not actors, and that seems to do extremely well combined with that humor. So I agree. It could definitely be flash in the pan and we've done funny stuff that hasn't worked, but on that front end, getting people's attention, humor does seem to work really well for bidets, specifically.Stephanie:Yeah, and I think that authenticity is definitely key, especially around a product that people don't really understand. And yeah, I'm even thinking, how do you guys lean into maybe user-generated content? Which to me, if you see someone using it that is like you, you're like instantly, "I'll probably give it a try, because you're like me and if you like it, I probably would, too." But for something like this, are your customers even willing to talk about it and get the word out there and help spread the message?Thomas:Yeah, so we have seen a steady increase in our post-purchase survey for friends and family, word of mouth. And that's exactly where it comes from: people that you trust talking about such an intimate topic. So UGC isn't always something that I'm going to be showing on my website, because it's true, I'm not going to be able to get the everyday consumer to send me a video while they're on their bidet, talking about how awesome it is. But when we do use that approach, it's been in the influencer space. A lot of people look at influencers as people they trust, guides in their lives, people they aspire to live like. Whether you agree or disagree with how people portray themselves on Instagram or social media, it's still a place for aspirational content and to look at people and see what they're doing. And we've seen some very good traction there, utilizing that influencer content elsewhere on our marketing channels.Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative). What platforms are you working with alongside these influencers?Thomas:Yeah, so they post on Instagram and then we use whitelisting on Facebook and Instagram.Stephanie:Got it. Okay. And then, what are the results for that when it comes to conversions, and what does that funnel look like versus maybe just a typical ad out in the world or on YouTube, maybe running it against your video with your dad, like a very authentic company story. How do those two perform side-by-side?Thomas:Yeah. So we typically don't run those side-by-side or A/B test them. We kind of keep them separate. The best thing about whitelisting... Are you familiar with the concept?Stephanie:Yeah. Go into the detail, because I'm not...Thomas:Yeah, sure. So whitelisting content is working with an influencer where you get them to create some awesome content around your brand. You guide them and let them do their own thing, but then you technically have access to their account, and from there-Stephanie:Oh, got it. Yeah.Thomas:Yeah, you can use their audience and create a lookalike from it on Facebook and Instagram, and then re-target them with that content from the actual influencer. So that's where a lot of the power comes from is building those audiences on Facebook and showing them these people that look and think and talk like them, and then getting them to look at this product and say, "Oh, I've never heard of it. These people are using it. Hmm." It's kind of like that "this is everywhere" approach. You're going to get hit with a funny ad, you'll see my dad and I, and then you'll see an influencer with it. So breaking down those walls and making it normal is a big thing in the customer acquisition.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah. Completely agree. So how do you even garner... I'm thinking about like, you have this product, and do customers give you feedback and do you let that influence the product? Or are you more kind of like tunnel vision? "We know it's good. We've been to Japan. We know what it needs to be like." How do you think about that product development cycle?Thomas:Yeah. The product is what the product is right now. We know that we have a great bidet seat, and we know that we have great bidet attachments, and we have faith in these products to perform extremely well. They're super high quality. A lot of people love them. When you're working with a product that 98% of Americans don't have in their homes, you're going to get a lot of feedback about that product in particular. We are always listening, though. It's not to say we turn a deaf ear to what people are coming back and mentioning about the product, because there are things you can change down the road. So it takes a long time to develop. Years and years. So being able to hear what people are saying, seeing patterns in their responses, will definitely be guiding our product development. But for me, listening to our customers at the beginning was more about why they decided to try the product, what they like about it, and what they were skeptical about, and then taking that feedback and putting it back into our messaging. So that was super important to me.Stephanie:Yeah. That's a really good way to view feedback, from all angles. What are some of the most surprising pieces of feedback, either before the sale or after, that you've received where you're like, "Oh, that's very interesting"? Where you actually maybe implemented it into your copy, your language, the way you educate people? What was something surprising, or more than one thing, that actually helped influence how you talked about it or sold it?Thomas:Yeah, so one thing that we hear a lot, and I love to hear it, is: "Why didn't I do this sooner?" And it's that sentiment where it's like, "Ugh, I've been living my entire life wiping with dry paper, and these bidets have been around. What was I doing before?" And so, we take that sentiment into our marketing now. And then, on the pre-purchase side, it really came down to listening the frustration points of what we weren't showing and telling people on our website.Thomas:So there are little complications with your seat size and shape and your plumbing fixtures, and it's a complicated world down there by the toilet. And I was looking at it from a world of head down in bidets and toilets, and I knew too much about toilets than I ever needed to, and to be able to hear a customer pick your head up and say, "Oh, well, I obviously need to show this information. Why wasn't I doing that before? It doesn't matter. Put it on there now." That always has been a winning tactic for us.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, it also seems like a good way, even around customer acquisition, building a piece of content of just, "How do I even hook this thing up?" I mean, even if they've bought it from a different brand or they're even considering it, I mean, that'd be my first question is, "Can I even do this myself? Do I need someone to come and install it for me? And what kind of things should I think about before buying something brand-new?" So it seems like a good content angle, too, to attract customers that maybe you wouldn't have otherwise.Thomas:Yeah. We put installation in a lot of our videos, and it's simple language, it's DIY, self-install, no special tools, no plumber required. Right? And that's kind of all you need to know. "Oh. I can handle it," is basically the message.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah. That's great. So earlier, you mentioned working with agencies was a piece of your world, and that's a topic that... We've had many founders on here where some are excited about it, some are like, "It didn't go well." How do you view working with agencies? What things did you choose to maybe hire out? What did you keep in-house? And how do you keep a good working relationship there?Thomas:Yeah, so the agency battle is: it seems incessant, until you find an amazing partner. And we've really settled into a couple of great partnerships, and those are the ones that we work harder at because we like the people internally and the work that they do. We get along with them. We have similar values when it comes to business, and so we put in extra time and effort say, "Hey, we don't really like this right now. We would like to change it this way," or, "We would like to see more of this." And the ones that take your feedback and change are the ones that you're going to stay with, and those are the people that we continue to work with.Thomas:So it's not easy finding a good agency, and we've had agency turnover multiple times with Omigo so far, but settling into a great relationship is extremely fruitful; and it's still going to be work, but that's the approach that we've taken. And to answer what we have kept in-house versus kind of farmed out, we keep customer service and product development in-house. Super important to keep that close to home, understand that feedback loop of what are people saying, how can we answer their questions more efficiently, and making sure that when it comes to a plumbing product, they have a great experience talking to someone and getting their questions answered. So keeping that close to home is super important.Stephanie:Yeah, it definitely seems like a high-touch customer service experience that, once you get past that point, it can be an instant sale as long as you have a good lead in and know everything and their questions are all answered from the start much easier, and you have to kind of keep that in-house. I can see why. So getting back to you working with your dad, and he's done a bunch of cool things before, what are some of the lessons and insights he brought into the company that you're like, "Wow, that really helped get it off the ground," or, "These insights here or his experience here really helped kind of get it going"? What kind of things did he bring to this company today that helped you guys lead it to where it is?Thomas:Yeah, so after he sold and exited Canvas On Demand, he started to consult with other ecommerce brands. So he is the friendliest person I know probably, and loves being around people, talking with them, listening to them, helping them, so it was a natural fit for him to take this... How many years was it? Seven or eight years at Canvas On Demand, where ecommerce was changing. It was in such a growth stage. Everything was different year after year, and so he had to adapt constantly. And I think that really shaped his way of thinking about ecommerce and allowed him to go past this legacy concept of ecommerce, that you might get stuck if you started in 2001, and really grow with that channel.Thomas:So he took that into his consulting career, and so, for the six years in between his sale and Omigo, he was consulting with ecommerce brands of all sizes: $5 million a year to $120-150 million a year and everywhere in between. So what we took from his experience into Omigo was what he calls his "ecommerce playbook," and it was the fundamentals of where you need to start with a direct-to-consumer business. And the basics of that were: great customer service, like I mentioned, solid fulfillment,Thomas:And the fundamentals of a website, so that being: something simple and functional, having a great hero and landing page, having solid email capture, having all of your email flows built and all of your knowledge base in place and everything ready to scale, because something could happen overnight like it did with Omigo, and you have to be ready to go from 10 orders a day to 150. So he brought this ecommerce playbook and this really rich knowledge base and a lot of connections to the start of Omigo.Stephanie:Nice. And so, how many orders are you guys at today? You just talked about going from like 10 a day to a hundred. What does it look like today, and what did that process look like scaling to where you are now?Thomas:Yeah, it fluctuates. So it's been a funny year-and-a-half for Omigo, because at the beginning of the pandemic, the toilet paper shortage hit.Stephanie:Oh, yeah. I forgot about that.Thomas:Right? Forgot about that.Stephanie:Yeah.Thomas:What a crazy time.Stephanie:I like to forget about dumb things like that. We didn't actually have a toilet paper shortage, we just had a logistics problem. But okay. Carry on.Thomas:We had a hoarding problem and a logistics problem. Either way, it was great for the bidet industry. It was an odd time to prosper, when you had a lot of people going through hardships and a lot of unknown in the future, but we couldn't look at that in the moment because people needed a solution to the toilet paper shortage. And bidets are the best answer, so, "Hello. We're Omigo. We've been here. Welcome." And during that time, it was Black Friday every day for a week. And then, that lasted about a month and a half. We sold out. Sales tapered back down in the summer, picked back up during holiday paper shortage, and then kind of continued into the new year. And we're seeing kind of a mini decline right now, and a steadying out of how many purchases we get. So still trying to figure it out. We haven't cracked the code 100% and we're working at it constantly, but definitely going with the flow as far as when orders are coming in and when they're not.Stephanie:So what are some lessons or things that you're adjusting going forward now that you've kind of seen these fluctuations of demand and Black Friday every day for a week, and then tapering down again? What kind of things are you maybe adjusting going forward to kind of future-proof the back end as well to make sure that you can keep up with it when it's there and then still have your suppliers and manufacturers when it's not Black Friday levels? How are you guys thinking about that now?Thomas:Yeah. Well, after we sold out, we realized this could happen again, especially during the pandemic. It was super unsure times. So we really shored up our supply chain. We ordered a lot of product, and we have a lot of product, and we are continually ordering it. Because we know it's a matter of time until bidets are ubiquitous. I mean, I am confident in that. It may take five more years. It may take 20 more years, but there's going to be one day where bidets are everywhere. And our products, they're shelf stable. It's not like they're going to be going bad, so having that on hand, being ready for a boom, is one way that we're future-proofing ourselves.Thomas:And another way is just keeping everything tight on our website. We are constantly A/B testing and trying out new copy or new design to optimize how customers are coming in, learning about our product, and finally purchasing. So keeping everything tight on the website keeps us future-proof. And being direct to consumer, we have a great relationship with our distribution centers, so always knowing that we're going to have a distribution relationship where, "Hey, yeah, we're at X amount of orders today, but that could double in the next three weeks and we need to make sure that you're ready." So having the infrastructure there, as well.Stephanie:So where are you most excited to take Omigo over the next maybe three to five years? What are you guys working towards? What are you most excited about right now?Thomas:Yeah, I'm really excited about television.Stephanie:Yeah?Thomas:I think that it's funny, because you think TV five years ago, you're like, "Oh, TV is dying. It's all going to be streaming." And yeah, it is a lot of streaming, but it's still a traditional marketing platform. There are still ads on every streaming platform and cable is still a booming industry. It is a gigantic industry. A lot of people have cable, Dish, and the like, and I think that for a young direct-to-consumer brand, getting in front of that many eyeballs is really exciting for us. So it's not a new channel; it's just new to us.Thomas:We are going to be launching soon. Yeah, we're going to be launching soon and are excited about the results. We have some people that we know that are doing well on TV and we think that we're going to do well, also.Stephanie:Cool. And is it specifically focusing on cable? Which I do feel like a lot of people are kind of sleeping on that, but I also wonder if maybe it's a generational thing, where it depends on who your target audience is that you're trying to get in front of; where maybe people closer to our age, they might not have cable. They're probably Netflix, Hulu, everywhere else, YouTube. But then, when I about maybe my parents, for sure they still have cable, and they're probably not going to get rid of it for a long time. So which areas... Or are you exploring all of that?Thomas:Yeah, we'll definitely explore all of it. Streaming is great. We have those low-price bidet attachments at Omigo that start at $89. So great entry-level, great price for anyone that wants a bidet. And then, our top-of-the-line bidet is at $649, and we do see the demographic there swing older. And that's a demographic that is humongous in this country. A lot of them are still watching cable, like you said, so they don't know about these luxury bidet toilet seats. And if they see it on TV, I think that kind of awareness is just going to do good things for every bidet company out there.Stephanie:Cool. Yeah, we'll have to circle back once you guys are live and [crosstalk] see you out there in the world on one of the channels.Thomas:You will.Stephanie:That'd be fun to hear the results and how it's going.Thomas:Yeah, so excited.Stephanie:All right. Well, let's shift over to the lightning round. Lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Thomas?Thomas:Yes.Stephanie:Cool. What ecommerce tool or piece of technology are you most excited about right now that you guys are maybe experimenting with?Thomas:So we've been on SMS for awhile, but SMS has just been a great platform for us. Being able to get into people's pockets and the open rate and click-through rate has been awesome. So SMS is a killer. It's not going anywhere and we're super excited about it.Stephanie:Awesome. What's up next on your reading list or your podcast queue?Thomas:Let's see. Guiltily been learning more about crypto lately on my podcast queue, so trying to educate myself on not just kind of what's booming and busting, but the inner workings and how to actually invest longterm into that world. So definitely a little bit of crypto podcasts in there.Stephanie:Nice. Yeah. There's some good ones out there. Personal favorites.Thomas:I'll have to ask. Yeah.Stephanie:I'll just send some episodes your way that are good ones. When you want to get creative, what do you do to get into that headspace?Thomas:I turn off everything around me, because I'm a very distractible person, and I really put myself into the place of who this creative project is for. Put on a little different hat for email, put on a different hat for Facebook, and if I'm stuck, I leave. Wherever I am. I go outside and move my body. I'm a very active person, so being able to get some blood flow gets my creative juices going, too.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah, same. Cool. All right. And the last one, what one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Thomas:The next year: the continued at-home life. People are not going to go back to the office full-time. A lot of people are going to keep spending time at home. People are buying houses. So this at-home goods and everything that you can use around the house is going to be huge, because people are still shopping online. People are still getting everything shipped to their door. We're not going to go back to retail yet. I think that's going to be in the next year. A big one.Stephanie:Cool. All right, Thomas, thanks so much for coming on the show and talking about bidets and the fun world. Where can people find out more about you and Omigo?Thomas:Yep, so if you want to find out about me, you can find me on LinkedIn: Thomas Lotrecchiano. And if you want to find out about Omigo, you can go to Myomigo.com. That's M-Y-O-M-I-G-O dot com. We have all of your butt washing needs. Stop wiping, people. Wash your butt.Stephanie:Do it the right way. Come on. All right. Thanks so much, Thomas.Thomas:Thank you, Stephanie. It's been a lot of fun.
Kanika: Wow, we are starting to resume normal life -- Kids will soon be out of school, long days, warm nights are here along with traveling, bike riding and reading but there are also nerves, questions and unknowns. How are you thinking about carrying forward some of the experiences and learnings from covid as we return to “normal”? Stephanie: Yes, alongside all the excitement there are so many questions and unknowns and still so much to process from the past year. Stephanie Tips: The Role of Mom: Less in the job of “mom”, more in the relationship of the child. Less about drive time means more quality time. Make room for kids to take agency Creating a schedule offers some structure while also giving kids agency to decide how they'll spend their time It's also important to make sure your kids feel like they're part of the team by contributing with certain chores around the house. This also gives them some structure and a sense of accomplishment. Hold onto the “silver linings” of the last year Rose, thorn, bud at dinner -- sharing the highs and the lows helps kids understand that life is full of ups and downs. They feel confident and more resilient. Increased family time Decreased social calendar -- In the past our weekends would be packed with 2-3 commitments/day, which would lead to a lot of rushing, not much enjoying Option 1: 1 commitment / day Option 2: Sunday funday Re-engage slowly Depending on the age of your child, they might not remember certain places or people, so re-engage slowly Be careful not to overly stimulate -- Cut outings and social gatherings in half or start with a beach day or a hike. Episode Links: WEBSITE: LearnWithHomer.com INSTAGRAM: @learnwithhomer FACEBOOK: /learnwithhomer
That first online sale plus the first time a retailer agrees to carry your product are always exciting. But when you can't meet the demand of your online customer base or your design process is slowed and shipments are delayed, that's when the headaches come twofold. But when your mission, and your product, is something you truly believe in and think can leave a lasting impact, you take all the good with the bad and keep on pushing forward. For Stojo, a company that produces collapsible, leak-proof cups and containers, there have been wins and losses of every kind, and CEO Jurrien Swarts has been riding the waves as his company tries to get a piece of a $22 billion industry. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Jurrien takes us through what it has been like to design, launch, and distribute Stojo's game-changing product. Plus, he guides us through how difficult it is to scale and market a business, and what it takes to make hard choices like laying off and rebuilding a staff. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Digging the Design: When it comes to delivering a product out to the market, it has to work in a number of different ways. The internal team needs to be invested in the design and believe in that product, but you also have to be willing and able to take outside feedback from customers in order to iterate and expand. Find stakeholders who can contribute in meaningful ways and trust them to keep making the product better.Punch Above Your Weight: Sometimes you have to get scrappy and find ways to compete without the help of big budgets or a ton of staff. In these instances, there are avenues to explore that offer high returns for very little investment as long as you can find the right partners. Influencer marketing is one of those areas and, when small companies make the right connections, they can compete at or above the level of any big brand.Sharing is Caring: In the past, it was uncommon and even frowned upon to share information, best practices, financials, or anything else that could be seen as a competitive advantage. The younger generations, though, value transparency and many DTOC and DTC brands that are run by millennials and Gen Z are embracing the idea of information sharing in order to help themselves become more data-driven.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO at mission.org. Today, I'm chatting with Jurrien Swarts, the co-founder and CEO of Stojo. Jurrien, welcome.Jurrien:Hey. Thanks for having me.Stephanie:I'm excited to have you on. I was looking through Stojo a bit and your background. What was very interesting to me... You can tell me if this is wrong, but I saw a quote where it's like you and your co-founders were reading 4-Hour Workweek and that's how this came about, which to me was wild because everyone's read 4-Hour Workweek, but I've never actually heard of someone creating a company based off that model. I wanted to hear a bit about what was going on back then. Tell me the whole story.Jurrien:It's kind of wild. I was at Credit Suisse and had a colleague. He was actually my manager. We got into this habit of going for runs every day during our lunch hour and we had this two-guy reading book club going. One of the books that we eventually got to was Tim Ferriss' 4-Hour Workweek.Jurrien:If you read it, you could either create something because you're a creative, which today I'll call myself a creative but at the time, I was like, "I'm not a creative. I can't sing. I can't write. I can't..." They were like, "But you can also make something, preferably in China," I think was the guidance. I said, "Well, I speak Chinese. I've always had a thing for product and design. Just personal interest. Why don't we see if we can come up with one of those?"Jurrien:So we started to brainstorm and a few weeks after having read the book, or even maybe a month, Alex comes in and he goes, "I got the perfect idea. How about a collapsible coffee cup that goes in your pocket so it's easy to take with you on your commute and travel?" I was like, "That's not a great idea." I didn't really like it. I was just like, "Whatever."Jurrien:Another couple weeks pass by and I was actually in the shower, where I have a lot of aha moments. What's funny is the more I talked to other founders and other people, a lot of people have a place where they have their aha moments. For me, it's driving on the interstate long-haul between home to whatever or in the shower.Jurrien:I had a vision of my grandmother's daycare setup where she used to have the dishwashing rack. She'd always have the baby bottles lined up, taken apart. If you're familiar with those, they have a plastic reservoir, a plastic collar and a silicone nipple. It creates a leakproof type of seal with the screw on. I realized that if I took a collapsible dog bowl or [inaudible] type cup and put a lid on it like that, we actually could create this leakproof coffee lid that would actually help make this thing work.Jurrien:When I had that discovery, did some sketches and figured out that "Hey, we're on to something here." That's how it all started. That was 2011.Stephanie:So let's get back to your aha moment in the shower. You're like, "I know how to create a collapsible cup that won't leak." What did the process look like after that?Jurrien:Again, dating it 2011, '12. Rapid prototyping was just becoming a thing. They had things like the first 3D printers, et cetera. When you're making a durable good, you have the industrial design thing, you have the CAD files that have to get developed. When we went and priced that out, we were getting quotes of $30,000 to get to a prototype and maybe one or two iterations, way beyond the budget of what are significant others were going to allow us to spend. My co-founder, Alex Abrams, was the guy that I worked with at Credit Suisse. When we got that price tag, we knew there was no chance that our wives were going to sign off on that. We were just like, "Okay, this is done."Jurrien:A month later, Alex is at a Halloween party with his kids and he runs into Ben Melinger, who he was a fraternity brother at UPenn with. Ben had been a consultant and quit that job to work on a concept he had for a water bottle. He self-taught himself how to do CAD drawings.Jurrien:We said, "Ben, how's that water bottle going?" He's like, "I don't really know how to get it launched," et cetera. "Well, we have a project for you if you're interested." He said, "Sure," and so we made him an even partner. He did the CAD for the free, and then we started prototyping. That's how we took it to the next level.Jurrien:I guess for anybody who wants to do a product design thing, if you don't have the money for a designer and industrial engineer and you could expect to spend anywhere from 20 to $50,000 just to get that design work and prototyping done, find a co-founder who can industrial design and bring them in. It's the best way to do it because there's going to be countless iterations. You want somebody who's really vested in the product to make sure that what you come up with is really exceptional, and it's not just somebody who's doing it as a consulting gig and just wants to check it off their list and move on to the next project.Stephanie:I was going to ask, then, about how do you view... Especially maybe back in 2011, it's definitely probably newer but now, it seems like everyone is doing that, launching [inaudible], getting prototypes quickly. Do you feel like it's in a different place now, where you can maybe just go on an Upwork and hire someone to create 20 different designs for you? Do you think the world is different now where you might not actually need to find a co-founder?Jurrien:Yeah, I definitely think that. I mean, I think the power of Upwork and 99designs, things like that, is that it's open to folks who are living in areas of the world that are much cheaper to live in, and so you can actually get incredibly work out of Eastern Europe, out of parts of Southeast Asia, Asia. I've definitely gotten lots of help there.Jurrien:It comes down to your aesthetic and your attention to detail and your ability to curate and manage that process. But for anybody starting out, I'd say go for it. What do you got to lose other than some time and money? Usually, you get really good learnings from that stuff. I think that's totally a viable place to go. The other one is if you're college age or recent graduate and you had an engineering school in your school, you might have people that you can find that way as well who'd like to do it just for portfolio building, or just maybe you want to start a company together.Stephanie:Love that. What was your first sale like? Do you remember getting that first sale?Jurrien:Well, yeah. We had two first sales, if you will. We're an omni-channel business. We have our website and we do Amazon, and then we sell to brick and mortar retailers.Jurrien:The first sale was when we launched our Kickstarter in June of 2014, when we got that first backer and then the euphoria around that, having created a product, done a video, put together a campaign and then pressed Go was... It was really, really incredible.Jurrien:And then what was the fun thing about that was we went from zero dollars and passed our goal of 10,000 prior to midnight that same day. That was really great. Ultimately, we did... I think it was $128,000 on Kickstarter, so 12, 13 times what we'd set out to raise, which was... We needed the 10K to cover the tooling. That was really exciting.Jurrien:And then when we actually went commercial... So I left my job at Credit Suisse in the summer of 2015. The coolest thing was when the MoMA Design Store buyer came and found us somehow—probably through Kickstarter—and asked for samples. And then they actually bought our cup, and so we were being sold in the MoMA Design Store. It's like our first retail relationship. That was really special, as somebody who cares about art and design.Stephanie:That's awesome. So then after you were there, is that how other stores... You're in Anthropologie, I think Whole Foods. Is that how they found you, by just having that first retail customer, or did-Jurrien:No.Stephanie:... you get those partnerships in other ways?Jurrien:I mean, that was a slog. 2015 until May of 2018, I was a one-man band. My co-founders kept their day jobs and were involved in various ways, but for all intents and purposes, I was the one that I was all in. I had to learn and teach myself every aspect of the business.Jurrien:Frankly, I wasn't very good at the sales part of it. We got a little stop-start with Bed Bath, but our packaging wasn't quite right. We had supply chain issues just because of cash flow. We didn't have the right merchandising.Jurrien:It took bringing on a professional consultant, who's actually still with us today, is great, who really knew the retail category and specifically hydration and coffee tumblers. It's a pretty big category in the US. It's like a 22 billion-dollar segment.Stephanie:Wow.Jurrien:If you think about it, every major retailer, gas station, dollar store, every store is selling hydration. Getting somebody who really knew how that worked and then just slogging it out for a bunch of years, going to the trade shows, getting press where you can, evolving our product... We started with a 12-ounce cup, which was great for New York City-based commuter who goes to the corner deli and gets the 10 or 12-ounce cup of coffee that's the standard coffee in New York City. It also really works out really good for the UK, Australia, countries where they drink smaller beverages. But guess what? In the US, most people drink 16 or 20 or 24-ounce coffees. Our cup actually wasn't really optimized for scaling in the United States.Jurrien:It took until 2018 until we introduced what we call the biggie, the 16-ounce cup, and we added a straw because southern part of the country actually drinks a lot of sweet tea, iced tea, iced coffee for most of the year. Moving away from a hot-only, small, single-serve cup of coffee to something that's more common to the US market, that really helped propel us.Jurrien:And then we also moved away from... We started with some really primary colors. When I decided I was going to start a brand and really grow Stojo into something, I really liked how S'well approached the market. The way that I saw that play was they went hard after a very certain demographic, the [inaudible], female, millennial, Gen Z consumers. I saw that we could probably do something like that.Jurrien:Being in New York City, Brooklyn, I thought that's a pretty natural fit for me to target that demographic and try to have my sustainable product be almost like a fashion accessory. When we did that, that's when I think we started to appeal to the Anthros, the Madewells, the Food52s, the Whole Foods, et cetera.Stephanie:How did you go about that? Because I look at companies like S'well and a lot of the brands that are in Anthropologie and I'm like, "How they got there is so much through marketing." I mean, you can walk in maybe a TJ Maxx and see tons of S'well style [inaudible], stuff like that, where oh, looks pretty similar but the way they did it, like you said, attracted a certain kind of customer where it's like, "I'm a fan. I'm not going to [inaudible]."Stephanie:How did you go about it to become like that as well? What did you start implementing? What kind of marketing were you doing? What did that look like?Jurrien:A lot of it was, I think, just intuitive in the sense that since a very young age, I was always a consumer of brand. I liked brand. I would buy products based on their aesthetic, their utility, but also what the company's doing and saying.Jurrien:One of my favorite brands of all time was United Colors of Benetton. What appealed to me growing up in a really small northeastern mill town which was predominantly white, almost 99.9%, was seeing this just calico quilt of different representations of human beings and bright colors. Everybody in the photo shoots always looked like they were having a great time. I was just like, "Yeah, man. That's what I want in life. I want to be around beautiful, different people," et cetera. Jurrien:I think that always stuck with me. When it came time for me to helm my own brand, what I wanted to do... And I was also watching things like TOMS, Honest Company, looking at the Acumen Fund and their activities. I came from Credit Suisse where I was tangentially involved in a lot of socially-responsible investment activities for clients. I said, "You know what? I want to build a brand that does this, that's mission and purpose-driven."Jurrien:On the one hand, I have my sustainability message, and then I have control over the storytelling and the imagery that I want to put out there. What I want to do is appeal to people who want to support brands that they think are conducting themselves in society in the right way because it's the right thing to do and not because they have to do it or because it's the most expedient or the most profitable thing to do. I think that's the stand that I took, and then the rest was more... Because we're bootstrapped, I got a little bit more sophisticated in terms of the look and the feel of Stojo every year as I was able to hire people and bring on professionals. When we were shooting our own photography and I was doing my own graphic layout in PowerPoint, it's a very different look than when you start actually hiring designers and paying for photo shoots and then leveraging influencers, et cetera. There was an evolution.Stephanie:It seems like to build a brand like that, you have to rely pretty heavily on influencers. When I think about some of the brands that have really shot up recently, it does seem like that's one of the most strategic angles, to partner with someone who has your values and ideals and also the audience you want to reach. Is that a big part to your marketing playbook, or just a small part of it?Jurrien:It's huge. But interestingly, we've only really started intentionally and systematically, strategically, tactically flexing into that since, I'd say, August of last year. What happened was the height of the pandemic, we had to let go of half of our staff. We were about 20 people. We cut back to 10, to the most necessary. Really hard to do.Jurrien:But when we did that, one of the things that came from that was that we let go of our CMO, who was very high salary, recruited from a big place. The remit that he had was to help us scale this really quickly. We thought we were going to scale a lot faster than we ultimately did.Jurrien:When that all fell away, I just partnered up, actually, with my romantic partner, my life partner, Megan. She joined the team as a fractional CMO brand creative lead and she started implementing all these things.Jurrien:We were like, "What are we going to do with no budget? How can we do this? We got to get really scrappy. We don't have any money to spend. We have to be breakeven or profitable every month we can."Jurrien:The influencer strategy is one of those things that if your brand has the right market acceptance and fit and you can relate to the right individuals, it's a really, really interesting way to go. We've had a bunch of success there, but we're really still only getting started. But there's definitely a ton of brands that are those challenger brands that have done a lot of incredible work utilizing that. We're always watching what other people are doing and learning from it.Jurrien:Frankly, there's a lot of us who are starting to talk behind the scenes, management teams and making intros and talking to each other at roundtables and just sharing a lot of data and information. It's making us a lot more scrappy, successful. We're starting to punch above our weight, I think. A lot of DTOC brands are doing that.Stephanie:Yeah, because I was going to say it feels like the DTOC world is much more eager to share best practices and talk behind the scenes versus... I mean, we have podcasts covering basically all the C-suite and I hadn't really heard of a bunch of CMOs getting together and talking about best practices or the first 90 days, or CIOs. It seems like it's harder to do there, then all these new DTOC brands are like, "Let's all work together."Stephanie:How are you finding that community? Why do you think everyone's so eager to work together and share successes and failures?Jurrien:Well, I think it's structural and it's generational. If you got a big incumbent brand, they are recruiting from a very well-known set of folks in the C-suite. They've been doing what they're doing and it's working. They're sophisticated and they know their stuff.Jurrien:It works for them, given their size and scale. When you have billions of dollars in revenue and you're like, "My marketing budget is 10% of revenue," you know what you've got month to month, quarter to quarter. When you're a millennial or Gen Z-run brand, a lot of us just started doing it out of hey, happenstance from necessity.Jurrien:There's a lot of studies out there that if you're reading the blogs in Medium and LinkedIn and stuff like that that talk about... Even the New York Times, Wall Street Journal talk about how millennials are way more willing to share and talk about their personal finances, their negotiating tactics, how much they're making per salary, how much they paid for their house, their car.Jurrien:I think there's a lot of us understand that being transparent... And we kind of chatted about it a little bit about my personal approach to it before the show. When you share information with other people, if you're doing it to brag or whatever, that's one thing, and I think the older generation always thought that sharing is distasteful. You don't do it. It's not done.Jurrien:But I always ask, "Well, I don't know these things. You know these things. I'm asking because I'm trying to gather information and make data-driven decisions." DTOC brands and really good startups are all taking in data and tracking KPIs. They're making data-driven decisions. Not to say everything's data-driven, but there's a lot more of it.Jurrien:In our industry, everything's pretty opaque. I don't have the money to spend $10,000 for research on this one little thing, but I can certainly hop on a call, have a beer, share a coffee with somebody and just pick their brain.Jurrien:I think a lot of us are starting to do that. When you lead with vulnerability, transparency, authenticity—which these are all values we share and aspire to in our team, and it's part of what Stojo's about—and you say to somebody, "Hey. I don't know everything. I'm here to share anything you might need or want to ask but today, you have some information that I need. Would you be willing to share it? This is how I'm going to use it." 90% of the time, people are super thrilled to just be connecting on a real level and finding somebody that "Oh my God, this person respects me. They're a peer. I can help them and they can help me."Jurrien:It's a beautiful thing and it's really a metaphor for where we need to go as a society, is instead of thinking about everything as zero-sum games, just talking about how do we all get to happiness and balance and Shangri-La or whatever... I'm overstating a little bit, but this idea of just because I'm winning doesn't mean you have to lose. We can all win. We're going to be around for a long time. Who knows? Maybe one day, we'll collaborate together on something, et cetera.Jurrien:I try to foster that as much as I can. I really encourage people who are on the fence about hey, will this make me look weak or naïve or whatever, don't let that get in the way. Just think about what you have to gain, which is information that you didn't have before you asked the question and took that chance. What do you have to lose? Somebody that you don't really know is going to, I don't know, talk about you or-Stephanie:Not respond?Jurrien:Yeah, exactly. Or say no. I think training yourself to do that is part and parcel with becoming an entrepreneur and a leader.Jurrien:We shared our parenthood. The cool stuff about a lot of what happens in a startup environment and especially in me as a CEO, it's very similar to being a parent. You're kind of the CEO of the household. A lot of the stuff you're strong at or weak at extends to both areas of your life. You can actually get a lot of learnings and personal growth through comparing and contrasting methodologies and approaches at home and at work.Stephanie:I think there's not much of a separation between those two, especially now. The other day, I did this human design reading and test. Have you done this before?Jurrien:No, no.Stephanie:You might like it.Jurrien:Sounds awesome. Tell me more.Stephanie:Essentially, it tells you, "This is the design of who you are and how you might operate." I'll send it to you afterwards, actually.Jurrien:Oh, please do.Stephanie:You would really dig it. You need to have someone who understands how to read it, but it was very applicable to life and with kids and your partner, and then also thinking about business. It was saying certain things to me that I think I never had words, of like I felt a certain way, but then when she went through and was like, "Oh, Stephanie, you are an unconscious alpha. You need to lead in this kind of way, but you don't feel like you should be an alpha." I mean, it sounds a little woo-woo, but everything she has gone through I was-Jurrien:No, it doesn't sound woo-woo at all.Stephanie:I was digging it. It made me rethink how I even thought about myself when it came to work and life and just how it's all one and how to approach it in a completely different way than five years ago where it's like keep it separate. Don't try and mingle them together. That's when it gets messy. It was great.Stephanie:I think that's where the world's headed. Certain people are trying to just adjust to that new way of thinking now and is this even okay. It's okay.Jurrien:I love that. Please share. When say that, it's interesting. There's a lot of dogma that we are raised with as children that worked for the prior generation, or maybe it didn't, and we're stress testing everything nowadays.Jurrien:The one good thing about all the information sharing and the putting everything out there is that you get to try and think about and discard things a lot faster. You don't have to be pretty about it. I think this rapid prototyping and hacks approach that started with startups is now spilling over into dieting... Or not dieting, just the way you eat, the way you live, the way you sleep, the way you relate to your family and friends. I think it's going to bring about some really rapid shifts in human consciousness for the better.Stephanie:I mean, the whole world is changing that way. I think that's where any bubbling up around... Even the US right now is having issues because people are starting to... They're meeting people 3,000 miles away. They're finding their community in different ways. It's not all just based off like, "I live here" anymore and we're the same within this one city. I mean, now people are thinking very different and finding their communities and having more of a voice by coming together more than we've ever had before.Stephanie:The whole world's changing so rapidly and people are trying to figure out, "How do I keep up with this? Do I stick with our roots of how my parents' parents' parents have always done it this way, or can I expand and do something different and live like a nomad and go where I want and find my people and have an impact on the world in a different way?"Stephanie:So tell me a bit about was there an inflection point with the sales at your company where it's like you were a solo person for a while, your other co-founders were working full-time, you were trying to build these partnerships and you're like, "I need a consultant that can help me with retail." When was there an inflection point where you're like, "Whoa. Now, we're off to the races. I need to hire. I need help"? And how many [inaudible]? What was that level when you're like, "Now, we're about to go fast and I need to hire [inaudible]"?Jurrien:Let me give everybody just a really high-level overview on what happened from 2014 to today. We raised capital on Republic, the crowdfunding site, so a lot of that information is public to the extent it's appropriate and stuff.Jurrien:So we were bootstrapped. I started with 125K from my family and a friend, just a small little check to get started, plus the 128K that we did on Kickstarter. Before that, I think we each chipped in 10K. I think we had 20K and then we did the 128 capital raise. We did another failed, but 20K Indiegogo in 2016. Raised 125 in capital, then did a small bridge round before I raised my first round. I'll just lay that out because I think it's instructive and informative for people who don't come from the typical equity-raising background.Jurrien:In 2015, I had a half year of commerce. That was internet and online. We did about 200K in sales. The next year, we did 340,000. The next year, we did 405,000 or something like... I can't remember the exact numbers. This is all me by myself, so 2015, '16, '17.Jurrien:In 2018, we came back from some trade shows. The houseware show happens in the spring in Chicago and in Frankfurt. I actually got some international distributors. Suddenly, the orders started coming in from them because Asia and Europe were actually ahead of the curve over the US in terms of buying into sustainable, reusable products. We actually started getting distribution in foreign countries.Jurrien:The orders started coming in and there were too many. I'd just had my second child, who was not even a year. I wasn't getting sleep and I was just overworked, just dogging it. I had to hire a person.Jurrien:I hired Jake, our COO. He's still with us today. He came from MALIN + GOETZ. I brought him in. I interviewed him on a Friday and I had him at work on a Monday. I was like-Stephanie:Wow. When you know, you know.Jurrien:... "Dude, I need your help." Yeah. I just was like, "This is the guy. I want him in here." He started on Monday and he took over all these purchase orders that had come in.Jurrien:We thought we were going to do a million dollars in 2018. We ended up doing 2.7 million dollars in revenue.Stephanie:Wow, wow.Jurrien:That's when I was like, "Okay, I have a growth trajectory here that will look good enough to investors to try and raise a small C round." I did a pitch night at WeWork, where I was using their offices. We ended up getting I think second place in this pitch. They made a 75,000-dollar investment. With that, I was able to raise basically about 700K, which brought my lifetime capital raise to a million bucks.Jurrien:From there, we hired the team in 2019. I got somebody focused on sales and marketing. I got customer service. I got a designer. And then we ended up, at the tail end of the year, bringing on after we did not get picked to go on Shark Tank... Because we were holding for that to see if we got an investment. They passed on us, and so I decided, "Okay, I'm going to plow ahead and then beginning of 2020, I'm going to raise another round."Jurrien:We were able to get to 6.5 million in revenue, 6.5 or 6.7 in revenue in 2019, and had a team of 10. And then the plan was to raise our mini A or our next seed B or whatever you'd call it. We didn't really fit in a good category, but we're going to try and raise two to four million dollars at the next level evaluation.Jurrien:So I started hiring the team out. That's how from January to April 1st, we hired and we were at 20 people. We'd extended the last two offers right before the pandemic hit, and they were set to start on April 1. I think we gave them their offers the week before the pandemic hit. They were going to start two weeks later. We're up to 20 people and we're on a trajectory where we thought we were going to double revenue again. What in fact happened was we were unable to grow year over year in 2020.Jurrien:We'd hired a team that was supposed to preside over a 14 or 15 million-revenue company and we were going to be a six million-dollar revenue company again. We had to cut the staff. It was really, really difficult to manage through that. I'd never done that before.Jurrien:That's where we're at now. We're at the 10 people range. We're starting to hire again. We're pretty confident that we're going to have a doubling of revenue again this year. It's looking like a really strong year. We have some amazing launches coming up, et cetera. We're starting to build.Jurrien:What was kind of a blessing in disguise was that when we cut back the staff last year, we realized that what we really needed to be much more scrappy was a different kind of a team than I had envisioned. A year ago, I was one person. I'd never scaled before, never managed that many people, all these things.Jurrien:Today, where we are today is we know much more what we need, and we have agencies to fill the gaps where we don't have justification for a full-time head. Now, our forward-looking hiring plan is much more based on profitability, certain KPIs that we have and then just very real needs that we've already established because we have agencies and we're paying them X. We know when that expenditure gets to this, then we can justify a full-time head. There's a lot of great learnings from going through that, even though it wasn't easy.Stephanie:Sometimes I think those forced adjustments end up being the best learning... I mean, we had to go through the same thing at my company had to lay off half the team not due to COVID. It was back in 2019. At the time, it felt like the worse thing that could ever happen, crying on the phone. Most of these employees were my friends.Stephanie:But now, looking back and being like, "So many good lessons in that." [inaudible] how to hire, like you said. Do you actually need a full-time employee? How do you justify an FTE versus an agency versus having a one-off contractor? It ends up being a hard lesson but longterm, sometimes companies that go through this blitz are able to come out on the other side stronger than before.Jurrien:Very much agreed and actually, I'll call something out again, I think, for the benefit of any listeners who are those entrepreneurial-minded, startup type people shooting for the sky because I'm one of them. That's why I'm sitting where I sit. If you talk to investors, a lot of times investors are not those people. They're actually the pragmatists and the realists. They've literally seen thousands of businesses like yours do either one of two things. They're usually much more disciplined and pragmatic. I think a lot of times, COOs, CFOs, those type of people also tend to have those personalities.Jurrien:What ends up happening is as an entrepreneur who's like, "I just need to make sure that we don't stall. We got to get it done. I have to make a decision now so I can go on and do the other 50 things on my plate," a lot of times there's a lot of inefficiency in that decision-making process. It's just guessing. What has to happen over time is the company needs to be run less on the seat of the pants and less on intuition and much more on discipline and just time-tested tactics of sound business principles.Jurrien:That's what, at a very high level, happened to you in 2019 and what happened to me. As a founder going through that injects you with a sense of realism and it matures you.Jurrien:It gives you wisdom, I think, that prior to that, because everything was on the up, you didn't really have that. You didn't have time for naysayers. You were defying all odds. Now, it's like no, it's not just about my vision and me anymore. It's actually a company and I have a responsibility to all these people. Accounting principles are going to define whether or not I'm still a business a year from now. I have to listen to those.Jurrien:I think that's the shift that can happen. It's really powerful when you go through that lesson. Your company doesn't implode. You come out through the other side of it. Those are learnings you're never going to unlearn.Stephanie:Yep, yep. I also think the emotions lead the scene where it's like during the time, you're just like, "Horrible," crying, the worst. Thinking about it now, it's how I would even operate, it's like you just... It is a cut-and-dried thing. You've got good margins or you don't. You're profitable or you're don't. Here's your [inaudible]. If it's not there, it's not there. There's no amount of friendships and feel-good anything that's going to fix that-Jurrien:Exactly.Stephanie:... I think, was one of the one of the top lessons for me.Jurrien:That actually ties back to that point that I made: if you don't take care of yourself first, you can't take care of others. If the company isn't sound and it can't pay its bills and keep the lights on, you can't employ all these lovely people who of course depend on you and trust in you and rely on you. But you have to make decisions as the leader in ways that will keep the boat afloat or keep the greater good going. Sometimes, you unfortunately have to make decisions that aren't popular, you don't like, you feel terrible about. But it's not about that.Stephanie:Thousand percent agree with all of that. I know we are running out of time, but I want to do the lightning round with you because I think you're going to have some epic answers.Jurrien:Oh, geez. No pressure.Stephanie:Uh-oh. Lightning round's brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready?Jurrien:I think so.Stephanie:All right, first one. I'm secretly curious about what?Jurrien:What the profitability metrics are of the top 20 DTOC brands.Jurrien:The real deal on the numbers.Stephanie:That's a good one, I thought, though. Something wise my elders taught me was...Jurrien:To always make eye contact and listen to what the person's saying and give it a moment before you respond.Stephanie:That's a good one. You're very good at that. You made eye contact the whole time. Good job. What's up next on your reading list or on your podcast list? What are you diving into these days?Jurrien:Jesse Pujji did a podcast, Invest with the Best, I think it is, where he was talking about his approach to performance marketing. I've listened to it twice and I want to hear it again because it's so thick. That's one.Jurrien:Then there's this other podcast that I can share. I'm terrible with names and remembering things like that, but it was two of the original folks, the early hires at Amazon. They talked about the Amazon memo and narrative and the PR/FAQ approach. We're actually employing that at Stojo right now. Again, very incredible paradigm shift in the way of managing and sharing and presenting information and coming to decisions. So two things I'd highly recommend to people.Stephanie:Cool. I'll have to look that one up and drop it in our show notes. What do you when you want to feel more joy?Jurrien:I like a little bit of cannabis as a night cap and I really like to run.Stephanie:Nice. All right, and the last one. This may be a little bit different than cannabis, but same same. What's one thing that will have the biggest impact on e-commerce in the next year?Jurrien:Oh, that's funny. I think the battle of Facebook-Apple. I'm really interested to see what happens there, how we figure out how to continue with attribution and respect people's rights to privacy.Jurrien:My gut, if you think about the right thing, is we should attribute a commercial value to everybody's data. I as a individual should have the right to monetize and share that data. People should pay for it. Because I'm okay with people having my data because I think it leads to better decision-making and better functionality of the whole machine, but I want to know who's got it and how they're using it. I think there should be value for it for anybody.Stephanie:I agree. All right, Jurrien. Well, it's been such a fun interview. Thank you for coming on the show. Where can people find out more about you and Stojo?Jurrien:God. Look me up on LinkedIn. Check Stojo's Instagram and our website, obviously, and then give this podcast a listen.Stephanie:Yes. Do it. All right, well thanks so much for coming on. It's a blast. Been a blast.Jurrien:Thanks so much for having me, Stephanie. And Hilary, thanks for your work on the back end there. Really appreciate it.
It’s not easy to keep a digital audience engaged. And it’s especially hard when the product you’re trying to engage them with is … produce. And yet, Avocados From Mexico has set a gold standard for what it means to build a funnel and engage an online audience and it has somehow found the secret recipe for success (and also guacamole).On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, I was excited to talk to Ivonne Kinser, the Head of Digital Marketing and Ecommerce for Avocados From Mexico, and learn her many tales about how the company has used out-of-the-box ideas to take something that rarely gets marketing love — produce — and turn it into must-engage-with content. She took us behind the scenes of creating one of the top digital campaigns for multiple Super Bowls, and she dove into what the future of digital marketing looks like, including why Avocados From Mexico has been ahead of the trends when it comes to things like NFTs and blockchain. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Impressions Matter: Impressions are a metric that often is hard to really judge the importance of. But when you can correlate impressions to search activity, it becomes clear that building an awareness of the brand through impressions and exposure can drive conversations on social media. This in turn leads to more Google searches and native activity on a brand’s page.Eternal Iteration: You have to iterate constantly in order to adapt to changing consumer behavior. Constantly changing your platform is not a signal that your platform is failing or wrong, in fact it’s a sign that you are staying on the cutting edge and trying to meet consumer expectations at every turn.The Powers That Be: When setting a path for the future, it’s important to differentiate between trends and fads that will come and go and the forces that will actually drive companies and consumers toward a new way of operating long-term. For example, rather than get caught up in the hot new social network or gaming platform, think about investing in the technology that powers that network (A.I., ML, 5G, AR/VR, etc).For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey there. And welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show, we have Ivonne Kinser who currently serves as the head of digital marketing and ecommerce for Avocados From Mexico. Ivonne, welcome to the show.Ivonne:Hi. Thank you for the invite.Stephanie:Yes. So happy to have you on. I think I just spent an hour going through your guys' website and then I got hungry and I realized it's probably not best to have avocados and salsa right before an interview. So let's see how it goes, I was willing to take the risk.Ivonne:Maybe it's a good thing because you can always get... Go for an avocado.Stephanie:Yes. Yeah, I agree. So before we dive into Avocados From Mexico, I was hoping you could touch on your background a bit. I saw that you moved from Venezuela to Dallas in 2001 and I thought that would be a fun point to jump off on hearing a bit about what inspired that move and what brought you here.Ivonne:Yeah. I mean, if you think about it now, that was a long, long time ago. I came and my first job here actually in Dallas, I have been here for over 20 years or 20 years this year actually. And I oversaw over 20 countries, the campaign of or the advertising for American Airlines across 20 countries in Latin America. And I was there for a long time, I think relatively I was there for about five years before I went to the resource group in Dallas and then I started going from agency to brands and brands to agency.Ivonne:I like both sides of the business until a point where I made a decision and I really liked to stay on the brand side. So I stayed there and right now I have been with Avocados From Mexico for seven years now.Stephanie:Wow.Ivonne:And counting. Yeah.Stephanie:That's amazing. So what pulled you to Avocados From Mexico? Because when you look at your background and what you just went through, it seems like such an interesting jump and what was the draw there?Ivonne:It is interesting. That's a great story. My career is full of stories but this one is one of my favorite ones because I have... I was also on the brand side with American Airlines after managing their account on the agency side, I went to the brand then Haggar company, Haggar Clothing then for a while I even go on my... I went on my own. I was very curious about entrepreneurship and just implementing my own ideas. It went great. It was on the fashion side, it went great, but I really missed the security and the stability of the corporate world and is when I went back then and went to Haggar Clothing and then Avocados From Mexico. But to your question my point is that fresh produce was nowhere in my experience or in my career.Ivonne:I was in transportation, telecommunications, fashion, apparel, retail, never even like the minimal experience in the fresh produce category and then the recruiter of Avocados From Mexico contacted me because they were studying the company actually, which is the marketing arm of two organizations, the growers and exporters of Avocados From Mexico in Mexico and the importers and the Packers and distributors of Avocados From Mexico... Hass avocado in the United States, they came together and created a marketing arm to market their products, avocados coming from Mexico. So at that point they appointed the president who is my boss, Alvaro Luque and he has been there from the beginning 2014, 13, and the recruiter contacted me and asked me if I was interested in going and speaking with them, with Alvaro and I was like, "What? What am I going to do with avocados?"Ivonne:I mean, I have... And that was before the first Super Bowl so I didn't even know that brand existed or anything. And she said, "Just go and talk to him and if you're not interested then fine, but I think that you would like it because it's a very entrepreneurial organization, is a very forward thinking and he is looking to really make an impact in the marketing industry." So that got me curious and I went and talked to him and yes I was fascinated with his vision. He told me the magic words. He say, "I want someone who... I'm looking for someone to build the digital marketing department from the ground up." And when I told him like, "Why me? I don't have any experience in the category."Ivonne:He told me that he was not looking for someone with the experience but he was looking for someone with very good solid expertise in the digital marketing side of the business who was very creative and who would be able to do what nobody else has done. And those are my magic words. I'm very creative. I love creative freedom and do exactly that, what nobody else has done. And besides is one of the very, very few cases in marketing where the marketing budget increases year over year because it's proportional to the sales volume and the sales volume of avocados have been growing year after year... Year over year since 2007 and especially since 2013. So I was sold.Stephanie:That's great. Yeah. I mean, such a good story and it's so interesting too when I think about other produce items in a grocery store, you would never even think like, "This avocado bag has a whole content strategy behind it." And they do Super Bowl commercials and like the stuff that you guys are doing to me seems so innovative. You're taking all the risks, you're trying things but what did it look like before you joined? How were they marketing and selling avocados? What was the landscape before maybe they entered the digital world?Ivonne:So when I started there, that was 2014, there was no digital marketing department per se. I mean, we were doing... We had a social media and we had a Facebook page and we have a few bloggers creating content, but I think that was about it. And then I started in September and my first assignment was okay now you have to build up Super Bowl digital campaign. And I was[crosstalk 00:08:43] okay. Yeah, whatever that means, right? But what has been very exciting about it is that we were talking offline before there was no preconceived notion of how a marketing practice should be. And that was... I think that is what has allowed us to do everything that we have done because nobody has ever say, "No, that's not the way we do things here." There was nothing.Ivonne:So we start creating, at least I can speak for my department that I started creating the marketing department that I thought and I think right now that is the right for these time. And one of the things that a lot of companies do is to become complacent and keep doing things the way they have been doing it for years without even realizing they are doing them. In our case, there was nothing. So it was a blank slate for us to build whatever our imagination can see. And like I was saying, my first assignment was... Was in September, I started in September, right? Super Bowl is next February and building a campaign, you can not build a campaign in just two weeks. So what's literally my first assignment is now you have to build a Super Bowl campaign. And it was the first time we went to the Super Bowl with a TV spot.Ivonne:So I did what I thought that it was best and not knowing or having an experience of what even means to be a winning Super Bowl campaign, right? I just did... Put a lot of love and passion into that but the best I could. And then I remembered that the very next day after the Super Bowl I had a call from one of my agencies and says, "Congratulation for the digital campaign." And I said, "Why? What for? What happened?" They say, "It was number two after Procter & Gamble."Stephanie:Wow.Ivonne:I said, "What does that mean?" And then it was in terms of the most social interactions, the campaign with the bigger bus after Procter & Gamble, imagine that. And that was the first year. After that we launched six more and every single year we were either the top one digital campaign or top two digital campaign. Of course now I knew, "Okay, somebody is measuring this. We're very competitive." So and then we purposefully look for that first and second place but the first year happened just spontaneously. We didn't even try.Stephanie:I mean, I want to dive more into that because I just watched your Super Bowl commercial from 2020 and it was so funny about what your avocado needs. It needs a helmet, it needs a baby carrier for it so it gets more skin to skin contact. I mean, it was really good, writing and super funny, which I feel like sometimes I don't always laugh at things. It actually was giving me a good belly laugh and I want to hear how you go about developing content in a way that you did especially with your Super Bowl commercials that are winning awards and coming in number two, how do you guys even start creating that campaign from scratch to make it connect with a lot of people?Ivonne:Yeah. You know that... I will say the most challenging thing about the Super Bowl is connecting that content across the different departments and disciplines because the concept of the TV spot comes from the brand team and the brand agency. So and I have my team and different agencies. We're like I mentioned before, we're very entrepreneurial organization. So pretty much every lead of every department gets to choose their advertising partners, whomever you feel more comfortable working with for whatever reason based on expertise or closeness or whatever it is. So then we have to... When the brand team define what is going to be our theme and they go to market to test three or four options and then they decide this is the commercial we're going out with. Then they give that to the digital team, to my team and I share it with my agency and we start concepting the digital campaign. And the digital campaign have to be able to stand alone and live on its own, stand up on its own but it has to have some connecting tissue with the TV spot. It has to look like the same story.Ivonne:But that is a huge challenge because how can you bring a story that in TV is 30 seconds and transform that in an experience that it has to keep users engaged for three weeks, because that's the time when we launch the digital campaign until the game day is about two, three weeks. So it's a big challenge. And we have... We develop all the experiences in digital with that connecting tissue in mind but created for digital audience is not only for them to watch, but for them to experience, to play with it, to interact with it, et cetera.Stephanie:Yes. How do you think about building out a call to action that gets people to go back to your website? Because oftentimes I watched these Super Bowl commercials and I definitely have more brand love towards the brands that make really good engaging or funny content. But I don't know if I've always felt drawn to go right over to the website. How do you think about making it a funnel that's actually going to convert and pull people into your avocado community?Ivonne:Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to tell you the story, I tell you I have many stories about the Super Bowl but let me tell you one that will illustrate a great, great example. Years ago, we also had a float in the Thanksgiving Macy's Parade and it was the same dynamic. The brand team who also manages PR has this project or this idea to go do the Thanksgiving Macy's Parade with a float. So we had a float then the CEO comes to my team and say, "Hey, we're doing this in brand so what you guys have to do is to create a digital campaign to go with this float in Macy's Thanksgiving Day, but it's going to launch three weeks before then we start concepting." So what we did is how we can do so users keep coming back after three weeks, every day, right?Ivonne:Because you want them to go come every day and participate every day and interact every day. So what we did is that we develop an interactive map and the story was that we're bringing the float from Michoacan, Mexico from where our avocados come from all the way to New York and you will see how... Stopping in key cities across the United States from Mexico all the way to New York city. So in each city we have videos, we had what are we doing in that video, in that city, et cetera, et cetera. But the key was that the only way the float can move is when users tweet or hashtag. So the more they tweet the faster the float goes to New York and we know that we have to be in New York by a certain day.Stephanie:Wow.Ivonne:So that was so exciting. I mean, users were so excited about it that the day of the parade, when we were monitoring the conversation online and you could see the excitement and users saying, "That's my float." And that was the most rewarding feeling because they felt that was their float because they brought it from Mexico. And just to wrap up the story, we deliver more impressions of, or campaign than the Macy's Parade hashtag, imagine that and-Stephanie:That's impressive and crazy.Ivonne:Yeah. I mean, we're just... Have the power of engaging the audiences, they work on your behalf and because we don't have the dollars that the multi-billion dollar brands have to compete in this type of competition if you call it, like the Super Bowl, for example. But we still have been top one and top two in terms of the most talked about brands and it's because we engage the users and they do it for us.Stephanie:I mean, that's why when I was digging into this Avocados From Mexico company, it was so exciting because at first I'm like, "It's a company about avocados." And I started seeing all these things you're doing I'm like, "They are really pushing the limits when it comes to marketing and being super creative of how to pull people into these funnels and get them engaging." And, yeah, it's super impressive. How do you think about the ROI around a Super Bowl commercial versus a float in the parade? What should the ROI look like or what should companies be going after when thinking about these really big moonshot level marketing campaigns.Ivonne:So every company is different and every company has different goals, right? But we don't manage or sales, we're a marketing organization but our job as a marketing organization we have two objectives that which is, build the brand Avocados From Mexico in the US and increase the demand of Avocados From Mexico in the US. So when we create these campaigns that has an enormous boss what we want to do is to put avocados top of mind. When you have, and I give you the examples of Super Bowl campaigns, when you have, for example 7 billion impressions that was a Super Bowl this year, 7 billion potential impressions on social media. Yes. I mean, you can tell the consumer heard about Avocados From Mexico a whole lot. So when they go to the grocery store, you're top of mind and and our conversation of course is very strategic.Ivonne:So we wrap our conversation around a fun story but really in the core of it, there's recipes, there's conversations about how to consume the avocado. In Super Bowl, for example, we say guacamole, we talk a lot about guacamole and Super Bowl. There's a research company called YouGov, the previous two years they did a survey one month after the Super Bowl and they publish their results and they say the winning brands one month after the Super Bowl. And Avocados From Mexico also is among the top one or top two in terms of purchasing tension increase even a month after the Super Bowl. So, and another thing is when you go and see... We're talking about billions of impressions in social media, right? And then you may think, "So what is even an impression? Who cares?"Ivonne:But it is important because that huge conversation that happen in social media is just a reflection of users engage talking about it. And when we go to, for example, and check the Google trends, how the searches for Avocados From Mexico, the brand, the brand name, the search for the brand name the peaks overlap. When our conversation on social media is very, very high, you also see those peaks of Avocados From Mexico, the brand name search is very, very high at the same time. So, yes, I mean, all this huge conversation that we create with campaigns like Super Bowl, Cinco de Mayo and Thanksgiving Macy's Parade, it really impacts the interest for the brand. So going back to our objectives which is build the Avocados From Mexico brand in the US check and increasing the demand of Avocados From Mexico in the US check, because we have seen also how these YouGov for example, is one of the companies that have shown the increase in purchase intention.Stephanie:Yes. Yeah. That's amazing. So, I mean, thinking about all these marketing campaigns that you've done, what is one of the more risky ones that you've done that actually ended up working where maybe people on your team were like, "It's not going to pay off."Ivonne:Yeah. One thing that I always start thinking even a year before the next Super Bowl is what kind of technology I'm going to integrate in the activation. I think that we live in a world that is dominated and I say this in a very positive way, I believe in technology as a positive force to move the industry forward. So, and there's new technologies every year and I see the technology not as a shiny object, at least not all of them but as a... Like I says, is what is moving the world forward and the marketing industry forward. So I start thinking about what technology I'm going to bring the next year. So last year and it was actually that campaign that you referred at the beginning, I wanted to bring the Vatoms that actually right now are super, super popular right now.Stephanie:What are they?Ivonne:NFT or they call it also NFT. Have you heard about NFT?Stephanie:I mean, I've heard of NFT is in the non-fungible tokens-Ivonne:Yes[crosstalk 00:24:25]Stephanie:Okay. Okay.Ivonne:Yeah. Yeah.Yeah.Stephanie:Al right.Ivonne:So then those are super, super popular right now in 2020. 2020, the other name is Vatoms.Stephanie:Okay.Ivonne:In 2020, we actually were the first... One of the first brands that use that as a marketing tactic and we were the first brand to put one of four advertising assets in the blockchain and that was even before everybody[inaudible 00:24:59]Stephanie:Wow. That's so early. You guys are ahead of every trend, basically.Ivonne:Yeah. I mean-Stephanie:Have you done AR already. I was thinking you have to probably have an Augmented Reality experience with your avocado. You guys have done everything.Ivonne:We did, actually was part of that same strategy. So what happened is last year I say, "Well, I want to do something with NFT, let's call it NFT even though we call it Vatoms last year, but NFT and we did, but what it makes so challenging to be early adopter or a trail blazer that you're bringing something that it hasn't been done before is that it's really, really hard to explain and sell the idea within the organization is like we're putting money towards these, we're allocating budget toward these and it's something nobody has done before is that going to work. And honestly, the answer is, I don't know. I mean, how can you know? You don't know if it's going to work but what we do is when we experiment with that kind of things, we experiment cheap as much as we can and we are really well prepared to pivot if we need it.Ivonne:So my agencies, and when I select my agency partners, it has to be someone that is extremely fast moving that or adaptable and can choose with a call cheap directions because if not, it wouldn't work for the type of approaches that we take. And when you can move that fast and when you have partners that can move that fast, the risk is minimal because we're in... I mean, in the digital space you can course correct in real time and you're going to be fine. The problem is when you don't have the right partner that can move that fast and you know that the campaign is failing or there's room for improvement or it needs to be optimized and you cannot react quickly. But it was a big success in terms of the, it created a lot of buzz and a lot of... Media talk about it and a lot of consumers came and visited our site and participate in our games too because of that.Stephanie:Yeah. That's amazing. So tell me a bit more about the NFT strategy. I mean, I understand the concept of them putting on the blockchain a scarcity thing, limited quantity but what were you actually putting on the blockchain? And are you going to do it again in 2021 now that more people understand the concept of it because of the NBA top shot stuff that really put it on the radar of a lot of people who maybe wouldn't have known about it before?Ivonne:Yeah. So what we did is a mix between Augmented Reality, actually it started... The idea started with Augmented Reality so users will sign up to get at the UTA wallet and then they will go to Google Walmart, for example, and then they will find avocados, digital avocados all over and they will capture the digital avocados with their mentor reality and save them to their data wallet-Stephanie:Like a Pokemon Go kind of game.Ivonne:Kind of. Yes.Stephanie:Okay.Ivonne:Exactly. Exactly like that. So they will call it the avocados and then exchange it for every avocado that they collect is a point. So it was part of a big game. So, but when one of those was a crown that you also saw in the TV spot and that crown also, we place it in the... To develop these kinds of objects, it requires special coding so we coded and somebody... And then users will participate to win it and the winner, we will send them the instructions and it was an object that could be placed in the blockchain and they could then sell it or collect it or save it for later or whatever they wanted to do. So it was like testing the waters without going all in but we want to do one. I think that's one of our goals as a company is just, if anything is going to be tested out there in marketing, in the fresh produce industry, we want to lead that.Ivonne:And of course we saw this is coming at some point. In fact, it came a year later but we know this is coming, this is common in marketing so we have to do this. So we did that the previous year, just to name another technology, we built an experience with IBM Watson, the artificial intelligence and that's another great story because it was such a creative implementation of Watson that even IBM contacted me and to her, "How do you guys do this? Tell me the story," and whatever. And then they send an email to all their subscribers using our campaign as a case story like, look how creative Avocados From Mexico is using Watson in a marketing campaign, because it was a totally unexpected application of what so now artificial intelligence tool.Stephanie:Wow. I mean, you're basically giving you a peek into the future, just thinking I want to know what you're thinking at all times, because you probably are thinking two or three years ahead of what other brands when it comes to a marketing and technology perspective are even thinking about right now. So what are you focused on over the next year or two? What are you guys betting on that maybe other people would look at, you'd be like, "Ivonne, that's definitely not going to play out. No one's interested in that." What are you guys shooting for right now or focused on building from a marketing campaign perspective.Ivonne:Yeah. So two things I want to say about that. First, let me tell you, we're in the middle of planning 2020, 2022 planning our fiscal year ends in June and it starts in July, so we're right now are planning processes in full swing. So any ordering process is six months. So in one of the first meeting, the opening meeting where I get to talk to my team before they start even thinking about what are we going to do for next year? I wanted to make very clear where has to be our focus and I told them and something that is... I think is served as a guide, when we look at the future, we need to see what are those forces moving us toward the future. Instead of looking at what is trending because I wanted them to differentiate what are the trends and what are the forces. The trends are now and they may fade, but the forces are what is going to build the future. In this case right now where we are, I will say the forces are definitely artificial intelligence, machine learning, data, 5G is going to change the way we consume content and the way we consume video.Ivonne:The trends, for example, on the other side are I will put gaming in that side is trending right now. I will put in home fitness, I will put... It's a trend, it may be permanent but it's not something so transformational as it is artificial intelligence, data and machine learning. So what are we focusing in the future? We choose to launch a platform called Avocado Nation, is an intelligent platform with artificial intelligence and machine learning engine at the core of it. We call it the next fix of avocados because it has the same intelligence power, obviously much smaller than Netflix but it was... The inspiration was the way Netflix deliver personalized content to their consumers. And as most of the content production companies, they have like 30% success rates in the shows that they put out there. I believe that the last number that I saw for Netflix is like 70% and it's because they really, really relied on that intelligence.Ivonne:So inspired with that, we say we want to create the Netflix of avocados and that's just one of the portions of this intelligent platform. And we have right now over 100 videos our goal is to get 2,000 videos eventually. And it's videos like any format, short videos, long videos, funny, serious of videos that it could be... It could go from a dating show to a recipe show, all kinds of videos to give the consumers a variety of content for them to interact with and in the meantime, the machine is learning from those interactions and helping us to make predictions in the future about what is the content that our first party data is more engaged with.Stephanie:Yes. Yes. I was just going to say the first party data access is probably... Is that big driving force behind creating an entire platform like this.Ivonne:Big driving. Actually, that was the purpose because with all third party cookies going away and all that, we have been working on that for several years now. And right now we have over 100 million users on our consumer data platform and we have a costume audience, that's our core audience, about 30 million consumers. So we already have... Again, we have been preparing for this since 2015 talking about looking toward the future and when all this happened and a lot of brands are scrambling to get ready quickly, we already have our audience. You never complete with... I'm the one building my audience. That's something that the machine keeps learning, the algorithm keeps learning but we're in a very, very good shape in terms of first party data.Stephanie:Yes. I think it's interesting too that you approach the platform in a way like an AI first focused way where I talk to and hear from a lot of brands and many of them are very focused on content, creating their own series and figuring out how to make that work for the company. But it's very interesting hearing that you're essentially approaching it like a Netflix style model and even thinking back to... I don't know if you remember the earlier Netflix days where when they started coming out with their own originals and people were like, "They're not good." It's like the whole time they were just using that as training data, they were learning what we like. They were learning what makes for a good series, what kind of format are people looking for? And I love how you guys are approaching your platform with that as a focus first instead of trying to figure it out afterwards and figure out, "Why aren't people interacting? Why aren't they loving this series?" Super smart.Ivonne:Yeah, exactly. And you know what? I have my agency, I have several agency partners but I have one that is over all the development and optimization of the website, et cetera. And I told them, "This is an ongoing project, is going to be always an ongoing project because... And I want to iterate every single week because the algorithms are learning. And as we learned about how users are interacting, there's always going to be something to optimize and change and improve the user experience and the user journey. So it's a mind shift because you are iterating and calling it changing, tweaking, it doesn't mean that the platform need is broken, it means that there's always, always, always the consumer behavior is changing and if you forget about that and just launch something and leave it, is going to be outdated next month. So you have to change as your consumer expectations and preferences change all the time, it never stops.Stephanie:Yes. How do you want... I mean, when thinking about your employee base, it sounds like they're working on a ton. You can be working on Super Bowl commercials, you can be working on day to day, like traffic generation. You can be working on an entire content platform where maybe you're trying to bring on new musicians and getting new series created. How do you instill a sense of creativity and an entrepreneurial spirit in them so that they're willing to jump around and work on all these things?Ivonne:It's just a lot of fun. I mean, I think that is... I work with seven agency partners because I think we do so much and every one of them has a specialization in one of the digital... The areas of digital and all of them I think say that Avocados From Mexico is their most fun account. And is one, because it's a fun brand but also because also they have a lot of creative freedom. I really value creative idea that is also strategic. We're very, very strategic. And as long as it ties to the strategy, the sky is the limit, their imagination is their limit. And then we really have fun bringing these crazy ideas. And we do so much that is impossible for one person to bring all the good idea. So everybody has the opportunity to participate and to lead and manage their own projects and they work also very collaborated between all of them and all the agencies, it feels like one big agency working together but it's really different partners.Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative)Ivonne:And it's all about ownership, when people feel the ownership of a project it's amazing what they can do.Stephanie:Yeah. That's awesome. So do you have any advice around working with agencies? Because we've heard from quite a few people that a lot of them have worked with agencies, they didn't have good experiences they ended up the creative and the branding and marketing campaigns back in house. And so how do you go about making sure that you're setting up a great partnership and finding these agencies like these that you speak so highly of?Ivonne:I believe that the agency choice is such a personal choice. Let me explain, the person that is... Or the company culture, the culture of the team, this agency is going to work with internally, the decision maker within the organization has to be a perfect match with the agency. And with that, I want to say, there's not a perfect agency for every... There's not a one pit soul. And I'm not talking about, there's great, great agencies that may not be a good fit for certain people or certain companies. In my case and in the case of Avocados From Mexico, just because we have the freedom to slate the partners we want to work with, they are a perfect match. And I think that makes a difference.Ivonne:So what is my criteria, is that they have to be a very, very creative agency, which of course, any agency should be, but it's a different kind of creativity. They have to move fast, they have to be nimble, they have to be a non-conformance. They have to be... There's so many things that it wouldn't work for us if it wouldn't be that way. And I think that every... That freedom that we have to select our partners should be... Any company should have it because it's like selecting a life partner or selecting a business partner is someone you really, really have to compliment each other and fit perfectly.Stephanie:Yeah. Really, really good advice. All right. Let's shift over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready to Ivonne?Ivonne:Yes. Stephanie:All right. Hard one first, what one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Ivonne:Data.Stephanie:All right. Tell me a bit more, what are you thinking around data?Ivonne:Well, data, and I think that companies... Any company, any technology company that has anything to do in that feel of ecommerce is really, really fast right now creating the new best solution. There are things they are working on right now that are going to come out next week or in a month or two months that doesn't exist now. And they are building all that based on data they are capturing now as we speak. So I think that data is going to be the big driver for technology capabilities, for how the technology is and users are going to interact with each other. And there's so much data out there that we are learning right now how to organize it and how to activate it. And that knowledge is what is going to be used to build the next generation of ecommerce tools.Stephanie:Yes. Love it. When you want to get into the creative mindset, what do you do to get into that-Ivonne:I walk.Stephanie:You walk?Ivonne:I walk in nature. It's very unfortunate what happened to the world in this last year. A lot of people... So really sad consequences but I can tell you in my case I think professionally speaking, it was my best year ever. It was my most creative year, my most productive year because I realized that the way I create is by being close to nature and being with my own thoughts and using that reflecting on things that I talk with people in the industry, things that I read but then going back and retrieve and reflect on those things. And I think definitely, I think that everybody should have that space to let their creative power to work on[inaudible 00:46:44]Stephanie:Yeah. I love that. I feel that I also... Yeah, I get very inspired when I'm just out walking and hiking and yeah, I think that's definitely a way to jumpstart that.Ivonne:Yeah. And I like to, I go on a bike, right now that it's getting warmer here in Texas is biking time again and I think my best ideas come when I'm on the bike or when I'm walking, because you don't have interruptions, you don't have a phone ringing, you don't have texts, you don't have anything. So it's you and your thoughts and the brain is an amazing machine that is processing everything that came in at some point and organizing it and making sense of it and coming up with new outputs.Stephanie:Yes. Yeah. You just have to bike on down to Austin, when you get here, we can go on a hike and we'll be super creative and you'll be really in shape so...Ivonne:Awesome.Stephanie:It'd be great.Ivonne:Love to.Stephanie:If you had a podcast what would it be about and who would your first guest be?Ivonne:That's a hard one. I think it will be definitely something related with technology. It will about disruptive technology and new shield solutions. I don't know exactly it doesn't come to my mind what will be my first guest but I think that I would love to interview a woman in technology. I think it's a field where women are being very successful but it was not until recently that they really had a place on the table in that industry. So it would be very interesting to learn how that has been and how it feels to be one of these top technology companies, preferably if she is a founder of a technology company and see how she leaves and interacts in an industry that only until recently became recognizing female as leader.Stephanie:Yes. That sounds like a good one. I would for sure listen to that. Well, Ivonne, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been really fun to get a peek into some of your marketing and digital strategies and yeah, it was just really fun feeling like I had a chance to glimpse into the future with you. Where can people find out more about you and Avocados From Mexico?Ivonne:So we, Avocados From Mexico on Twitter is Avos From Mexico and about me, I have the same in Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn is all Ivonne Kinser, I-V-O-N-N-E K-I-N-E-R.Stephanie:Amazing. Thanks so much, Ivonne.Ivonne:Thank you.
Let’s be real, talking about sex makes people uncomfortable. But it shouldn’t! And that’s one of the driving principles behind Maude, a modern sexual wellness brand that is disrupting a taboo industry and making sexual health more a part of the overall health and wellness conversation. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, I chatted with the founder of Maude, Éva Goicochea about how she built her company with a combination of excellent content, a growing and vibrant community, and a go-to-market strategy with patience and empathy top-of-mind. Éva also gave us some insight into the lessons she’s learned from bringing Maude into the retail market, and how she goes about assessing customer acquisition and community engagement. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Getting To Market: Ideate quickly, go to market strategically. Get to know who your customers are, what they want, and what problems they need solved before pushing a product to market. Not only do you need to take into account what your customers want, you also need to consider the associated logistics and cost that product will have to your business. You have to decide if your company is the one that should be creating it and whether the market size is big enough to jump through whatever hoops there are to actually bring that product to life.Content is King: Obviously, businesses want to sell goods on their websites. But it may actually be a better strategy to build a site that is less transactional and more content-driven and educational. In doing so, you can attract a casual audience, who are more likely to turn into buyers when they are already on your site.Bidding Wars: When wholesaling or working with retailers, a unique problem arises if those retailers try to outbid your brand for keywords and search terms in order to win more customers. Whether or not to fight to win those bidding wars comes down to assessing the value of the customer acquisition method. Is the customer more valuable as a native buyer or do you get the same or more value by having your wholesale partner see success selling your product?For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host Stephanie Postles, CEO at mission.org. Today on the show, we have Eva Goicochea, the CEO and founder of maude.Éva:Hey, it's nice to be here.Stephanie:I'm excited to have you on. I feel like this is gonna be a very intimate fun conversation, the first of its kind, no puns intended. I would love that before we dive into maude and what it is, I always like to start with the beginning stories. Tell me a bit about what you did before founding maude.Éva:I'm going to try to tell the short version because I think it all connects.Stephanie:Perfect.Éva:I studied advertising in New York in the early 2000s, very analog time. I went back to California, became a legislative aide in healthcare, and then moved to LA and went back into marketing, and worked with a lot of brands, but then I was one of the early employees at Everlane. I think that those two experiences really shaped how I got to maude, and so I started working on maude in 2015 after leaving Everlane in 2013, and here we are.Stephanie:Awesome. What did the early days of maude feel like? Where did the inspiration come from? What is maude? Tell me about how the early days were back then.Éva:Maude was born out of this conversation I had with some friends of mine, who were also founders in a business with me called Tinker Watches. We started talking about sexual wellness and like, "What is the industry that has just never been changed?" This is one of them at least for the modern consumer. It's changed many times, but I think to the modern consumer. I was like, "This is the idea I've been waiting for between the healthcare background and what I thought I would pursue, which was a master's in public health and consumer brands. This is what I want to work on."Éva:Everyone's like... I can't tell my grandma that I sell condoms. I'm like, "I'm going to do this," and so I started working on it. The early days were very similar to COVID for most people, which was heads down at my house working on this idea, not ever feeling super connected to the outside world, and then here we are many years later. It's something that's just grown a lot.Stephanie:That's amazing. What kind of products do you offer now?Éva:We launched in 2018. We had condoms, lubricants, a vibe. Then later on that year, we had a massage candle. Now, the business is about 75% sex essentials, and 25% back and body products which are meant to be used with a partner or alone. That's the profile of the business now, but we launched with these four products saying, "Customers should be able to go to one place and find them," and that really resonated.Stephanie:That's amazing. I mean, how do you even view the landscape now? Has it changed since you've got into it, or is it till the same? What does that look like now?Éva:So much. I mean, on one hand, you see copycat brands, and that's always a little frustrating. But at the same time, I think it's indicative of what is happening in the space. I think it's indicative of what's happening in the space, which is that people are starting to ask for sexual wellness to be considered a part of personal care and reframe that way. They want to see products positioned in that way so that they can shop with the same comfort you can when you're dealing with something like beauty. That's what you're seeing.Éva:We're a brand that fits right there, because we have these products that are bath and body and then also sex. It's really interesting. I think you're going to start to see the products. I mean, I know you are because I know where we're going in terms of retail, but you're going to start to see the products in places that maybe you wouldn't expect.Stephanie:I mean, I'm thinking about even a couple years ago, it's like if you're going to get something, you're going to the back aisles of a CVS, and you're like, "Is anyone looking?" Ka pow. Grab it real quick, run, and check out. They'll look away while they're paying for it. There is this stigma around any items in the sexual wellness industry, but I like how you guys are changing that, especially around your content for the company.Éva:Thank you.Stephanie:You have these amazing products, and you have... It's nice because you don't have a ton of products. You can either have this, this, this, which I think is important especially in the early days of changing this industry. But how do you approach it from a content perspective that brings in new people like I was just describing who maybe would be like, "Well, I'm not going to buy this stuff online?"Éva:I think it was... It was really this choice that we made early on. We had the blog, which is called The Modern from day one. The idea was can you build a world around the product, because we knew we weren't going to have many products. We didn't want to be an over sorted brand, and people were reading it. They just kept consuming it. Then we started to get feedback, and then that turned into seeing what was working and what wasn't. Now, it's been built out into these three verticals. One's called the essentials, which is for an 18 to 25-year-old audience. The modernist is 25 to 45, and then the golden is 45 and up.Éva:It's grown so much. I think we get more traffic on the modern on the product side of the site to be quite honest with you. That's probably because we produce so much content, but it's been great. I think it really positions the brand in the right way, and we're showing content that we want to see in the world.Stephanie:How do you create content that resonates with people? How do you approach that and get in front of new people and know what's going to attract them to the blog to then eventually, hopefully, sell some of your products?Éva:I think, obviously, there's a bit of a science, right? You're looking at the search. What's happening in search, and what are people looking for? But then there's also, I guess, the pattern of behavior around what they've been looking at for the past three years, and what really resonates there and then asking them. That's where the art comes in, because you're really trying to be as empathetic as possible, and as you start to really decide and see who your audience is, then you think about all the things that they need. We try to think of it with both lenses, which I think is the only way to create content.Stephanie:What are your top performing content? What articles you got going on, where you're like, "These bring in the most traffic, or people really love this article?"Éva:It's funny, because for a very long time, it was sex in the wild west, which was one of our-Stephanie:The what? Like Oregon trail type of sex?Éva:Yes. It was sex in the wild west. I mean, it was the shortest piece of content ever, because when we first started, it was more like a Tumblr than it was a full blog. For a long time, that was one of the biggest traffic drivers. It was so funny.Stephanie:People are searching for that? I won't even know the keywords to type in to even think like, "What did they do back there?"Éva:I know. I don't know if it's because there's not many resources for this we were just getting, and it was making it easier for it to float to the top of the search. I'm not sure, but that works really well. We don't dig into it too much, but astrology and sex works really well. There are all of these funny topics where I think people are thinking. It's just these... I would say they're more cultural moments than they are just the WebMD version of content that resonates with our customer.Stephanie:That's pretty fun hearing about the kind of content that works. Now with COVID and everything, what have you seen with this market? I'm guessing, like we mentioned before, that you've had a crazy demand. People are all at home trying to have fun. What new trends are you seeing pop up this past year or two that maybe you weren't seeing before that?Éva:I definitely think that one of the biggest trends that we've seen which makes complete sense is when people are on the site. We used to see it more when it was a nine to five world at night on the weekends, and we still see that, but there is more of a consistent traffic on the site for the whole day, which is interesting. I think we're also just seeing a lot more. There's a lot more press around it being a part of your life and your holistic health, which I think is the right approach. That's how we should think about this.Éva:I like the fact that people are thinking about it, and they're more health related and psychologically. It's psychologically tied to your happiness too, so I think that's important, but we see that a lot. I feel like before, people talked about sex in this compartmentalized way, and now they're talking much more about intimacy. That's always the way that we've approached it anyway, so we were in the right place at the right time in terms of messaging.Stephanie:That's cool. The other thing I was reading about with your brand was that, I mean, you not only lead into content as a big part of even starting the company and less about paid ads maybe in the beginning, but you also focused on PR, and you partnered with a celebrity. I want to hear about how you... Who is it? How did you get that partnership, and how did all of that accelerate growth in the beginning?Éva:The PR was interesting because I was actually just looking at our first piece of press today for some reason, and that was in the beginning-Stephanie:Like ever.Éva:Like ever. That was in the beginning of 2017, which was interesting. The first thing that I did because my background in brand building is also in design, and so I threw up this website in 2015 for maude, even though we weren't anywhere close to being ready to go to market. We started getting inquiries about press, so I knew then that it was a topic people were going to want to talk about. Okay, cut to 2017, we actually had a real landing page, and we got our first piece of press. We use basically our renderings of our products, but that was an important piece in getting maude off the ground because the brand awareness happened so far in advance of launching that by the time it got there, we had built in community.Éva:We had captured those emails, and people were excited and ready. I think that that's a really interesting approach for people to take. I don't know that I would give your brand a year [inaudible] too long, but for us, that was about the amount of time was and then... The celebrity partnership, which is with Dakota Johnson, came about... Her team approached us and said that she was really interested in the brand. At first, I was very hesitant to take on any celebrity investment, because I'm not really interested in putting a name to the brand in that way.Éva:When we partnered with her, it's very much about being behind the scenes, so she's been working with us as a team behind the scenes, and that's been great.Éva:We'll work on products. We talked through what does the next year look like? Anything that we work on hasn't really come to market yet, because it takes a while for any of these things to happen, but it's a lot of just behind the scenes working on really what is the creative direction of the company.Stephanie:Okay, cool. I want to dive a bit into product development, because this is such an interesting area to me like, how do you go about creating products knowing what your customers want? What does that lifecycle look like, great sexual wellness company?Éva:I think for us, I mean, we started working on the product in 2017, which is why we knew what it was going to look like, and so we had about a year. Every product that we make essentially has a six month to a year cycle before it gets to market. We do that for a number of reasons. We don't just take products to market quickly. We definitely work with our customer. We survey them and ask them questions and look at feedback, and then we also look at really what's happening in the market.Éva:Are there products that we can make in a better way? Are there things that we should be... Are there problems we should be solving with our brand? It's this collaborative process with the team to look in this 360 view and say what's really happening, and should maude even be making it? Because I think there are brands-Stephanie:How do you decide? What parts should you be involved in, and which things have you said no to?Éva:I think it's mostly, "Could it be used..." All of our products are meant to be used by yourself or with a partner. How can we be the most inclusive whatever your status is, whatever your adult age is, whatever your gender? That's one way to look at it. I think the other way to look at it is does it make sense with the other products? Is it additive, or is it random?Éva:There's a lot of hurdles to get a product to market. Condoms are class two medical devices. Our lubricants are the same thing. When customers are like, "You're inclusive. You should make all of these things," we say, "There's a couple things. One, is there a regulatory hurdle, and then two, is there a minimum order quantity that we just can't as a small brand get to?" Then the third would be like, "If we could do both of those things, is there a market for it?" That's just real brass tax. Do you take a product to market?Stephanie:Interesting. The other thing I'm thinking about is your ecommerce strategy with your products. I mean, I think a lot of consumers are used to, like I said, buying things in a certain way not really thinking too much about it, definitely not probably standing in the aisle and be like, "Hmm, which one do I want? Let me read the back of everything and see the description." How do you think about developing that ecommerce strategy in a way that people know what it is, know the benefits and do want to hang out and look at it, but also understand it afterwards, especially for someone new coming in and being like, "I'm not from this world?"Éva:I think it's interesting that you asked this because I would say that we could do better in the ecomm strategy given the fact that all of our bottles are brown, so we-Stephanie:Wait. All your bottles are brown.Éva:We have two lubricants. They both look the same, so we've had the same challenges. Our thought was that we create these products that look great in your bathroom or on your bedside table that you wouldn't be embarrassed to have out. But I think in some ways, it's also like, "Okay, but do you know what they are?" What we found in terms of ecomm is to be really clear about how you're shopping for them. Our site is merchandised in a way that's pretty clear and that you can find things in a couple ways.Éva:One is by usage, so if it's before, during and after sex, or just buy the actual type of product. That seems to have been helpful, but I still think we have work to do on that front, because I do think you're right. People come to the site, and they might be uncomfortable, or they might not know what goes together. We're actively trying to make sure they don't just see a sea of brown bottles.Stephanie:That's interesting, trying to put two things together to be like, "This could be a package," and like... Do you have something that shows up on the side of your website that is like, "Here's something that pairs with it?" What kind of maybe tests have you done where you're like, "This one converts well. They add more things to the cart," versus, "When we had it this way, it didn't work out?" Any little findings there?Éva:I mean, there are some products that people just like adding to their cart. One of them is the massage candle, because I think it's something... Universally speaking, I don't know that everyone knows what a massage candle is, per se, but a candle is very easy to understand, so that works as an upsell. I think that if you're pairing a product, if you're getting the vibe, for instance, and you get suggested the lubricant to use, I think that makes sense to people. If it's a bath product, there are other bath products that go well with it like the wash, which is our body wash goes really well with the massage oil.Éva:There's ways for us to basically guide you through the journey, but I still think it's probably one of our biggest challenges is to make sure that people know what else we have.Stephanie:Do you study other brands to see how they're doing things, or are you like, "We're such a different unicorn that there's really no one else that we can look at when it comes to recommendations and trying to figure out who needs what it at what point?" How do you figure out good practices that you want to try and implement?Éva:Well, so it's a bit of a conundrum in a couple of ways. I think the first way is that if you look at a let's call it a skincare site, usually, those things are maybe it's shopping by system. Let's say that they just have one cream or one face wash. That's easy to understand. If it's by say problem, it's distinctively called out, so it's for oily skin or dry skin. We don't have... That's not how you shop the site. In one way, some of the products are a system, but they're not based on a problem.Éva:It's still something for us that we have to, I think, solve for. One of the things that we're really.... I wouldn't call us precious about it, but I do think that we try to be very kind and empathetic about is making the customer feel comfortable, so we don't want to scream anything on the site. I think there are times though that were to tone down. This is a good question.Stephanie:What about quizzes and things like that? If someone comes and they're not really informed on what you guys are selling, have you tried out any quizzes that guides people to what they might want and in a way where they're like, "I didn't get there myself. You told me to get there?"Éva:It's funny because originally, the site was just a quiz. When we first launched, it was like it walked you through, and you ended up with seven different kits basically. There was a couple things, learnings, all things that anyone listening should know. We named the kits one through seven. That's not really helpful. You don't know like... You're like, "I can't remember what number I am." I think also, we didn't have enough options. The only real difference between the kits was how many products were in them, and then if it was shine organic or shine silicone lubricant.Éva:We're still figuring out the best way to bundle. I think that customers... What's interesting, and I think it will happen and improve over time, is that people are starting to see it more as, like I said, something between sexual wellness and beauty, and so they browse the site. There's actually a pretty high conversion on the site. They're browsing the site because I don't think they feel uncomfortable, which was [inaudible].Stephanie:Cool. The one thing that we've talked about in previous episodes is around UGC. That's the best way to get people to buy things if it looks organic, and my friends would use it. I feel like that'd be really hard for your brand to get [inaudible]. I mean, you might get flagged on Instagram.Éva:We do get flagged on Instagram. I think for us, it's just been that's where the bath and body products come into play. We've started to introduce more UGC because we've been seating out more bath and body products for people to try, but it's a really interesting line to tow between messaging around like, "Here's this really soothing body care, and how does it relate to intimacy," but we can't be explicit on Instagram and Facebook, so navigating this category has been really interesting, challenging at times.Stephanie:Did you consciously develop something that you could use on Instagram to then try and get that traffic back? Were you thinking about that before you even developed the body wash type products?Éva:Yeah. It's interesting because the condoms and the lubricant technically can be sold. The ads can be posted on Facebook and Instagram, but the language starts to get tricky. The reality is that there are real people looking at your Facebook ads, making the decision if they should be shut down, which always gets into really funny territory. When we launched the burn massage candle, we're able to start really ramping up ads, but it's really amazing what's allowed on Instagram and what's not allowed.Stephanie:Yes. I mean, I could go down the entire wormhole of certain people who've been banned and other people where it's like, "That is definitely a very bad site, and there's a lot of bad things happening there. How are they still on here?" It's an interesting world. What kind of ads are you creating? I think a lot of times about humor can always be fun around certain topics, and get people in. Do you guys approach it that way, or are you strictly content, educational? How do you think about your ads?Éva:They're just really beautiful straightforward ads. I would say that, again, they always lean more towards beauty. The funny part is that we... I mean, not to use the word funny, because I'm about to say maude has a sense of humor. It's just typically in the captions or in the writing or in the quippy parts of the content, so that could be brought out more. The ads are generally just like how to use the product, and they're beautiful.Stephanie:That's cool. We were talking a bit before the show about retail and how you were thinking about it. Tell me a bit about what your plans look like when it comes to entering into retail.Éva:We are actually... Our business is about 20% retail. We're in a lot of-Stephanie:Oh, you're already there.Éva:We're already there, and it's growing. We're launching in a bunch of new retailers this year. The retail angle has been interesting. We first started out... I can't remember who our first retailer was, but back in 2018, we were definitely in a lot of smaller boutiques. We were in hotels, which makes sense, and started going into bigger retailers. What was happening and what we still see happen is that the merchandising teams would be fighting over where we should be in store.Éva:Now, it seems like the beauty teams are winning. We're seeing maude. It's going to get positioned in a lot of the beauty categories in retail, in these doors not just online. I'm very curious to see what it looks like there.Stephanie:How do you think about connecting the story and the brand and approaching that omni channel experience? What kind of things are you trying out and learning through all of that?Éva:The kinds of things that we're working on is really sticking to the script for the brand, because we see a lot of crossover audience that comes to us via Instagram, and then finds us out in the world in retail. Whereas I've definitely worked in brands that try to cater to each retail audience, and they've test a lot. We try to just really be very distinctively on brand all the time so that people remember us. I think when you're really a new brand or a younger brand, it's important for you to be memorable and top of mind.Stephanie:How do you stay memorable? What do you do especially now that you say there's people popping up like competitors or copycats? How do you differentiate yourself to make sure that you're not blending in with someone else who enters into a Urban Outfitters?Éva:I think it's more about what's the product assortment and then what's our creative strategy, which hasn't been copied quite yet. The other thing is... I've said this on other podcasts. I don't want to completely sound like a broken record, but I think there are really two types of companies. One is product, and one is mission-based companies, very appropriate to what you do.Stephanie:Perfect.Éva:I think that our company is a mission-based company, which means you can't expedite the process of growing community and brand equity. I think that that's what makes maude really ahead of other brands that are trying to do it. It's like they'll have to build their own communities and their own look and feel, and customers will either get it or resonate with it or not.Stephanie:I mean, do you find that you have the ability to stay connected with your customer afterwards? How do you keep the conversation going to then increase the lifetime value of that person and bring them back and stay within your community? What kind of things are you doing behind the scenes to ensure that happens?Éva:Our biggest KPI internally has always been NPS and customer reviews and satisfaction. We have really, really high NPS, and we focus on making sure that they are engaging with our emails, and whether or not they're coming back to buy from us is more a matter of do they need it? What do their sex lives look like? Can we even control that? We can't do any of that work for them, but we can be there. It's staying top of mind through the content, and then making sure that they're happy. We check on them often, and then try to listen when they're not happy.Stephanie:How do you encourage reviews for your product? I could see, like what we were saying earlier, people being hesitant to review something where their name's on there, and someone identifies them. How do you get people to come in and drop some valuable insights into your review system?Éva:They'll get a notification to review the products so many days after purchase, which people are pretty open to doing. Actually, that's all we do. We don't encourage. We don't give discounts for reviews. We're really purist in a lot of ways in terms of how we gather data and what we ask our customer only because we're really respectful of this category and what it means for them to be disclosing this kind of information, and so we want to be as thoughtful as possible. The reviews that we get are amazing, and they're amazing a number of ways.Éva:They're heartwarming and funny and maybe too raunchy. You're like, "Okay, thank you. I didn't need to know any of this," but I think getting people to feel like they can safely write that is what we're trying to do. We're a pretty respectful brand.Éva:I mean, there are other ones that I think are like... a lot of reviews where people will say like, "I lost my spouse, and I just didn't know if I can navigate this alone, and this has made me feel like I'm a person again or lovable," and these things you will just be crying in the office. It runs the range. There's lots of reviews.Stephanie:I mean, I feel like that authenticity is key, though, when people are especially exploring a market that they've maybe never looked into before. Reading reviews like that is, I think, what sells the product by itself, because there's probably many other people who've comment and like, "That's me. I'm in that position right now. I feel sad like that." Trying to get customers to speak like that, I think, is game changing if you can get them to do that, which is why I'm so impressed that you get reviews like that because to me, I can see a lot of people holding back and not wanting their name on something and just being nervous about that whole thing.Éva:I know. I'm like, "I wouldn't write a review like this," but you should read the reviews.Stephanie:No.Éva:After, you guys need to read the reviews because they're very funny. I do have one other funny review that I'll bring up. Somebody used the burn massage candle, which has this great scent. It's really an amazing scent. It took us a while to develop, but she was like, "It made me feel like I was going at it in the redwood forest instead of my dinky no ho apartment." I'm like, "Oh my God."Stephanie:These people are good copywriters. Can I hire them?Éva:One woman wrote about the vibe. She was a powerhouse, a workhorse, an icon. That got turned into an email.Stephanie:That could be the tagline of the product.Éva:I know.Stephanie:Your customers should be the ones putting in their ideas, and then you just take their names and their tagline.Éva:I know.Stephanie:Man, that's good.Éva:That was good.Stephanie:Where do you see maude heading over the next maybe one to three years? What are you guys excited for, planning for?Éva:We're planning to go into one or two other categories. I think we're really deepening the product categories we have, and then venturing into a couple others all around intimacy. If it can be in the before, during or after category, we'll make it. I'm really excited about that, because I envision this maude. We have one in the office, so I guess it's easy for me to do. But I envision a maude shelf, and I'm like, "Okay, what does that complete experience look like?" I'm so excited to build that and then to see it come to life on these end caps and then these retailers is just...Éva:It's incredible. Then to go back to the reviews for a second like how much these products have impacted people's life, I think that that's where I'm really excited to help continue to solve for their needs, and also create products they really like and that have made their lives better in a small or sometimes big way.Stephanie:When thinking about retail, I know I keep getting back to this. I'm just so impressed that you guys are going this route and having success in it. What kind of lessons did you learn when exploring the retail path? What would you do differently maybe if you were to do it over again?Éva:I would say that the biggest thing I would do differently is probably not have launched in a category or in a corner of a store that wasn't really where we should be placed. An example of this is within Urban Outfitters, which again, Urban Outfitters as a brand has been really a good partner to us. It's not our age demographic, but I think in terms of... They've always been good about building out beauty. At first, they wanted to put the vibe in tech and the other products in beauty. I'm like, "The problem with this is that it creates this sense of novelty," and we actually have something launching this week around why we don't call devices toys.Éva:It relates back to why this should not be a novelty in the electronics section of your store. That'd be one.Stephanie:I mean, that'd be weird if it's next to some key chain, cellphone cover, and there's a vibrator.Éva:There's a vibrator. Honestly, I don't know that anybody even bats an eyelash at that sort of positioning because they have been called toys, and they've been made to be these novelty items for so long, but our whole ethos is that we're a brand for all genders, but in particular women, cis women have not... The vibrator has been treated like it's this thing that's an add-on, and for many of them, it's not an add-on. Why can't it just be with the rest of the products?Stephanie:Did you have pushback when you told them like, "We want to have our products together?" Are you even able to tell them where you want your product to be?Éva:We can ask it and guide them. I think over time, they were like, "These products should be here," and then they built out sexual wellness as a part of their beauty both online and in store. Then it was an easy solve.Stephanie:Cool. That's a good tip. Any other lessons or experiences from getting into retail that were insightful?Éva:I mean, we've had conversations with retailers where we go down this long journey of they need certain testing or they need certain things, and we have all of these quality controls, and we have all of this testing on our own, but some retailers are so specific, and then you get to the PO. They're like, "And we want 10 units." You're like, "We've just gone through seven weeks of your editor testing, and you're 10 weeks of this, and you want 10 products." I think that's an interesting lesson is who's really the volume driver, and then who's really...Éva:It's about brand positioning, and what are the risks you should be taking for each.Stephanie:Now, do you go into it with a minimum quantity from the start of like, "We're not going to mess around with 10 units if you're going to make us spend six weeks doing this?" Could someone new do that? Can you only do that now because you've been doing this for a while? Could a newer brand come in with those expectations of like, "Tell me how many units you guys plan on ordering before I do the work," or you just have to go through that phase in the early days?Éva:I don't know that they would have told us. I do think that there are trade offs around. For instance, what we've learned now with retailers is a lot of them online will outbid you for your Google search terms. If you've made all of this effort, they've only bought 10 items, and guess what? They're putting a lot of search dollars behind it. Is it worth it? I'm not sure. Is it worth it to Sam in the xyz.com, whatever? I don't think it always is. It's just a trade off around how are you acquiring a customer? Where are they finding you, and does it really matter if you're in... I won't name names, but...Stephanie:I mean, that seems like a very important point that I actually not heard anyone bring up yet about the retailers outbidding you on your own keywords. It seems like there should be something in the contract that says, "These are my set of keywords I go after. You can't touch them if we're a partner."Éva:We're only learning that we can even push that now. I think there's a lot of things as a smaller company where you're just like, "Okay, sure. I'm so excited to be in blah, blah, blah," and then lessons learned.Stephanie:Oh man, that's a good lesson. I'm glad I'm pushing this. I feel like a lot of people could actually learn from the stuff and go into it with different expectations than... It is easy probably to be like, "I've got Urban Outfitters. I've got whoever," and then to be like, "Oh, maybe I should have asked for more upfront." Ask for what you actually think is fair.Éva:I think you're also like... We didn't put a stockist on our page, because, one, we couldn't keep up with where we were, especially when we were in these independent retailers. If you think about stockist, it's really for the benefit of the customer, right? At the same time, it's like, "Well, then why are we in some of these places, because we know they only ordered 10 products?" This is all up to you as a brand, but think about these things and really what is the value.Stephanie:That's great. Good tips. I love it. All right, well, let's shift over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question, and you have one minute or less to answer. Are you ready?Éva:I'm ready.Stephanie:All right. What one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Éva:This is interesting. I think probably to your point, it's content. It's building out a site that is less transactional and it's more about building a memorable brand, because I don't know about you, but I track brands. I'm like, "There are so many brands coming out." If I can't see a deeper story, or if I can't connect with something that I'm going to remember, it's just really hard for me to think about them.Stephanie:What do you think the world's going to look like in a couple years? Because like you said, it does feel like there's so many new DTC companies popping up, and it actually seems like it's hard to trust who's saying what and if that's their mission, and if they're doing what they're saying they're going to do, because now, anyone can launch really quickly, and then also go away really quickly if they need to. Where do you think the world's headed because of all that?Éva:I think it's in examining all of their channels, finding where they really are speaking to their community. When I mean content, you don't have to go to the site and find a blog per se. But if you can find a community, whether that's on Instagram or Tiktok or some channel where you can see evidence of them having a connection with their customer, I think that's really important, because I have been to a lot of sites where then I go check out their social channels, and they've been around for long enough, and there's just like no engagement. It's really interesting.Stephanie:That's working out really great. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about, and who would your first guest be?Éva:Oh, this is a good one. I actually just started a podcast.Stephanie:Nice. What's it about, and who was your first guest?Éva:Well, so we haven't booked the first guest yet, but I will tell you who I want the first guest to be. The podcast is called The Una. It's about the first and the few females in a particular industry. It could be any industry, whether that's politics or finance or the spirit's industry. We want our first guest, although I think it's going to be much harder to land now, to be Deb Haaland. If you didn't know, she's now the first Native American Secretary of the Interior. She is from New Mexico, which is my home state, but I think because she's now the secretary of the Interior that it's going to be a little harder to land her, so wish me luck.Stephanie:Come on, Deb. Get on the show.Éva:I know.Stephanie:That's awesome. It sounds like a very cool show. I'll definitely be listening. When is it going to launch?Éva:Well, so we're starting to do the outreach because we did the trailer finally. If you go to theunapodcast.com, you can see or listen to the trailer.Stephanie:Very cool. What's Up next on your reading list?Éva:I just watched the Dieter Rams documentary, and I've been reading the book which is the 10 Principles of Good Design only because I think it's the way to bring me back to why we have maude, why we do what we do at maude. By the time this actually airs, the team will know, but I'm taking them to a screening of the Rams documentary, and we'll then talk through the book. That's what's up. I'm getting through the book.Stephanie:Very cool. What's one thing that you don't understand today that you wish you did?Éva:I mean, I don't know if I wish I did, but I really don't understand the allure of clubhouse. I'm like, "I don't understand. I don't get it."Stephanie:We've had a couple people say that, so you're not alone. Don't worry.Éva:I don't. I think that it's a pandemic phase, but I could be wrong.Stephanie:Well, we'll have to do a check back in six months or a year and be like, "Was Eva right or?"Éva:Although I have heard people like... They listen to this... For instance, our director of product listens to people talking about Sci Fi. I think that's a great use of clubhouse. Otherwise, when it's just talking heads about the same things, I don't know.Stephanie:I agree. All right. Then the last one, what's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you?Éva:Oh, well, I mean, this is going to sound cliche, but my husband is actually a mechanical engineer. He's the one that's designed... He designed the vibe. He designed our second product drop.Stephanie:Wow.Éva:He doesn't work for maude full time. He really builds the business with me when needed as if he were a part of it. I think that's the nicest thing that anyone has done for me.Stephanie:That's pretty amazing and awesome. Go him for stepping in and helping like that. Was he unsure if he wanted to design sexual wellness [crosstalk]? Did you have to be like, "Come on?"Éva:No. His take on design and the usefulness of design, which I would actually joke goes back this Rams documentary is like, "These products are really everyday items, and they shouldn't be made to be used that way." I think he liked the fact that maude was turning it into an everyday object instead of making it phallic and loud and all these other things. I think he was just like, "Great. Let's make this product better."Stephanie:Oh, that's awesome. That's amazing. Well, Eva, this has been so fun having you on the show, such a different interview, which loved, and it's fun hearing about maude and the industry and all that. Where can people find out more about you and maude?Éva:Well, with me, it's if they follow me on Instagram. It's evagoicochea.com, which is really long, but I'm sure if you type in E-V-A-G-O-I, you probably will be able to find me. Then maude is getmaude.com, M-A-U-D-E, because we could not just get maude.com.Stephanie:Amazing. All right, everyone, go check it out. Thanks so much for joining us. It was a pleasure to have you.Éva:Thank you so much for having me.
The Beatles told us that All You Need Is Love. Howard Tiersky says the same thing — but he’s talking about brands, not the whole of human existence. Howard is the CEO of FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency, which has helped brands such as Mattel, Barnes & Noble Education, Mall of America, NBC, Avis-Budget, and more transform to compete and win in a new digital world — and they succeed by getting customers to love the brands and everything they offer. Whether you’re a shiny new ecommerce start-up or a legacy brand with decades of history behind you, getting a consumer to actually love you is a multi-step process that is getting harder and harder as the digital landscape evolves. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, we dig into what the pyramid of brand love looks like and how companies should be working to climb their way to the top. Plus, he reveals the biggest mistake he sees companies making that causes potential customers to shop elsewhere, and he gives some strategies to rectify that situation and improve your bottom line. Enjoy!Main Takeaways:The Switching Cost is Zero: On the internet, it’s easy for a customer to move from one brand to another and it costs them nothing to do so. That means a brand’s first duty is to explain very quickly and clearly that it can and will solve a consumer’s problem. This is the area where most brands fail because they don’t have clear, simple messaging or content that tells their story and delivers their value prop instantly.Keep It Simple: Doing customer research is the best and easiest way to find the kinks in your website and processes. Setting up a simple focus group to watch how customers are using your site to see where their pain points are or where they are getting stuck can reveal the most basic and easy-to-solve problems that could increase your bottom line.Pyramid of Love: Creating a brand that people truly love is a challenge that has to be tackled in stages. There are specific levels of customer affection that you need to build up and that eventually culminates in love. But reaching those levels takes work and requires a brand to take specific actions. What are the levels and how do you reach them? Tune in to find out.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey everyone. And welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO at mission.org. Today on the show, I'm chatting with Howard Tiersky, the CEO of FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency and the author of The Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Winning Digital Customers, The Antidote to Irrelevance. Did I do that justice Howard?Howard:Perfect. Stephanie, thank you so much. And thanks for having me.Stephanie:Thanks for coming on the show. So I wanted to start with something that we were chatting with a little bit before this, that your whole company is about reverse engineering love, which I actually really liked that saying. And I think I'm going to start using it in my personal life now, but I want to kind of start there to describe what is FROM and why do you say that?Howard:Sure. Well, what FROM is, is a kind of a combination between a consulting firm and a digital agency. We work with large brands like Avis, AAA, NBC Universal, Airbus, and our mission is to help them create a better customer experience that ultimately generates more customer love. Because in our experience, the companies that have customers that feel passionately about them, that feel appreciated by them, and appreciate those brands, those are the brands that do the best in the marketplace by all the most common measures of business success, revenue growth, profitability, and share price.Stephanie:Awesome. And a lot of the brands that you're working with they've been around for a long time. I mean, I was looking at, let's see, some of them. You said Airbus, Barnes and Noble, Facebook, Verizon, Spotify, Amazon. And I think I even saw it was like American Girl, which I used to have back in the day. And it seems like you catered towards the brands that have been here for a while and are now kind of seeking help on like how to get to that next level, how to find new customers.Howard:Well, that's exactly right. I mean, we have worked with some, what you might call sort of pure digital brands like Amazon and Spotify and different things. But the majority of what we do is really working with great classic brands that are faced with a real challenge because they need to transform to be relevant in a new age. And particularly when a company is large and has been around for a long time, that's not an easy thing to do. And so this is really our area of expertise, is how do you... Everything from the vision and the design concept of a future customer journey to dealing with the politics and resistance to change that you find in most large organizations.Stephanie:Yep. So when you're initially approaching some of these brands, I mean, how do you even go about finding out what the issues are? Because especially with the company size, it seems hard to go in and be, there's probably a thousand things going wrong, or everything feels like a fire in a larger company. How you start pinpointing, here's some of the things that are maybe not up to par right now, and that we need to start evolving and here's the game plan going forward?Howard:Sure. Well, the good news is most companies ultimately want the same things. They want more customers, they want more revenue, they want increased profitability, they want increased share price. So at the very top level, it's usually not too hard to figure out what the company's after. And one of my fundamental philosophies of everything I've done in business for 25 years is this idea that most business value is derived by influencing human behavior. If you can get people, people like customers, employees, shareholders, if you can get them to do what you want them to do, you're going to have a great business. And if you aren't able to get, for example, your customers to do what you want them to do, then you're probably going to be in big trouble, no matter what ERP system you've implemented or what other kinds of things you may be doing.Howard:So the first question is, all right, you want more customers, you want more revenue and profitability? Great. What behaviors do you need by customers, employees, et cetera, in order to get that business outcome? And in my book, I talk about many of the most common behaviors, but you can imagine what they are getting customers to buy more, to buy more frequently, to upsell to more expensive products, to refer you to their friends. And also there's some behaviors that are sort of value destroying behaviors. For example, customers calling you on the phone every day and spending hours with your support desk getting help, right? And so getting clear on, okay, well, if we can drive these behaviors, then that equates to business success.Howard:And then from there, the question is, all right, well, what drives behavior? I mean, how do you get people to do what you want them to do? And the answer is their thoughts and feelings. People behave in a certain way because of their thoughts and feelings. And then lastly, the question is, all right, well, how do we control people's thoughts and feelings? Where do those come from? And the answer is from their experiences, your thoughts and feelings come from experiences. So our job is to help conceive what would be the next generation set of experiences, a customer journey, that will drive the thoughts and feelings that will drive the behavior that equate to business results. So a very often it's research, doing a lot of ethnography, task analysis, different types of interviews, surveys, looking at existing data, for example, funnels on sites, things like that to understand well, to what degree are these things happening today? Because of course, no doubt, there is some degree of success in almost any business. We don't do often a great deal of success. And what's holding back the increase in that? For every customer that buys, there's a bunch that don't buy. Why not? For every customer that buys at level A and never comes back, why don't they come back, et cetera?Howard:So once we understand those things, well, then it's just a question of figuring out well, okay, how do you start to remove those barriers? Are we confusing them? Are we frustrating them? Are we annoying them? Are we just not offering a compelling enough value proposition, et cetera, et cetera?Stephanie:Yep. Are there any themes when it comes to the barriers within all these brands, were you have seen this come up time and time again, because maybe they have not thought digitally first because there are similar theme around customer barriers to buying?Howard:There are a number of very common themes. That's really a great question, actually. I would say one common theme is being failing to make it really clear, really fast, exactly what you can do for somebody. Anytime a customer is coming to you, they probably don't care much about you, that's just the way it is. Maybe they do if you've already inspired customer love. People really care about Apple. They really care about The 49ers, they really care about, I don't know, Aeropostale, or some fashion brand. Maybe they care about Rolex. But those are a very small percentage of brands that have inspired customer love. But before you get to that point, most of the customers that come to you, they really only care about themselves. What is it that they're trying? They're there to solve some kind of problem, right? Their kid is having a birthday party and they need to find an entertainer. Or their car is broken down and they need to get it fixed or whatever.Howard:And so how quickly do you make it really clear what you offer them? And it's fascinating to me how often brands don't do that clearly. They have different messages, they make it too hard for someone to really answer the question, can you help me solve my problem right now? And because the internet in this environment where it's so easy to just go back to Google, go to another website, it's like when you walk into a store, if you don't get clarity within the first 10 seconds that they're going to have what you need, the switching costs of getting in your car and driving to another store is at least a little bit high. But when you're on the internet, the switching cost is zero or so close to zero might as well be. So that means you've got to make sure someone understands right away they have a high probability of you being a solution to what it is that they need.Howard:So I think that's one thing. And if I were to just mention one more, it's just making it easy for people to transact. Sometimes I like to think of ecommerce as being basically about two things, persuasion and transaction. First, you got to get them to decide yes, on whatever it is you want them to do, and then you've got to get from there to the point that you have their money in your Stripe account or whatever, and that screwed up along the way. And how many times, Stephanie, how many times have you gone on a website and gone, I want to buy this thing and then started the process of checking out, but for one reason or another, you never wind up buying it?Stephanie:Or you go back to your cart, a day late and you're like, why is my stuff's not in there anymore? Why don't you just save that for a little bit. I'm ready to buy but now I give up. I give up easily though, that kind of stuff.Howard:And there's so many things that can confuse somebody about the checkout process, about the sales tax calculation, about the terms and conditions, about, I mean, it's about the promo code, why didn't the promo code work? So just really getting compulsive about asking what is everything that holds people back? How can I make sure that in addition to doing my very best to persuade people that they should say yes to whatever I'm offering, that I lose none of them between their intention and the completion of the transaction. So we do a lot of analysis and research to try to understand how many people are you really losing in that process. And of course, most people do that, right? They study abandoned shopping carts, things like that. So most people have a fairly high percentage of people, but of course not every abandoned shopping cart was somebody who had an intention to buy, some aren't right? There's various reasons people might be putting things in their shopping carts.Howard:But what percentage of those people are you losing? And then again, it goes back to a simple, what's holding them back? What is happening to stop them from completing what was their intention? And, I mean, I'll give you one tiny example. My company is from digital. Our domain is from.digital. My email address is ends in an at from.digital. It's a little bit of an uncommon first level domain, right? Many more dresses and in .com. And I would say a good 25% of ecommerce sites, when I check out, if I have to enter my email address, tell me that my email is invalid. It's not. Now, and I have a solution to that. I don't always abandoned because I have some other Gmail address, I'll give him something else. But these little problems along the way can very often add up.Howard:And the analogy I like to use sometimes is it's like if I had taped an extension cord across a hallway, let's say I was setting up a Christmas tree and I just had to run an extension cord across the hallway and I duct taped it down, so hopefully no one would trip on it, 50 people might just walk by and step over that duct tape, just fine. And 60 people and 70 people, but eventually, maybe it's the hundredth person, they trip on that tape down duct tape cord, and then another 50, 100 people and another person trips. It's a very small percentage of people. The vast majority of people deal with it just fine. But if you're running a billion dollar ecommerce site, and 1% of your customers are getting caught up by something like that and not purchasing, how do you feel about giving up 1% of your revenue? And for some of our clients, the answer is that 1% is a lot of money. And then if you have six, eight, 12, 15 things along these lines that don't affect everybody, but affect a few people and you start to remove those obstacles, all of a sudden you unlock a whole bunch more sales.Howard:And that's the optimization side of, if you will, digital transformation. And then of course, there's more of a envisioning, a dramatically different journey. But I think so often, and I guess this is my long answer to your question about what are the common themes, one of the common themes I see is the lack of what I call hygiene in ecommerce experiences. And by hygiene, I mean, most digital experiences are being constantly adjusted, tweaked changed. And of course, browsers are changing and iOS, operating systems are changing. And unless you're continuously looking through that saying, have I unintentionally planted a confusion bomb somewhere? Have I added a new feature, but it has a label or has a button that distracts from my main button or whatever? I've just added a cool new feature, but it pushed down something on the page, and now my checkout button is below the fold or whatever it might be, unless you're continuously looking for those problems, they'll creep in like weeds and they'll pull down your conversion. And that hygiene process is something that I find as a common theme, many of the largest brands in the world fail to do often enough.Stephanie:Oh, that's good. So, I mean, how do you go about identifying, I guess more like behavioral issues or how people are actually thinking? I mean, it's one thing to solve the tech and the UI aspect of it and make it easy to check out, but what about trying to figure out going deeper with the customer to really understand why didn't you check out, why didn't you follow through if everything else is there tech wise?Howard:Well, one of the things that I go into in some depth in my book is how to do customer research. And actually because at a certain point we had to start taking stuff out of the book because it was so crazy long, we were afraid of someone would drop it on their toe, they would injure themselves and we have a lawsuit on our hands for publishing such a long book. So we started to put stuff on the supplemental website. So I actually published for people to buy the book and additional PDF and a bunch of videos and all kinds of stuff. And the reason I mentioned all that is because research in customers to really understand them is foundational to being able to do all the things I'm talking about. You can't guess, and you probably can't figure it out even by looking at the site. I mean, you can look at a site and sometimes see some things that are probably problematic, and I do that all the time.Howard:But to really know, you use various types of customer research, such as bringing customers into an office or a lab or on Zoom and giving them tasks and saying, okay, great, go on my ecommerce site, here's the story. Your aunt's birthday's coming up. She's 62 years old. You need to find her present or birthday's in two days, you need to make sure you can get it to her in time. And and then you observe how that person uses that website. And as they do, you can ask them questions or we like to ask people to actually speak out loud, kind of verbalize their stream of conscious thoughts. And of course you record it, and you're studying and understanding, okay, well, what's easy, what's problematic, what's confusing, what's frustrating? And you can learn so much.Howard:And you do that for a few dozen customers and you start to see patterns and you start to see themes. And depending on how many different customer segments, a given website targets, you might do even more than that. But even still, it doesn't take that long, a week, two weeks. And in that time alone, you can learn what many of those issues are. You're observing people and then you're having the option to ask questions. If all of a sudden someone's using a page and all of a sudden they get that look on their face, they're fused or whatever you say, "Oh, what are you thinking right now?" They can say, "I'm thinking I can't figure out what the next step is." "Well, what were you expecting to see?" "Well, I figured there'd be like a next button, but I don't see one." Okay, well, and of course there might be a next button right there in front of their nose, but maybe it doesn't say next, maybe it says continue, right? And for whatever reason, that's not what they're looking for.Howard:So, and if a bunch of people are saying that maybe you should relabel the button. And as simple and obvious as something like that is it's shocking how often we find problems that are that simple. Then of course not all problems are that simple to solve, but very often that kind of low-hanging fruit. Can you imagine rewording a button and getting an extra $600,000 a week in sales? I mean, we've seen things like that repeatedly, of course, assuming the site has very, very high volume. So it's really, customer research just is many companies do some forms of customer research, of course, but my experience it's way, way under utilized. And then it's also about how you do the research. And so we've tried to be very detailed in the book and in the supplemental materials, suggesting some of the key things to do to make sure you're getting, you're really getting the insight and you're getting the most accurate. If you take a customer and say, "Hey, take a look at this website and tell me how you think we should improve it," you're not going to get a good information. You have to approach it in the right way.Stephanie:So what things didn't make it into the book that you wish made it in? What's not in the supplemental material is not in the book and you're like, man, knowing what I know now in 2021, I wish we would've had this in there.Howard:One is, I've done since then analysis on this idea of customer love and shown a bunch of examples. We have actually a scale of customer love from love down, sort of like what's the range from? It starts with love then it goes down to resonant, then it goes down to relevant, then it goes down to relevant and ultimately non-existent. And so this idea that companies exist in terms of the mind of any one customer at any time along this continuum. In subsequent to that, we talked about some case studies that show let's look at Apple, let's look at Disney, but let's look at some companies at each level, let's look at companies that are resonant, like Verizon, for example, great brand. A lot of people like them. They love them? No, probably not quite. Exactly.Howard:And then you go down from one from there, maybe now you're at Citibank and then you go down another one and maybe you're at Radio Shack. I don't know. So looking at them and then looking at their financial performance and really being able to show how this correlates. And then the other thing that isn't in the book that probably should have been, is answering the questions, how do you know what level you're at? And we actually have different tools we use, but one of them is a very simple test. We ask one simple question. And based on the answer to that question, we're able to say whether it's a brand that you love, or that's only resonant, or that's relevant, or that's irrelevant or non-existence. And the question is very simple, if this brand disappeared tomorrow, how would you feel? How would you feel Stephanie if Apple disappeared tomorrow?Stephanie:Oh, that's a good question. I'd be super sad because I own Apple everything.Howard:So if you'd be super sad, if you'd be distraught, if you'd be ah, really emotional, then that's a brand you love, that's a brand you love. That's the sign of love. But if you say, well, I be kind of bummed. I'd be like darn.Stephanie:[inaudible].Howard:Exactly. Well then that's a brand that's resonant for you. It's you care about it. I mean, you don't care about it like that much, but like, you'd be like, oh, rats. That's a disappointment. And then the next level down, if you're, well, I need to know that. I've no emotional response, but thank you for telling me that that brand is gone because gosh, I usually get my gas from Chevron. And I guess if they're gone, I'm going to have to go to British Petroleum. So thank you mental note. At least it mattered to you, it affected you, but not in a way that you're emotional about it. That's what we call a relevant brand. It matters, but you don't have an emotional connection. And then below that, if it's like, you're like, who's gone. Who are they? I didn't even know they were still around. Well then now you're down in this sort of irrelevant type range.Howard:And we do surveys like that all the time to try to understand which other brands that really people do love because a key question is, well, what are those brands doing? How are they inspiring love? And one thing that is in the book then is we showed the pyramid of how do you inspire love? What are the three things you need to do to get your customers to have that feeling of love? And that's in the book.Stephanie:And so what are the things to do? Because I'm thinking about a brand like car insurance, whoever's cheapest, don't care Travelers, Geico, whatever it takes, I'll just go with whoever. I don't feel myself ever feeling loving towards those kinds of brands. It doesn't really matter what they do. So how would a brand like that go about inspiring love when you're compared to someone like Apple?Howard:Right, right. So I'll answer your question and it's really not just for car rental, sorry car insurance, but for all brands. And I'll tell you the formula, which is a pretty straight formula. But before that, I want to tell you this, I've worked with a number of auto insurance companies over the years, including Allstate, Farmers, Mercury, a little bit with State Farm, CNA, so a lot. And I've done a lot of research over the years with customers of car insurance. And I will tell you this, there are without doubt people who love their car insurance companies.Stephanie:Oh, this is not me.Howard:I realize it's not you. And I'll be honest. This is not me, it's not me either. But I have been in customer research sessions and I have interviewed people who they are with the same car insurance company that their parents used, and they will never switch no matter what.Stephanie:Why?Howard:They are applying for life.Stephanie:Why are they so committed?Howard:Right, exactly. Why? So let's talk about why, but let me talk about it in the context of the recipe. So how do you get someone, how do you get a customer, how do you inspire a customer to love a brand? Three, just sort of show up in the book, a diagram of the pyramid, three levels. The bottom of the pyramid is to consistently meet their needs. And that is not enough to inspire love, but it is required. Whatever your area of, whether you're delivering pizza or whether you're a place that they buy power tools, or you're hotel or whatever it is, what are their needs, you are consistently meeting those needs. That's your base.Howard:Then the next level up is to periodically delight the customer, to do something above and beyond what you have to do and what you're expected. And then the top level, and that will get you farther up that continuum, but probably not to love. In order to love a brand you have to feel that they stand for something, they have kind of a value system that you reflect, that you see in yourself, a value system that you resonate with. In fact, to that last point, that's why we see some brands now that have taken a strong political stand, and by the way, a value doesn't have to be political. But like when Nike did the thing with Colin Kaepernick and demonstrated their support for Black Lives Matter, that had a massively positive impact on their standing in the market and their share price, and then their sales, because they were taking a stand for something that a lot of people believed in.Howard:And even though that also meant that they were taking a stand that some people believe the opposite and said, I'll never buy another Nike shoe in my life. And that did happen. And there are some people who won't buy Nike shoes because of that, the net impact was enormously positive because the love that they inspired meant so much more business than the people that turned away from them. And you can say the same, see the same thing on the opposite end of the political spectrum. There's a Chick-fil-A not too far from my house. And Chick-fil-A of course has taken strong stands on extremely conservative right wing social values. And I got to tell you there's police at that Chick-fil-A every day to manage the drive through lane, because there are so many people who want to buy Chick-fil-A sandwiches.Howard:And I have been told, I think I might've had one like years and years ago, but I'm not going to Chick-fil-A for the same kind of reasons, but I don't think there's anything that's special about what Chick-fil-A sells. And I think part of the reason of their popularity is because people... Like what they stand for. And you could say the same thing on the right of someone like a Hobby Lobby or other. And by the way, I'll just close this answer with one thought, which is why, why, why do these three things together create such an emotional reaction? And the answer is because they push the three levers, the three emotional levers that really inspire love.Howard:And what are they? When you demonstrate, when you consistently meet someone's needs, you're demonstrating to them that you understand them because you can't meet the needs if you don't understand. So that when someone's always there for me, I'm like, "They get me, they understand what I need, or they understand, I want that coffee hot when I get it, or they understand that I need whatever it is." When you delight someone, when you go above and beyond periodically, but you demonstrate another emotional thing, you demonstrate they care about me. They didn't have to do this extra thing, right. I was going to give them my money anyway. And they went and they did this extra thing. And that demonstrates that they care about me. So many brands they're constantly saying to their customers, "Thank you for your business." And all that kind of stuff.Howard:And man, that just goes right past people, right? How often do you believe when you get a bill from your utility company at the bottom, it says, "We appreciate you as a customer."Stephanie:You are like, "[inaudible 00:25:09]. You're welcome."Howard:Yeah, that's printed on the form, right? Come on, how stupid are we? We might as well not bother. I mean, it doesn't hurt or anything, but come on, people are very cynical. But when you make a genuine gesture that they knew took money, took effort that demonstrates. When someone at Zappos shoes goes out of their way to help you with something, or I was at an Avis Rental Car yesterday, and I observed somebody helping someone on the phone because they had a problem with the car for like 15 or 20 minutes and they were clearly doing everything they could. Way above and beyond what you would expect. When you get that, that demonstrates to someone that not by telling, but by showing that you care about them.Howard:And then the third level, when you express values that they resonate with, that makes someone feel that they are like me. There's a humanity there, not just a business. And that they share something about my belief or my values about the world. And when you combine those things together, and by the way, many companies don't do this. Many people, if we said, what does Ben & Jerry stand for? What does Whole Foods stand for? What does Apple stand for? I think most people would say something that is sort of [inaudible]. But if someone said, what was the auto insurance company that you were talking about?Stephanie:Travelers. Yeah [inaudible].Howard:Travelers. What is Travelers stand for? What does GEICO stand... You could say, well, GEICO stands for saving your 15%. But that's not a value, right? I mean, it might be a value in the sense of a discount, but it's not a human value, right? There's nothing wrong with saving people 15%, but it's not the kind of value that Nike stands for, or the kind of value that Apple stands for. We believe in you, we believe in unlocking your personal creative freedom and capabilities. What is Citibank stand for? There's so many brands. What is United Airlines stand for? And that's a great example. And by the way, I like United Airlines. I fly them all the time. fly the friendly skies, does anyone believe that United Airlines is the friendly skies? It's just words.Stephanie:I believe it. But I mean, I think that just shows that I don't think brands are able to tell their stories very well in a way that connects. I mean, like a political stance, I think that's an easy thing to jump on because it's like newsjacking. Something's going on. I'm going to take a stance on it. I think that's easy. But to actually tell your story without an event going on, to try and get news around it, I mean, that is still think is hard for large brands. I was just reading Warren Buffett's shareholder letter. I don't know if you also read that for fun like me.Howard:No, I don't.Stephanie:Maybe now you're like, "Nah."Howard:I probably should.Stephanie:It's great. I mean, he was going through the companies that they acquired and why he's going to bet big on America and he'll never bet against it again. And he went through the backstory of these companies that he acquired. I think Ikea was one of them. And it was just very interesting to see how he could storytell better for these very, very large companies. And going through why he even was interested in investing in them in the first place. I'm like, "That is what needs to be told." That startup story, yes, a huge brand now, but how did they get there and how you instill that message around your company without just having to newsjack or jump on politics.Howard:Right. Well, and actually it's funny because you asked about things that weren't in the book and one of the other things that's not in the book, but I did a live cast on Subsequent is the answer to that very question. How do you figure out? Well, actually there's sort of two questions. One is how do you figure out what your brand really stands for? Because some brands were birthed standing for something. Toms Shoes or something like that. And so the people that were attracted to that brand, both as customers, but also as employees, they understood what the brand was about. So you wind up with a bunch of people at that brand who believe in that mission, because that's what it was when they came. But when you start with a company that doesn't have that, then the question becomes, okay, so how do you achieve it?Howard:How do you come up with what it is? How do you figure that out? That's a challenge. And then also, and I did a live cast on that, but then also, and to your question, then how do you express that? How do you get the world? Newsjacking is one way or taking a stand on a political issue. But so anyway, so I did another one on what I call the seven Ps, which are just seven different ways. And you don't have to do all seven, but you probably want to do more than one of how you take the value that you're about, whether it's wholesome food, like Whole Foods, or whether it's personal, creative tools that unleash your creative potential. What have you like Apple and how do you actually get that to be something real in the world that people believe in and really see that you are standing for those values.Howard:And one of those Ps is positioning, which means basically telling people, right, which is what a lot of brands do. This is what we stand for. But if you only do that... What I always say is positioning serves only one purpose, which is to create cynicism, to create doubt, which is good. It's good to do that. Because if you tell people what you stand for, they're going to not believe you. And then they're going to look for evidence. And if you have the other Ps or some of the other Ps, and the evidence is there, and then they start to look for the evidence, then they'll start to see that it's true. Brands that are really strong at standing for something don't even need positioning necessarily because people experience it and they know what it is. But if you position, you better make sure that you've got some of the other things, because you're going to create doubt from your positioning.Howard:People are going to, if they're interested, test your positioning, to see whether it's really true in their experience. And if it is, then you're great. Then you've used the positioning as a lens to get them to evaluate whether it's really true, or if it's BS. But of course, if it's not really true, you've accomplished the negative thing, which is you've lied to them and you've allowed them to spend their time and energy proving that you've lied to them. And now, of course, no doubt, unless your positioning is that you're a lying company. It's harmful rather than helpful.Stephanie:Yep. That makes sense. So this kind of takes it way back to earlier in the interview, but a lot of brands right now, I see focusing on here's my mission and the company's starting around the social impact or causes or things like that. And a question that I've talked with quite a few companies about is, how do you balance the mission behind the company, but then also the product value? I mean, you mentioned that, so one of the big themes was that customers would come to a company's website and not know if it could help them right away. And it feels that's a newer thing where every new DTC company right now has some kind of mission, and I do see some of them struggling with, do you put it on your front page, do you sell with your mission, do you sell with your product, how do you think about that? So what are your thoughts on having a good balance there while not making the customer journey get harder?Howard:I think it depends who you're selling to. I think it goes back to what I said about understanding your customer. I know especially with millennials and younger we definitely see something that we generally don't see with older customers, which is a willingness to actually make a choice and spend money for a social reason, because of some sort of charitable connection or something like that. Usually with older consumers, they like it, we'll do tests like this. We'll say, this brand gives 10% of the money to the American Red Cross and this brand doesn't how do you feel about the fact that this brand gives them money? And people say, "Oh, I'm all for it. I think it's wonderful that they do that." And we say, "Okay, great. This brand's product costs $12, and this other brand that doesn't give them money, their product costs $11. Which one are you going to buy?" And very often they're like, "I think the $11 one."Howard:It's like they like it, but they're not really willing to spend more for it. Whereas with younger consumers, we find increasingly they say, "Oh no, I spend another dollar for the company that gives the money to the cause that I believe in." So I think part of it's understanding who you're communicating to, but also I think part of it's understanding that building a relationship is about a number of different thing. And you don't start a relationship usually by focusing on your values. Usually the first thing, I mean, if I said, "Hey, there's this restaurant that gives 50% of all the money to Greenpeace. Do you want to have dinner there?"Stephanie:And that's it?Howard:Do you want to have dinner there? What's that?Stephanie:If it's good food.Howard:Well, right. And you might want to know what kind of food is it? Is it Chinese? It's not enough, right?Stephanie:Yes.Howard:You kind of want to start with, well, what's the value proposition for me? It's like what I said earlier, people care first and foremost about themselves. So I think there may be exceptions to this rule, but I think by and large, you have to do a good job first of being crystal clear about... It's like that pyramid I talked about, right? You can't jump to the top of the pyramid. You got to start by consistently meeting their needs and demonstrate that you understand them, and that at a very basic level, you can deliver what it is that they need. And then you can go to delighting and then you can focus on values. And so I think the answer is it's probably not your first message, and it's probably not the thing that's going to attract them to you, but what's going to happen is they're going to be attracted initially by what's in it for them.Howard:And then you can start to build a relationship and help them understand, most people didn't buy their first car in a Ben and Jerry's because they were protecting grassland in Vermont or whatever environmental stuff. They looked good. They heard all Chunky Monkey, that's good stuff, and let's try and diet. But then they might've fallen in love with the brand over time because they realized that not only is that bottom of the pyramid, not only are they consistently meeting my needs really well, but that they're also doing things that resonate with my values. And then that keeps me coming back again and again, it makes me more loyal and less likely to jump to the next brand of ice cream that has something that sounds appealing.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah. I completely agree. So get them in the door with good products, showcase your value, and then you could probably upsell in a way, once someone knows this is a good product, and now maybe I am willing to spend that extra dollar now that I've already had a good experience with them versus trying to do it the other way around.Howard:Yeah. Or be less likely to switch or be willing to try new products from that same brand, et cetera.Stephanie:Cool. So the last thing I want to of touch on was content strategy. I saw you working with Aéropostale and American Girl around getting these brands to start creating content, making it more organic, getting customers to create their own viral content. How do you think about brand should be approaching their content strategy right now?Howard:Well, in this day and age, everybody's a content creator. And as you look at the ages of your customers, I mean, I'm a content creator and I'm over 50, but as you go down in age, it becomes everybody, my kids are all creating all kinds of content all the time on obviously Tik ToK and Instagram and everywhere. And so I think first of all, it's easier than ever. And I think that one of the best ways to inspire people to create content is to give them a platform. Because what every content creator cares most about is what, likes, whatever it is on the given platform, right? Subscribers, followers, likes all this kind of stuff.Stephanie:There you go, it's wrong.Howard:So I mean, there are many strategies of course, to inspire people to create UGC around your brand. But I think that the number one strategy to say, okay, how can I give someone a sense that if you create something you're going to get my platform, obviously if you're a brand, you want to make sure you have a good sized platform, which means simply how many people you can reach, how many followers, et cetera you have. And then if you can help someone see that by creating content around your brand, that's going to get that content more exposure than if they just create content and post it on their own personal Instagram account or whatnot. Then that's valuable. And then of course...Stephanie:What's in it for me? That's the same thing that we've kind of talked about this whole time, the whole time.Howard:Understanding your customer, 100%. And in this case, the customer is they may be your customer in the traditional sense, they may be buying your product, but they may not even buy your product, but it's, again, it's like what I said about human behavior, you want to influence people to create content about you online. Great. You have to make sure you understand those people and understand what drives them. And there are going to be some different personas, right? To get my daughter to create content is takes one thing, to get someone who's already a YouTuber with 15 million followers, now it's something different. It's called probably going to an influencer platform and writing them a cheque. And that can be a very viable and smart strategy to do as well if you do it correctly and you pick the right influencers and you make sure that it's organically integrated into their content and not feeling like something they just slapped on, like an ad. But that can be a very powerful marketing tool as well.Howard:So that's what they want. My daughter, they don't need your platform because they have an even bigger platform probably depending on, I mean, if your platform is big enough, if you're Coca-Cola, maybe you even have a bigger platform than them. In which case maybe the influencer is willing to do it for less or for free. But anyway, but it all comes down to that. Anytime you want to motivate someone to do anything, you want to make sure you understand, what do they care about, what are they trying to accomplish? That's right.Stephanie:Cool. Well, let's jump over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have 30 seconds or less to answer.Howard:Okay.Stephanie:Are you ready?Howard:I'm ready.Stephanie:All right. First one, what one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Howard:The elimination of a third party cookies.Stephanie:Okay. Expand a little bit more on, because I've had another guest say it doesn't matter and we have solved that and it's nothing to worry about.Howard:Okay. Well, I'll have to watch that episode because I would love that to be true. But essentially what's happening is between things that Apple is doing and things that Google are doing, Google is doing and frankly, things that may also happen from a legislation perspective, the ability to cookie somebody on one site and display ads to them on a different site is being no longer permitted or they're rolling out changes, which will mean that, if you're familiar with going on overstock and looking at a sofa, and then that's sofa is on every site you see around the whole internet, they're not going to be able to do that anymore. And it has the biggest impact on smaller or medium-sized ecommerce players, because that's a key strategy. So I think that's going to have a huge impact and require everyone to come up with different ways of attracting buyers. I think it's going to have a huge impact.Stephanie:Yep. When does that go into place? [inaudible]Howard:Well, some of it is already in place, certain browsers are already blocking third party cookies and other bots, but I think we're already in the middle of a transition.Stephanie:Okay. Got it. Onto a happier subject then, what's up next on your Netflix queue?Howard:My Netflix queue? Well, I think I want to watch this show about [inaudible], I think just started. Is that? I think it's Netflix or if not, it's one of the other services.Stephanie:On of them.Howard:All about how this [inaudible] thing got started and how so many people were hypnotized into being crazy.Stephanie:Interesting. Tell me how it is. What one thing do you not understand today that you wish you did?Howard:Women, and why they do what they do.Stephanie:Oh my gosh.Howard:I've got two teenage daughters and a wife and man, I don't understand a single thing about why they do what they do.Stephanie:Oh, that's great. I mean, I don't even understand myself sometimes. So that's a valid answer. What's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you?Howard:Well, I guess I have my children, I've got five children. That could be [inaudible].Stephanie:Five. Wow. That's great. That's a good answer. What's the last ecommerce purchase you made that you maybe would not have made pre-COVID?Howard:Well, that I would not have made pre-COVID? I have been buying more gear for at home, stuff we're doing now because I used to do that all at our offices in Manhattan, where we had more of a studio. So I don't know the very last one, but a lot more lights and microphone stands and all this kind of a side monitor, an extra small minor like I've got over here to show me these slides, if I'm talking about things. So I've been buying a lot more Gadgets & Gizmos, did I say that? Gadgets & Gizmos.Stephanie:Whatever you say works for me.Howard:To make it easier to turn my office into a kind of a studio for all the content that we produce.Stephanie:Very cool. And the last one, if you were to have a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be?Howard:Well, I do have a podcast.Stephanie:Oh, well, what is it about?Howard:It's called Winning Digital Customers. And it is about how you most effectively win as a brand in an age where so many of your customers are living with digital at the center of their lifestyle. And the first guest on my podcast was a great friend and client of mine, Michelle McKenna, who's the SVP and chief information officer of the National Football.Stephanie:Oh, nice. I saw she wrote... Didn't sh write a foreword in your book?Howard:She did. She also wrote that. Well, that's kind of why we kicked off the podcast, which kind of connects to the book, same name. And she also was kind enough to to do that. And she's awesome and has driven a lot of innovation and transformation at the NFL, everything from the new way they do instant replays to stuff that supports player health and safety, to drones at Superbowls and sensors on players shoulder pads and helmets and the ball, so they can track with motion capture everything that happens in the game. So many cool things. And so she's always got great things to talk about and also a lot of stuff she can't talk about.Stephanie:We need to bring her on our IT visionaries podcast, which Hillary also produces. So we get her on there Hillary. Awesome.Howard:He is definitely an IT visionary.Stephanie:Yeah, we'll have to bring her on. Cool. Howard, thanks so much for joining the show. It was a pleasure chatting. Where can people find out more about you and your new book?Howard:Sure. Well, thank you so much for having me. If they want to learn about the book, there's a website for the book, which is winningdigitalcustomers.com, just like all one word. And in fact, if you go there, you can also download the first chapter of the book for free as a PDF if you want to just get started on it. Obviously it's available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kindle, Apple books, all those types of places, and in bookstores, possibly near you if you go to bookstores. And as well, if you want to learn more about me, I'm on social media. I publish a lot on LinkedIn and other places. You can find me by my name, Howard Tiersky and my company is FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency and we are at from.digital.Stephanie:Amazing. Thank you so much, Howard.Howard:Thank you for having me, it's been a blast.
You’ve heard it time and time again on this podcast: That influencer marketing not only works, but could be the key to unlocking massive business potential for your eComm business. Influencers have the power to take a product – or an entire brand – from unknown to a trending topic product overnight. And sometimes, the community that they build is so valuable, it creates a jumping off point for a business of their own. That’s what Deepica Mutyala did when she launched LIVE TINTED. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Deepica takes us through how she progressed as an intrapreneur at BirchBox before she took the plunge and set out on her own journey. And it all started after one beauty video that she made went viral on YouTube. Deepica explains how she went about building a community based on a mission to bring more diversity to the industry, and how she’s been able to tap into that community to create content and launch a successful business with products designed specifically for her community. Plus, Deepica reveals some of the advice she got from her investors and mentors like Bobbi Brown and Andy Dunn. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Deprioritize the Big Channels: It’s okay to deprioritize big marketing channels such as Facebook in order to explore and engage with users elsewhere. Facebook will always be there, but you might catch lightning in a bottle if you are willing to adapt and explore new platforms. It’s Not a Dirty Word: Influencers tend to get a bad rap, but the truth is that anyone can be an influencer, and that influence can be nurtured for the good of a community and a business. By tapping into the power of a community, growth becomes much more attainable.Start Where You Are: Intrapreneurship is an avenue you hear about less often, but is a strategic way for anyone with bigger dreams to learn the ins and outs of business. By embedding yourself in a business that works, volunteering to help in every department, making connections, and taking all of your learnings to build an initiative internally or on the side, you can advance as a true entrepreneur much faster. More Than A Check: Fundraising isn’t just about filling your bank account, it’s also about adding to your knowledge bank. Deepica tapped into mentors and investors like Bobbi Brown, Andy Dunn, Payal Kadakiam, Hayley Barna and others to learn from their experiences and invite them to be a part of her own growth. Tune in to the episode to hear some of the advice they each gave to Deepica!For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey everyone, and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce, this is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder at mission.org. Today, we're talking to Deepica Mutyala.Deepica:There you go, you nailed it.Stephanie:The CEO of a beauty brand, LIVE TINTED. Deepica, welcome.Deepica:Thanks for having me.Stephanie:How many times do people pause when they're like, "I'm about to botch your name, I know it, I know it, ah, there it goes?"Deepica:I mean a lot, but I appreciate the pause and effort to get it right, versus just blatant lack of attempt to try and get it right. So, I appreciate you trying. Thank you.Stephanie:Good. Yeah, thanks. Stephanie:So, I was doing a bit of research, as I always do on my guests, and I'm fascinated by LIVE TINTED. I mean, you have such a great story, so much stuff [inaudible] want to dive into, but first, I think it'd be fun to kind of talk through how you got here, your background, What did you do before you founded LIVE TINTED?Deepica:Yeah. So, I actually started my career on the corporate side of the beauty industry. In college, my first internship was at L'Oreal in New York, and post-college I had a brief stint at Limited Brands, which is now L Brands at Victoria's Secret, which is no longer there because they went bankrupt. So, I was there for a brief stint, but the whole goal and end game was to one day create my own beauty brand. I was that 16 year old girl who grew up in Sugar Land, Texas who said that... I was going to change the narrative of what I saw when I was going down the beauty aisles.Deepica:When I was a kid, I shopped at Walmart predominantly, honestly, that's where I shopped for beauty because, going to shop for beauty wasn't really a thing in my family's life, so when we were just getting groceries at Walmart, I would divert to the aisles and go look at makeup. And I would find myself not reflected in the ads, and I would also not see any foundation shades that worked for my skin tone. And I literally, remember telling my family at 16 that I was going to change that narrative one day, and everything I've done for my career since that point was to get me to starting LIVE TINTED.Deepica:So, it's kind of crazy being now back in Texas, like I was telling you earlier, that it's just really full circle being here, and finding doodles of me writing out what I thought my brand name was going to be, and talking to family members who are like, "It's just crazy that you're actually doing it." Because this is what I wanted to do. So then, after nine months at Limited Brands, I quit my job to take a risk on a startup called Birchbox, which at the time was the hottest tech company... Not even just beauty, but I think overarching, they created a whole category of subscription model that really created a whole new category.Deepica:And so, that was really cool, incredible experience working for two bad-ass female founders who, in my parents' eyes, were really okay with me working there, and taking a pay cut, and going for my dream, because the two founders went to HBS.Stephanie:Oh my gosh.Deepica:And so, they were like-Stephanie:I also read the quote from your... You were saying, "Oh, my dad all growing up would hand me a stethoscope," and then you would instead grab lipstick or something, and I thought that was really funny.Deepica:[crosstalk]. Yeah. It's kind of an Indian tradition where... There's this ceremony that happens... I think it's after your first 100 days, and we just did it for my nephew, where they put things in front of you [inaudible] like a book versus different things to see what you would gravitate towards. And instead of me gravitating towards anything that was in front of me, I was grabbing my mom's lipstick in her [crosstalk].Stephanie:In the purse digging over there.Deepica:Yeah, yeah, which is so funny, and crazy, and full circle now, but yeah, this was always the dream, and it's wild for me to look back and reflect. But I worked at Birchbox, and in true startup culture, you can create opportunities for yourself at a startup. And so, I made it very clear to the founders that I wanted to one day create my own beauty brand, and they gave me opportunities in the company to do that. Then, I had to do it a lot of the times, in my free time, it wasn't like... I still had to do my day job, but if there was projects that I could work on in my free time, I did it, because I saw it as Birchbox was my business school.Deepica:And they always said it as founders, right? But I truly felt it. I really felt like working there was an incredible network of really smart people, and I got to... Literally, you have an idea, you can test it, and just go for it. And so, I got to work on product development at Birchbox. I got to work on influencer partnerships at Birchbox. And when I did that, was my first time being like, "What is going on in this influencer world? And how much are these girls getting paid? What is happening?" Some random girl at Iowa getting paid this insane amount of money to do a YouTube video, and I was just like, "This is wild."Deepica:So, as I was doing that, was when I realized there was nobody who looked like me on YouTube creating content, and I kind of just saw it as a fun hobby. I was like, "You know what, Deepica? At the end of the day, you're not quitting your job, just do it on your weekends. And at the end of the day, all the people in your life that text you questions about makeup and things like that, you can just say, 'Go to my channel, stop texting me.'" So, really, I didn't think much of it. And so, January of 2015, I picked up my iPhone... Because again, I didn't know what I was doing video content wise, I had no clue how to... Ad revenue wasn't even activated. I didn't know.Deepica:And I picked up my iPhone and held it vertically instead of horizontally. The production, it was like I knew IGTV was happening before IGTV was happening. I did it in a vertical mode, and I used red lipstick under my eyes to mask dark circles... And people who are hearing this are probably literally so confused, but-Stephanie:I read that too, I was like, "Well, it'd be funny if I showed up with red lipstick under my eyes."Deepica:Oh my God, that would have been awesome. Yeah, no, I used red lipstick under my eyes to hide dark circles, and I guess that was crazy to 10 million people, because that video went viral, and yeah, has millions and millions of views.Stephanie:And it worked. For anyone who's like, "What did that look like?" I looked at the pictures and the video, it actually works.Deepica:Yeah. So, here's the deal, I basically... That was my biggest beauty concern my whole life, how to hide my dark circles? And it wasn't talked about, people didn't talk about it because it's such a specific problem to specific communities of people. And so, I just did the video that I had learned when I was on set one day, where a makeup artist was using a color corrector under my eyes, an actual product made for under your eyes, and I was like, "What are you doing putting red lipstick under my eyes." And she was like, "Oh no, it's a color corrector, it cancels out the darkness, so when you put on your foundation, you really can mask your dark circles, because you have extra pigments that require kind of additional correction." And I was like, "Well, what's the difference?"Deepica:My brain is always thinking about hacks and simplifying things, and so that doesn't change with my beauty routine. I want to always simplify things. And so, she basically, said, "Not much." And so, I filmed this video and it went viral, and when the video was at 4 million views, I got a call from the Today Show to come on to do the segment on air, and I quit my job that day. I kind of just had this moment of, this could be a cool 15 minutes of fame, or I could turn it into my dream career. [crosstalk].Stephanie:That's amazing. What did the founders say? Because I'm guessing, you had a pretty close relationship with them. I mean, they were letting you essentially, be an intrapreneur within their organization, and test things, and learn, and try, how did they feel about that? Because I saw that they were some of your first investors along with Bobbi Brown, which I'm like, "What? How did you get in front of her?" So, what was that process like leaving and getting them to invest afterwards?Deepica:Yeah, it was really tough. There's two co-founders, and they just had different mindsets, right? One of them was more like, "You are all on a Birch tree, and you're all acorns that will fall into the world." I remember she said... And she's the one that's currently an investor in my company, "I want to see you grow and thrive." And the other one, it's not to say that she didn't want the same thing, but she was really excited about me growing within the company. And listen, she had every reason to feel that way. She helped me get so many opportunities within the company to be able to create what I have been able to do today, and she gave me those opportunities, but it was more like... I was really close to her too, I worked more with her directly. So, of course, it was like one of those bittersweet things, but they're both incredible and really supportive.Deepica:But it was really scary to... I remember when I got... The day I got the email from the Today Show was when I pulled her into a room that day at 6:00 PM, towards the end of the day, and I just was like, "I feel like I have to go for it." And she gave me a really big hug and said, "She's really happy for me." But you could tell it was like a bittersweet thing, which I appreciated, because at the end of the day, that means she felt that I made an impact at the company.Stephanie:That's great. So, what was the Today Show like? Did you go on there and do a tutorial? Tell me a bit about that.Deepica:Oh my gosh, it was wild. So, my sister came on and was my model on air. So, she flew in from Texas. My dad was backstage sitting next to Kid Rock, which was hilarious. Picture this immigrant Indian dad who's like, "What is even happening? My daughter is on national television. And who is this guy with a beard and long hair, what's going on?" It was the moment where I realized that I was meant to do exactly what I'm doing in that moment. I was not nervous, I felt like that was... I was just meant to be there, it just felt that way. You know that Eminem song... What is it? Lose Yourself? You get one shot, one opportunity. I was listening to that backstage, and I literally felt like I had four minutes on national television to show people that a brown girl can do this.Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative) Oh, that's great.Deepica:Yeah. I felt like I could be the Indian Hoda, and just be the next news anchor on the Today Show. I still feel like... I love doing live television, I think it's like... There is a beauty in the imperfections that come with it. And it was surreal, is what the word is, and incredible. And I remember after it was over... The hustle and bustle of live television is very real. The second the segment is over, they're like, boom, boom, boom, moving onto the next thing. And I was like, "That was so fun, let's do it again." Most people were just like, "All right, lady, we're moving on." But then, there was this senior producer who came up to me and she was like, "You should do it again."Deepica:And I was [inaudible] around, and it's so cool because my dad is in the background recording it, so I have all this on camera. But she just was like, "We can't believe it was your first time doing national television, we'd love to have you back regularly." And that was really cool for me, because everyone told me that when you go on national television, it's a cool moment in your life and you move on, and I feel like I proved the exact opposite, that if you have what it takes, you can make things happen for yourself. So, I became a regular doing beauty segments on the Today Show, and was a full-time influencer, which is a thing.Stephanie:Yeah, I saw that. That was one of the first things when I was looking into your bio a bit, and it's like, "Oh, Deepica is an influencer, and I think she's just signed a deal with WME." I'm like, "Oh." So, tell me, now you've got the status, and you're super popular, how did you think about capitalizing on that, and to get out of just being an influencer, and then being like, "I'm going to create my own stuff?"Deepica:Yeah. Well, here's the deal [inaudible] I never grew up saying I wanted to be an influencer or even be famous, but I did grow up saying I wanted to be a CEO and run my own business. And so, when you fall into something like this, it's very weird. But I think what got me through the years where I was just an influencer and didn't have the business side of it was, the end goal was the same. I wanted to change the face of representation for people who look like me, period. So whether that's in the media, or through my own beauty brand, the net goal was the same, and it still is the same.Deepica:And so, what I realized was, I had this opportunity to create a brand around myself that was really once in a lifetime, honestly. And I was just like, "I want to focus in on this and really learn everything I can about the beauty industry." Which at this point, I knew a decent amount. I worked at Birchbox, I had a lot of beauty brand contacts. And really, what I did was, after I quit my job, I emailed all my contacts and I was pretending to be my own assistant, and I was like, "Hello, I'm the assistant to Deepica Mutyala, beauty influencer with 10 million views, Today Show beauty expert, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, if you want to work with her, whatever."Deepica:And for every 100 emails I sent, I got one reply, and that one reply led to my first job where they asked me my rate, and I had no idea what to say. And then, when they said, "Okay," I realized, damn it, I could have asked for triple. You just learn as you go, and you're your own assistant, producer, editor, manager, agent, sometimes lawyer, which I don't recommend.Stephanie:Nope.Deepica:I'm like, "Bad idea."Stephanie:Yeah.Deepica:But you just learn as you go. And so, I think for me, what got me through being the girl who was waking up and taking selfies, and posting it for literally a career, I got paid to do that, was that I really saw a narrative in the beauty industry that didn't exist when I was growing up. There was no token brown girl, there was always... And even then, there wasn't really a token black girl growing up, that was still in the... Now, I feel like we're finally... It still has so, so much work to do, but I do think that we now have representation happening more than I ever saw growing up, but there still is this tokenism that happens where... I felt like for three years, as grateful as I am, that I've been able to work with every beauty brand under the sun, like a L'Oreal commercial to a Samsung ad that aired during the Golden Globes, and just any beauty brand I could have dreamt of.Deepica:I also realized there's plenty of people out there that deserve the shot to also do that, and there shouldn't just be one of me. There is not just one white girl on the campaign, why shouldn't there be more brown girls in the campaign, more black girls in the campaign? That experience as an influencer is what led me to launching LIVE TINTED as a community platform prior to launching the actual product itself. I didn't plan for that, again, being a community brand wasn't a thing growing up either, but it was lived in experience that truly inspired the idea that, before this launches with a physical product, let's create this united community where they dictate our future decisions.Deepica:And really, for me, honestly, I was craving a home where people were talking about things in the beauty industry that was not a thing, heavy topics like colorism. But then, other topics like facial hair, and things that you just didn't say. And so, we created this almost like collective home where every day we were just posting about faces that I felt like you didn't traditionally see being shown in campaigns. And it just started to organically grow into this very, very engaged community, which then at a point, I was like, "Let's create products for them, it's time." And that's kind of what led to our first product launch in may of 2019.Stephanie:Yeah. We had a really cool company on... Food52, same thing, they build up a huge community first, and then, afterwards, she was like, "Oh, it was only right to then start creating products to service that community." But my biggest question is always like, how did you build that community? How did you transfer the audience from TV to then go into your community? Or from Instagram, or YouTube, or wherever you were, how did you pull them in and get them engaging in a way where you're like, "They're here for the long haul and now I can move on to phase two of a product?"Deepica:Yeah, no, it's a good question. I think for me, I feel very grateful that those three years as an influencer, I created a community of people who felt very connected to me, because again, there wasn't a lot of brown girls doing this. And so, I felt like they would be ride or die for anything I put out into the world. But that is, to me, a huge responsibility, and it was like, "Okay, so now, if I create this brand, I don't want it to be about me, I want it to be about something so much bigger than myself."Deepica:So, if I had just launched it, which a lot of investors in the beginning were saying to me like, "Why do you have to create this community first and spend money on creating content as a community platform and things? You already have a following, create a product, show proof of concept, and build it out." I just didn't listen, and I felt really strongly that LIVE TINTED was bigger than my own identity, it was about a larger multicultural group of individuals coming together and finding common ground in industry where I felt like people were so divisive.Deepica:And so, I really wanted to kind of bridge that gap and create a really powerful, I think, warm home for people. Which, I think, a lot of brands are saying they're doing now, and it's awesome, right? I'm not hating, I think it's all for the greater good. But people are smart, and they can understand when some people are being performative versus not. And I feel very grateful that since day one, we've had values and core beliefs that we've... Of course, they evolve, but the core belief around diversity and inclusion is the pillar that has stood strong since the beginning.Deepica:And so, for me, on an actual tactical level, the first 20,000 followers, I would say, came directly from my following, from... I remember before we even launched it, I was trying to find photos of deeper skin brown women online, and it was virtually impossible. I was just searching and the team was searching, and I was like, "You know what? Let's use the power of social media." And I just posted on my Instagram, "I'm working on a project on stories, if you see any deeper skin melanated brown women, use #livetinted." I'm not even kidding, within minutes, the #livetinted was flooded with just tags. It was just like this community of women who have been thriving to be seen. They are just craving for this industry, who has neglected them, to pay attention to them.Deepica:So, when you ask, how I did it, sure, my following definitely helped do it, but what really did it was that there was just a natural need. These people didn't have another home, and they were excited to finally have it. And so, I also think that it grew from just being a South Asian Brown collective to being much larger. Because again, I talked about topics that were very specific to me and my life. I didn't force it and try to speak to something that I didn't know personally. And with that, I recognized colorism is not an issue in just the South Asian community. To be honest, I'm learning so much as we build this brand that... I had no idea, this is something that so many different cultural backgrounds face around the world.Deepica:And that actually, excited me, because I realized that there is an opportunity to create a brand with pillars that, like I said, unite people from all different cultural backgrounds rather than divide. And so, it just organically grew from there, just by talking about things that I lived in and experienced in my life.Stephanie:Yeah. That's very cool. So, how many people are in your community now?Deepica:Well, it's a tricky number, because I say 600,000 because I include my community as well. Because quite honestly, my whole brand has shifted to just LIVE TINTED stuff, Which I love. Yeah, we're a little over 600,000.Stephanie:Cool. And how do you think about keeping them engaged on the different channels? What are you doing now that's maybe different than when you started out in what? 2015, 2017?Deepica:I mean, yeah, because my brand started in 2015, and then LIVE TINTED started in 2018. But you have to evolve with the times. Perfect example is, hello, TikTok.Stephanie:Yeah. Actually, my favorite influencer is an Indian girl on there with her dad.Deepica:Oh yeah, she's amazing. I love her.Stephanie:What's her name?Deepica:Sheena? Is it Sheena? It's starts with an S.Stephanie:Yeah. She's so funny. But you never see her dad, it's always just his responses to things that she's doing. I've never seen her dad anyways in any of her videos. But she's my favorite. She's hilarious.Deepica:I'm obsessed with her. And yeah, I feel like there's this understood brown community bond where you're rooting for each other, because it's like, so many of us were told to be doctors and go down this traditional path. Yeah. One of my goals for the brand is to spotlight not your traditional beauty influencers, but people like her who are just creative creators. I think there's this incredible creative community that I've come across just from building LIVE TINTED that deserves so much spotlight. We have big plans to only continue to spotlight them in a bigger way as the brand continues to grow, Which I'm excited about. What was your question, again?Stephanie:[inaudible] Yeah. Okay. So, [inaudible] I like to derail things every once in a while, but back to saying... You said you had to change with the times, from what you used to do to what you do now, and you said, of course, TikTok, what are you doing today to keep your audience engaged? And how do you think about treating the different platforms different, [crosstalk] people right now are connecting with them best?Deepica:Well, I think, first and foremost, I don't try to pretend like I know something that I don't know. And so, luckily, at this stage in the business, bringing in an intern that's in college that can do TikTok for us, because I'm like, "Wait, what is this dance move? What's going on?" So, I think hiring subject matter experts is something that I feel like, finally, oh my gosh, because I've been just doing everything for the longest time that now, it's like, let's hire for people to do what they're good at.Deepica:But of course, you have to have a pulse and know what to even hire for, right? It's like, am I looking for an email expert? You have an X amount of budget, if you're going to focus in on email versus... Social versus paid versus all these other marketing levers, you know what makes sense? For example, for us, influencer is such a critical part of the business, because a lot of them are my personal relationships, but we need to continue to grow that network to the people... Just like the girl you just mentioned, there's a whole community of people that are continuing to create and build every year, and so, for me, it's about staying on the pulse and making sure you feel comfortable evolving with the times.Deepica:Facebook is still a powerful, powerful sales channel, for sure. And so, we do need to be relevant on there. But if you're a small team, and you have to pick and choose your efforts, for us, it's been deprioritized, and eventually, we'll get back there. But I'm way excited about LIVE TINTED impacting the next generation and helping them be a more tinted future, where everyone sees beyond the hues of their skin.Deepica:And so, I get really excited about tapping into a younger audience because they are the future of this entire industry, than going towards maybe an older audience. So, these to me, are just the little things you have to keep your mind on, what is your goals? What is the audience you think that you can really tap into? And what are they doing? And then, you decide your marketing leverage based on that.Stephanie:Yup. So, how are you thinking about tapping into TikTok then? I mean, you're mentioning partnering with an influencer who isn't a beauty influencer, but could still probably drive results. And I know earlier you said influencers, and you kind of cringed too in thinking about that. So, tell me a bit about, how do you partner with them? Does it work? How do you make sure that it works? All the details behind them.Deepica:Yeah. I cringed because I feel like the word influencer has been so like... It's been created into this like comedic relief for people, and I think that's what makes me cringe. But one thing that I feel really, really strongly about, is the value of these creators. I think of them as creatives that are just really changing the landscape of marketing. And I think that it's just the word influencer used to really make me cringe because I felt like it wasn't respected. And as somebody who went through being an influencer, and I still am an influencer, at the end of the day, [inaudible]... By the way, something people forget is influencers have always existed, they were just called celebrities before.Deepica:The definition is evolving and changing, and it's going to continue to evolve and change. If you have a platform and an audience, you are an influencer, you have an influence of some sort. And I think it's actually a really powerful thing, if you think about it, because it makes you realize, anyone can be an influencer, and it makes people empowered to use their voice. But the part that I get really excited about, like I said earlier, was this creative community, and how we can work with them. The same way I told you, these girls were just wanting to be seen. These creatives are just wanting to be seen, and they've never been given the opportunity to be seen. So, how is it that LIVE TINTED as a brand can tap into these people, and really invest time and effort as an internal team to search for these people, and work with them, and not go against the grain, and go against who everyone else is wanting to work with?Deepica:Listen, we're still a small company, so paid partnerships is something that I can't wait to be able to do. It's like, are you kidding? I went through it, I want to be able to do it for other people. So, we're working on trying to grow those relationships now. So, when we have a full budget in place, we support these, I would say, underdogs, versus going towards the people that everyone else was going to, because that's no fun.Stephanie:Yeah. And I mean, that's a big theme that I'm hearing too, is finding more of the micro-influencers who have a very engaged following, but they might only have a few thousand followers, versus a million, but those few thousand are ready to convert and really buy the products, and do the things that you're doing. How do you go about finding those people? I mean, it seems hard to have to go through TikTok and Instagram, and find people that might not show up on your feed right away, if you are kind of searching through all that.Deepica:Well, there's a lot of cool tools now that we've actually just invested in, which... Honestly, for me, my plan was to do it the old school way, of just investing the time, finding people, and I think, that to me, was the way to go, but there's supplemental tools, like there's this new platform... I sure don't know if it's new, it's new for us, called GRIN. And it's a way to manage your influencer partnerships and relationships, so you can actually have data and analytics to back up why you're doing certain decisions. And it's like, traditionally, in PR, you send products out, you hope somebody posts about it, who knows if they do? Tracking that is really... It's just a lot, so you need to have the manpower to be able to do it.Deepica:And now there's these tools in place that make it a little bit more scalable, which is really great. But I don't think anything can beat the just human aspect of finding a gem of a person and saying, "This is who I want to grow with." And I now, luckily, now that there's a team in place, I can spend my time doing those things, because, first of all, I truly believe that is the special sauce that comes from a brand, is those little efforts you put in that take time, that really set you apart from the others out there. I don't want to be the person who partners with the biggest TikToker, and not just because of the financial reason, which I think... I don't want to speak for other people, but I think a lot of times, the theme is to go to micro or nano influencers because of budget reasons. And to me, it's really exciting that they're untapped, and have a voice, that they're... You just want to continue to empower that voice, I guess.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah. I love that. So, how do you think about strategic partnerships, or when it comes to when you're getting investors? I mean, I'm thinking, okay, you have Bobbi Brown who is very big in the makeup space, what did that look like? Did you have that in mind when you partnered with her, like, "Oh, maybe you can kind of showcase my line along with your brand?" How does that work? And how did you think about picking strategic investors instead of just going with the first person who might give you money?Deepica:Yeah. That's actually exactly what happened too. So, I learned so much through my fundraising process, so it was my first time doing it, and what I came out of it realizing was, nothing is more valuable than experience, and that includes a cheque. I think I was taking people's cheque, but really, what I was taking was their experience, that's what I wanted to learn from.Deepica:And so, I had a couple term sheets where it was like one large cheque from one VC... Which, by the way, that whole process is a whole thing in itself. But I feel grateful to say that... I actually don't feel like I had as much trouble being a woman of color getting investors on board as much as I think I've heard a lot of my other girlfriends who are women of color, specifically, black women, which is just all sorts of messed up in its own, that... I feel very, honestly, grateful that I didn't go through that, but I also think it's really messed up that I didn't go through that as much. But that process has taught me so much in what I want to do in my future of... There's so much I want LIVE TINTED to do to help other women who want to create their own brands. But when I went through that process, I was like, "Wow, I really don't want one person this early in my business to dictate my decision-making."Stephanie:Yup.Deepica:You're learning so much in the beginning, and the last thing you want is for someone who knows nothing about your business, who just gave you a cheque, to say, "You need to go into this retailer, or you need to do this partnership, or grow this, or hire this person." So, instead, what I did was tap into a network of people who I worked my off to build my entire career, and tell them, "I'm launching my own brand, and you've been somebody who has been a mentor in my life in some capacity." And really positioned it as an opportunity to be a part of the growth of what I'm building. And I feel very confident about that. I still feel that way. I know and I feel very competent about what I'm building, and what the impact it's going to have on the world.Deepica:And so, I went to all of these mentors or just advisors in my life, and they put in more angel cheques, strategic angel cheques, really, just to get their advice. I'm learning from their mistakes. Andy Dunn from Bonobos, the other day, I sent my annual investor update, and he was like, "Just continue to focus on profitability, don't overspend on marketing, learn from my mistakes." I'm learning from all of their mistakes. Payal Kadakia from ClassPass, she would say, "Focus on your why, don't ever get distracted from the why." And Bobbi Brown, she was the first to tell me, "Go on a motherfucking date." That's what she told me to do. She literally, told me to go on it, and she used that word. So, that's why I said that, I apologize [crosstalk].Stephanie:That's okay.Deepica:But that's Bobbi for you. She is such a dope woman. She is no BS. She told me, she was like, "At the end of the day, you will succeed because that's who you are, but you don't want to look back and wonder, what was it all for if you don't have someone to share it with?" And so, maybe that's a part of the reason I came back to Texas, and I'm kind of taking a step back and zooming in on things. But they all give me different advice for their own nuggets of what they went through. And Hayley Barna from Birchbox, is now a partner at First Round Capital, she put in a personal cheque, and I feel like I could always call her to ask her about fundraising advice, because they've obviously raised so much money.Deepica:It's just truly invaluable to be able to talk to people who've gone through the mistakes and the wringer to say, "I'm thinking about [inaudible]..." I'll give you an example right now. Food52, I love what they're doing. You mentioned them earlier, I love what they're doing. I love the idea of a collective ecommerce shop where you're creating content to commerce. I think it's really smart. And I've gotten distracted in the past of wanting LIVE TINTED to also be that as a collective home for inclusive beauty. I wanted to create the next sephora.com that truly zoomed in and focused in on, you won't be on our site unless you are caring about inclusivity. That doesn't mean you have to be a POC owned brand, we will absolutely prioritize it more than most people do, but I had this vision.Deepica:And at the end of the day, I think the biggest, hardest thing for founders to remember is to stay focused, eye on the prize, and I think... That doesn't mean I don't want to still do it one day, but we have way too much momentum happening as a singular brand that I think I just have to stay focused. And these kinds of founders in my life, if I called them, and I'm like, "But what if we, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." They will all pull me back and say, "All in good time, young grasshopper." [crosstalk].Stephanie:That's awesome. And I mean, that is the time when a lot of founders do kind of want to start seeing profit, want to go big, want to experiment a bunch of different areas, and I think that's really smart. And I also love Bobbi Brown's advice too. I mean, I love the personal aspect when you find people like that. Deepica:Another thing, on the Bobbi Brown thing, her specifically, we met through the DM.Stephanie:That's great.Deepica:Yeah. You can connect with anyone in the world, you have no clue what the power of social media... There's so much negative that comes with it, but there's so much positive. And I remember on my launch day, I was in New York City doing a ton of press, and I went to Jersey to meet with Bobbi Brown in person, and she was like, "Wait, your launch day is today, and you're here?" And I was like, "Yeah, you're Bobbi Brown." [crosstalk].Stephanie:I'm here.Deepica:Yes, of course, I'm here. Because to me, she was doing inclusive beauty before inclusive beauty was inclusive beauty. And as a Jewish woman who grew up in New York, I just find it to be so impressive that she recognized that... She sees it as like... Obviously, I care about making sure that everyone feels represented, that's how she sees it, and I feel like I wanted to learn from that person. I want to create my own Bobbi Brown cosmetics one day, and I feel like with her guidance, I'm well on my way.Stephanie:Yeah. That's cool. So, I mean, you have a lot of good mentors and investors. I mean, Andy Dunn is another good one. He actually was our first investor in our company too-Deepica:Oh, wow.Stephanie:[inaudible]. So, good people you got there. What is something that they're guiding you on right now for 2021? How are they kind of... I mean, Andy has Walmart, but he got to look at... He has a lot of things that he can see around ecommerce at Walmart. What are people like that saying right now? Like, "Hey, Deepica, you need to start preparing for this. Or we're seeing this shift at our company, so maybe you need to kind of pivot, or adjust, or do something different to be ready for this new world." Anything high level like that?Deepica:I think the biggest theme and general advice, is slow and steady growth for the win. And that's very different from what I was told when I was first fundraising in 2018, it was all about the next billion dollar unicorn company. And I have a couple of people who were unicorn companies, Payal Kadakia as an investor, and it's like, they are all also advising me like, "Just don't get caught up in the noise, don't get caught up in the quick turnaround story." And the more I'm seeing what's happening in this bubble, that's kind of bursting, it's like, "I'm so happy that we didn't take on a ton of funding, we're growing slow." And I'm going through the fundraising process right now for our Series A, and the reality is that we don't need to fundraise right now. It's this back and forth of like, we're doing really well and we can go really slow.Deepica:But at the same time, like you said, Andy is with Walmart, and one thing we're exploring right now is retail partnerships. And so, one thing that I think is very apparent now is, it's a very different ecommerce and D2C climate than it was five years ago, as we know. And I think the idea of being omni-channel, it's not an option. We have to be omni-channel to also beyond just like the business and the metrics, because myself being, again, that 16 year old girl who dreamt of having her own beauty brand, it's about impact too. And I want my physical products to be able to be touched and held by people who are in store. And again, go down those beauty aisles and actually see yourself represented. And I feel like we're the brand that needs to do that in a big way.Stephanie:Yes. Beauty feels hard to me though from ecommerce. I mean, I'm just thinking about... I went to Tarte, which is of course, a beauty website, and I was ordering things on there, and it still feels so hard to figure out what you need to buy based on your skin tone. And it's asking me all these crazy questions, which you're probably like, "Yeah, those are obvious ones." Like, do you have a pink with a yellow undertone there?Deepica:Undertone.Stephanie:I'm like, "I..." And it literally has 50 options, and I'm like, "I don't know, am I pink? Am I yellow? Am I green? I'm not really sure." So, beauty feels hard. I mean, I know obviously, being in retail, being in person is important, but during this time right now, where that's been a little bit harder, how did you think about adapting your ecommerce experience in a way that people could know what they wanted, or what was meant for their skin? It just feels so hard.Deepica:And it is really hard. That's totally true. We're actually going through a site revamp right now, and it's all going to focus on community, which I know is such a buzz word. But the best thing we can do is tap into all these people who, again, have been just dying to be seen and be featured. And they're not like the person with all this following, whatever, this massive following. And to me, what we can do is... The best marketing tool we have is them, and see them, the product, have them create the content, have them be the things we feature on our website, so people like you can go directly to the site and see themselves and say, "Oh, well, I look like her." It just helps.Deepica:I think Rent the Runway is the first example I saw of a company that... I remember shopping it and picking a dress, because I saw girls who had my body type, and I was like, "Oh, well, she..." All the reviews, I think it was [inaudible] that they used on their website that is really great customer review experience. And I remember when we created livetinted.com, I wanted to use [inaudible]. So, we do for our review system, because I wanted it to feel really real, a yelp kind of situation where you're truly feeling like you trust that person telling you which product works for you.Deepica:So, it's tough, but there's tools and ways to make it better. And I think just leaning into people and humans, and having them be a part of the experience, and creating a really strong customer service experience so they want to meet that review, is all important.Stephanie:Yeah, that's great. I also think that technology is evolving to a place now where... You should be able to have your face in front of your camera, and take a picture, and then be like, "Here's exactly what would go best with your skin tone or something."Deepica:It's getting there, and there's apps and stuff too where you can do that, but lighting is such a factor. We're getting there, but with beauty, it is tricky. And I think all the tools I've seen this far, none of them have worked for me. That was one of the business ideas I wanted to do in college, I was like, "It's just too hard to shop for beauty online." We'll get there though.Stephanie:Yep, I think so, too. All right. So, let's shift over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question, and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready?Deepica:Yeah, sure. Okay.Stephanie:All right. What one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Deepica:I would say new ways of leaning into people and community. Yeah. I just said that, but we're currently revamping our ecommerce site, and the biggest thing we're focusing it on is people and experience, and tapping into the human aspect of what people are looking for when they're buying something, which is as emotional as a color corrector to solve their dark circle issues. And so, I think if you continue to focus in on people, community, how they can drive purchase decisions, you'll thrive in the ecommerce world, especially in beauty where things are very... You want to see yourself reflected.Stephanie:Yep. I love that. What's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you?Deepica:Wow. Is this personal or business? I mean-Stephanie:Whatever comes to mind, whatever you want.Deepica:This is the first thing that comes to mind, because we just talked about it. You should always value every person you meet in life, because you never know where it's going to lead, and come back, and connect, and help you in the future because... I didn't work directly with Hayley at Birchbox, but when I quit my job for her to... She introduced me to XFactor Ventures, which is our first VC that came on board, that gave us our first cheque, which then created a ripple effect that made other people think we were legit, that created another ripple effect. And I think that confidence in somebody who only... I worked with her but at a very bird's eye view and stuff, and so it's kind of like... I'm so grateful for that. And not just her, just generally, I think, when I think about the people who have taken the bet on me, I think it really makes me feel like I'm here for a reason, and I have shit to get done.Stephanie:Yep. That's great. What ecommerce tool are you most excited about right now?Deepica:Right now, it's GRIN, that's the one that we're literally doing trainings on right now. We're really trying to optimize. I think the influencer partnership space is something everyone's trying to figure out and find a way to scale, and I'm hoping and hopeful that GRIN can help us do that.Stephanie:Yeah. Wow, that's awesome. We will check that out also. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about? And who would your first guest be?Deepica:Well, I'm working on getting this started, but it's going to be... It will be called Hue To Know, which was... Instead of [inaudible] To Know, Hue To Know.Stephanie:Yeah. I like that. That's cute.Deepica:And we had a whole video series for LIVE TINTED when we were just a community platform, where we interviewed people, they came on, and they talked about their identity and culture, and it was all these... To me, they were dope creatives, again, people that you should know about that you may not, like a black Muslim rapper, or a gender nonconforming South Asian artist. And these people who were like, "I'm going against the grain and creating a path for myself, and living tinted." That's really, to me, what that means, and what LIVE TINTED stands for. So, I want to bring them on as a guest, and create it into a podcast form. And my first dream guest would be Meghan Markle, because I think she's incredible.Stephanie:That sounds great. Well, if you need help getting off the ground, you know who to call.Deepica:Great. Okay. Cool. Yeah.Stephanie:All right. And then, the last one, what is your favorite business book where you often go back and think about it, or read quotes from it, or whatever it may be?Deepica:Man, I wish I had it so I could show it to you right now. This was a pile recommendation. It's called Financial-something, Financial Terms... Financial... I'm going to have to find it and send it to you.Stephanie:[crosstalk].Deepica:Yeah. But she told me... Before you go into fundraising process, as a person who's never done it before, there's a lot of terms that get thrown around, like convertible notes, and cap tables, and all this stuff. I didn't know what I was doing, so she was like, "It's going to feel like you're reading a dictionary, and it's going to be dense, but you want to be able to walk into those meetings with full confidence, and I highly recommend that you read it." And so, I have to look for the book and find the name. There's a lot of different terms in there, so I'm blanking on the title itself.Stephanie:Yeah. I think there's a good book that it reminds me of called Venture Deals by... I think it's Brad Feld-Deepica:That's what it was.Stephanie:Oh, is that what it is?Deepica:Damn it, it was Venture Deals. You're right. Yes. Yes.Stephanie:Okay. Well, [inaudible] because I'm like, "That's a good one too." Where I remember-Deepica:That was it.Stephanie:... when we were thinking about raising money, I'm like, "All these terms, I don't know what they are. Pre-money, post money, cap table. Oh my God, what are we talking about?" So, that's a good book for anyone raising money right now.Deepica:That was it. Mm-hmm (affirmative).Stephanie:Awesome. Well, thanks so much-Deepica:[crosstalk] But it's a good book, but yeah.Stephanie:Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a good book. And then, after you read it, you're like, "Okay, I'm done with that for a while." Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining the show. It was so fun having you on. Where can people find out more about you and your work?Deepica:Well, I'm obviously, going to plug LIVE TINTED first. LIVE TINTED is L-I-V-E T-I-N-T-E-D, livetinted.com. @livetinted all on social. And then, you can also follow me at @deepica, D-E-E-P-I-C-A on all social outlets.Stephanie:Amazing. Thanks so much.Deepica:Thank you for having me.
We’ve all seen it — maybe some of us have even fallen for the trick — you’re on an ecommerce site and a big “Wheel of Savings” pops up. This innocent-seeming discount offer, though, isn’t what it seems, and it’s doing damage to the end-user spinning the wheel, and the site the wheel pops up on. The world of malvertising and browser extensions has been causing headaches in the ecommerce world for years and brands are constantly looking for ways to fight back and regain control of their websites. Matt Gillis is helping with that mission. Matt is the CEO of clean.io, which offers real-time protection against malicious actors and code for some of the most-trafficked websites in the world. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Matt takes us through some of the methods bad actors are using to install malicious code on ecommerce sites, and he gets into the nitty gritty of why browser extensions like Honey and Wikibuy are hurting brand bottom lines, and why those extensions are making marketing attribution nearly impossible. But he also offers some solutions, too, so that ecommerce brands can finally win back control of the user experience. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Good Guy or Bad Guy?: Traditionally, malvertising is done by bad actors who infiltrate websites and take over through ads. But in the world of ecommerce, the bad actors are actually manifesting in the form of Fortune 100 companies that profit from website extensions like Honey and Wikibuy, which disrupt the user experience of the customer on the original ecommerce site. Solving that problem is the challenge for ecommerce brands that want to take back control.Sneakily Effective: In the malvertising world, the bad actors are at the top of the marketing game. They can achieve a 100% click-through rate at little to no cost because they are using sly, untraceable strategies. Targeting and eliminating those malvertisers is critical in order to level the playing field for ecommerce marketers to have success moving forward.Last Line of Defense: Publishing platforms hold most of the responsibility for the end-user experience. Everybody has a role to play in minimizing the risk of malicious buyers or advertisers, but ultimately, the publisher is the last line of defense against malvertising moving into the user experience, and they should be held accountable.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey everyone. And welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles co-founder at mission.org. Today on the show we have Matt Gillis, the CEO at clean.io. Matt, welcome.Matt:Stephanie, thanks for having me. I'm excited.Stephanie:I am very excited to have you here. We were just talking about how cool your background is, and I think that's actually kind of a fun place to start of where you're at in the world. And tell me a bit about your background.Matt:Yeah. Hey, so I'm in Baltimore and we actually just took possession of this office in February, right before the pandemic. And so the irony is I've been here every day since the pandemic started pretty much.Stephanie:By yourself?Matt:But I'm by myself. So we have 4,000 square feet. We just did the mural right before the pandemic and no one on our team has been able to experience it pretty much. But yeah, cybersecurity company located in Baltimore, we're about 45 people, I guess you could say solving this problem of untrusted and malicious JavaScript that is ruining user experiences in revenue across the internet. That's us in a nutshell.Stephanie:Cool. Well, I am really excited to dive further into clean.io. Before we do that though, I was hoping you can kind of go through your background because I saw you've worked at places like AOL, you've been in publishing. You've been in ad space. Tell me a bit about what you did before you came to clean.io.Matt:So full disclosure, I'm old. And so I've been around a little bit. I've had some fun. But yeah, I think key things I've spent probably the last 20-ish or so years in a couple of different capacities. Right out of university, I started in the mobile industry and mobile at that time was just making phone calls, that's it. There wasn't even texting then.Matt:In fact, my job back in those days was I would stand on a golf course at a golf tournament and let people make free phone calls because that was the cool thing to do then. No one had cell phones and if they did, they were like those brick ones. You remember those ones that you couldn't fit in your pocket?Stephanie:Yeah. And you were the cool guy like, "I've got access to an awesome phone, anyone want in?"Matt:Yeah. And listen, men and women would come up to me and they'd be like, "Can I call back and check and see if I have any messages?" And so that was the cool thing to do then. I know it sounds so crazy that was a thing at some point, but yeah. So I worked at mobile operators in the early stages of my career.Matt:So I worked at Bell Mobility in Toronto, Canada. I'm from Toronto. And then I moved down here to work at Verizon Wireless. And at the end of my tenure at Bell Mobility and my tenure at Verizon, I was focused on some of the services that you live by on your cell phone today. So this was in kind of late '99 and then the early 2000s of things like video on demand on your phone, playing games on your phone, downloading ringtones on your phone, I'm sure you did that.Stephanie:Oh, ringtones, yeah [inaudible].Matt:They were, obviously a huge business at some point.Stephanie:Now if my phone rings I'm like, "Stop it, what are you doing? Who's calling me? Don't call me, text me."Matt:Put it on mute. Yes, exactly. So I was kind of part of the foundational days of things that you would do with your phone, before the iPhone. And then I went and took a swing at being an entrepreneur and joined a little small video game company. Our biggest game was Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? We did a lot of TV game shows. So we did, Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? And things like that.Matt:So I kind of walked the mile as a publisher for a while and then Capcom, which is the Japanese video game company acquired us. So I ran their publishing business for a few years and I got to experience what it's like to be a publisher and how hard it is to make money.Matt:And that was kind of in those early days of the iPhone where I'd say to people, "You'll go and spend $5 on this latte, but you won't pay $5 for unlimited use of a game over a period of time." And this is back in 2008, 2009. And so we had a real struggle and people weren't wanting to pay for our games. They want them free and free became kind of the thing on the iPhone.Matt:And so recognizing that struggle, I actually joined this company called Millennial Media, which was one of the earliest mobile ads platforms for app developers, helping app developers make money with ads. Some of our biggest customers at the time were like Words with Friends, if you've played Words with Friends-Stephanie:Yes, I have.Matt:... ads in every game. So we were kind of one of the foundational tech partners with folks like Words with Friends and various other games across the internet and apps. Did that for eight years through an acquisition with Verizon and AOL. And then we acquired Yahoo. So I ran the publisher platforms business at the combined entity of those companies, which was awesome.Matt:And one of the biggest problems in my time over that period was this thing called malicious ads, or malvertising as they call it. You probably are familiar with when you're scrolling away on your phone and all of a sudden it redirects you and says, congratulations, you won an Amazon gift card. And you're like, "I didn't click anything." Or spin the wheel for your chance.Stephanie:Yeah. I did that once I fell for it. I was like, "Oh, I spun it." I couldn't help it.Matt:Never spin the wheel, Stephanie.Stephanie:I only did it once, but yeah, afterwards I'm like, "That was a bad call. Why did I do that?"Matt:Yeah. So it was a big problem in my past life. And there were a few folks that were solving this problem and two of them were folks that I had worked with at AOL. When I left, it was called Oath at the time, which is Verizon Media now.Matt:I went and had lunch with these guys and they told me that they were spinning up this company called Clean Creative and set to solve this problem of malvertising. And I didn't have a job and it was getting too cold to golf. And so I said, "Hey guys, can I be an intern?"Matt:And so I came and hung around for a couple of days a week. And I was like, "You guys are really onto something here because this was a massive problem in my prior life." And so I said, "Hey, can I have the keys?" And they obliged. And that's how I'm here, started as the CEO two years ago. And we've kind of been blowing it up ever since. That's awesome.Stephanie:Yeah, such a fun story. So what is your day to day look like now? And what's your best day in the office look like while you're there by yourself? Are you around skipping around bicycling around the big office? What is your days look like?Matt:I do pace and I get my steps in over there. Day-to-day, we're startup, so we're small. And so as any of your listeners would know at a startup you do everything, and you take the trash out and you sign big contracts, hopefully you raise money. You kind of do run the gamut. So it's a little bit of everything. If you've worked at a startup you know that generally speaking, there's epic highs and epic lows. And so you have those days where you are the king of the world and you and your team are high-fiving and celebrating. And that's a little different now because you got to do it all virtually.Matt:Part of being at a startup is you get that culture of everybody generally speaking, being in an office like this, but we're a widely distributed culture now. We were before the pandemic where we kind of had, I don't know, five or six or seven locations among all of our people, but now we have 40 locations. So it's just like any other gig except there's really no net underneath you. You're walking this tightrope and hopefully you get to the other side.Stephanie:Yes. I definitely feel that.Matt:It's fun though. Isn't that why you do it?Stephanie:I mean, yeah, it's definitely really fun. Other times you're like, "Oh my gosh, I'm responsible for so many lives." And then other days it's like, "This is fun." So it's a good balance.Matt:Yeah. I mean, I won't lie. I had months of sleepless nights when we were raising money. We most recently raised our series A and we started raising it in March, right at the beginning of the pandemic. And yeah, all these people's jobs, for me, the pressure was on me to make sure that we could raise money and continue on this mission.Matt:The reality is, is the people behind the scenes are the ones that actually made my job easy because they're the ones that enabled me to go and tell the story of our massive revenue growth and our massive traction and our product market fit and all of that sort of stuff.Matt:Startups are hard, but there's a reason that many people once you leave the big company and you actually go and take your swing, that becomes the thing that you keep doing and doing and doing because you like having that euphoric feeling.Stephanie:Yeah. No, I definitely agree. And I mean, I think it's a good reminder too, as the CEO at any company to kind of get out of your way and hire a team that can support you and do things, but then let you do the higher level things like selling, raising money, such is a good point for, I think a lot of business owners who want to kind of stay attached to, "I've always been coding." Or, "I always did this part of the business." You need to step away and find people who can step in for you so you can go on to the next thing.Matt:Yeah, and focus on your strengths. Don't try and overcompensate and really... We did this thing called StrengthsFinder with our leadership team. And it was really about figuring out what are the strengths across this group of people that are practically leading the company. And you go, "Okay, well, I'm really good at this, this and this. And you're really good at this, this and this. Wow. We compliment each other. I should continue to keep doing this stuff. And boy, we should just let you handle all of this sort of stuff." So yeah, hire a diverse team and hire people that are way smarter than you and you'll be successful.Stephanie:So how have you seen the digital security landscape change? Maybe even over just the past year or two, what new things are popping up, what should e-commerce owners be aware of right now that maybe wasn't happening last year or two years ago?Matt:I would say that where we cut our teeth was in this malvertising space and what it is, is malicious JavaScript that's kind of being injected into the user experience through ads. And what we've seen is that the bad actors, the people that are doing it, are getting even more sophisticated over time. They have figured out how to get around the systems. They've figured out how to get around the checks and balances.Matt:And we kind of stumbled into this e-commerce world where we were protecting, we're protecting some of the biggest websites on the internet. There's seven million websites that run our code. Probably many of the websites that you go to everyday either to get your news or to read entertainment gossip, or that sort of stuff if you do.Stephanie:No.Matt:I'm not saying you do Stephanie, but we protect all of those sites; every single page view on those pages, we make sure that the user experience is protected and revenue's protected. And by the way, in that world, it's folks that I would say, delivering malicious JavaScript. What we started seeing in the e-commerce world is there's this whole phenomenon of what I would call untrusted JavaScript.Matt:Now in either case, the premise is you own your website. You should be able to control everything that executes on your website. You should be able to protect your user experience. You should be able to dictate your user experience because it's your website. On the malvertising world, what we saw happening was if folks had ads on their website, they had lost control of the user experience. They had lost control of revenue because any bad actor could just buy an ad and take over the user experience and get you to spin the wheel.Stephanie:Only once, but yes.Matt:Only once, but it happened. And so in the e-commerce world, what we've noticed is there's a lot of stuff happening on e-commerce sites, just like there is in any website that is without the permission or without the authorization of the person who owns the site. The biggest problem that we kind of dug in and gone to solve for is, if you ever heard of these things called Honey or Wikibuy?Stephanie:Yeah.Matt:So these are Chrome extension, Safari extensions, Firefox extensions. They sit resident on the user's device and Stephanie, when you're out shopping on your computer and you get to check out, Honey will pop up and say, "Hey, I've got coupons for you. Do you want them?" You as the user you're probably like, "Yeah, I'd love to get a discount. I'd love a better price, if I can get it without having to do any work." Honey does all the hard work for you.Matt:We think that's not really in the best interest of the merchants because they own their website and now someone is injecting code in and disrupting the user experience, disrupting your revenue. So just like it is in this malvertising world, the same phenomenon is happening over here. The difference is Honey is owned by PayPal. Wikibuy is owned by Capital One.Matt:So the folks that I would call "bad actors" in this world are actually fortune 100 companies. They're folks that you would expect to be able to trust. And what they're doing is they're actually injecting code in to disrupt the user experience and disrupt revenue. And so that's the problem that we've gone out and solved.Matt:We just launched our product that's called cleanCART. And what it is is it's a Shopify app and it gives Shopify merchants the ability to protect their carts at checkout and make sure that they can prevent this sort of code from disrupting user experiences in revenue. So it really is giving control of the websites back to the merchants.Stephanie:Oh, interesting. So when you implement that you just can't get coupons or are there other pieces that it kind of protects as well, or the user can't see coupons from a Honey or something, or are there other things that your app is also protecting against?Matt:So we're in, I would say the second inning of the baseball game. So early stages. We're really focused on to start is blocking the automation of these coupons. So we don't want to block you as a user going in and manually inserting the coupon. We think that's the intended use case. But what we think is unfair is that someone is standing beside you at checkout and handing you a mitt full of coupons and actually not even handing them to you, they're actually giving them and just scanning them all to make sure that they all have a chance to work.Matt:If you think about this analogy, the grocery store would never let someone come and stand beside the checkout and save you 30% off your grocery order while you're already ready to pay. And I think that's the phenomenon that we're trying to solve for in the earliest days, which is, let's prevent the automation from happening. Let's not prevent people from manually inserting coupons. Let's give control back to the merchants because it impacts them in so many different ways. Obviously, it impacts them from a revenue loss perspective.Matt:I talk to merchants every day. Many merchants are complaining that these injections are literally scraping and pulling 30% off of their cart value at checkout. So someone who had $100 cart, they go to checkout, Honey runs and it knocks their cart value from $100 to $70. That's kind of bad for the merchant, especially if that person was going to convert anyway.Matt:The other key thing is Honey and Wikibuy and these other discount extensions have made it really hard for merchants to have discounting strategies that they can track. And so what's happening is that promo codes are ending up in the wrong hands. It's creating an attribution nightmare for merchants where they think that this social media influencer or this Instagrammer, or this YouTuber is driving tons of sales and lo and behold, Honey has grabbed that coupon and is injecting it.Matt:And now every order that comes through where Honey was present on the page is applying that person's code. And so now the merchant not only has bad data that is going to ultimately drive their marketing decisions but now, they're also losing revenue and they're paying out affiliate fees to folks that generally didn't deserve that affiliate fee. So I think it's created a bit of a nightmare.Matt:And so, we felt this kind of pent up demand for this product. And that's exactly what's happened is that no one has solved it. We think we're first to market. And we think it's important that people are fighting for the merchants. There's been 10 years of growth in e-commerce over the last year. The pandemic driving a lot of that.Matt:And we think it's important that merchants really get control of their websites, get control of their margins, get control of their revenue and really get the right data to make the right data-based decisions of how they're going to run their marketing programs.Stephanie:Yes. I think that's a really cool story. You were just talking about how you were looking at a problem that people were complaining about, and then now you guys are like, "Well, let's solve it." Because I've read, I'm trying to think where this was, where they're talking about going to Reddit and looking at some of the threads of people talking about problems that keep occurring and occurring and how you could build businesses just based off Reddit threads. And you guys did that, just looking at problems with what merchants were struggling with. So a really cool example of how to build a business is look at all the problems that are going on and jump at solving it.Matt:Well, and I think the other key thing here is as you know is solving the problem, but also during that process of your hypothesis that you're going to develop of what you're trying to prove, it's you also need to prove that people pay for it. And that's, I think part of the foundation of what we've built here, obviously on the malvertising side, but also on the e-commerce side is it's a big enough problem. People need to protect user experiences.Matt:If you think about just in the internet in general, it's very expensive to create content. It's very expensive to drive traffic. And once you've done those two things, why would you leave it to chance that someone might come to your website and have a crappy user experience? Protect your user experience.Matt:It happened last week on the Harvard Crimson on the crimson.com where somebody was on Crimson and they got one of these redirect ads that took them to this landing page that said, "Hey, you're a Verizon customer click here and take the survey and answer these nine questions and you'll have a chance to win." And this user actually took to Twitter and said, "Hey @thecrimson, which is, I think their Twitter handle, you've got a crappy user experience. Why are you letting this happen?"Matt:I never even saw a reply from the Crimson. But when we did some investigation on what was going on, they don't even have protection on their website. So it almost feels irresponsible at this day and age to not be protecting your asset because your asset generally speaking, isn't your website, your asset is your users.Matt:And so protect your users, make them feel confident that when they come to your site, they're going to have a great experience. And so that's really what we've focused on is just delivering technology that solves a problem that people are willing to pay for. Because obviously without that, we don't have a business.Stephanie:So when thinking about like the Crimson example, that's all from a bad ad being run on their website, correct?Matt:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Stephanie:Someone was able to buy that ad unit have bad JavaScript, and then that's when they were sent to that Verizon survey. I'm I thinking about that, right?Matt:You're totally thinking about that right. And what's interesting about the thread is that when this woman went on to Twitter and said, "Hey, this is what happened. And here's a screenshot," there were a whole bunch of people that piled onto the thread of like, "Oh, here's what I think is happening." "Oh, you have a virus on your computer." Or, "Oh, you have a bad extension on your computer or whatever." Everybody had a hypothesis of what's happening.Matt:And so we actually went and captured the threat and reverse engineered it and said like, "Here's exactly what's happening." And yeah, it's all coming through ads in that case. And there's so many great things of the open programmatic ecosystem.Matt:So programmatic media being able to buy a single oppression at a time by single user real humans, real devices, real networks, like you know I'm having a one-to-one engagement with this person and in the malvertising world, that's a feeding ground for bad actors because they get to do the same thing.Matt:And quite frankly, they're better at it than any other advertiser out there because they're the ones who know how to pay 20 cents CPM and buy an ad and actually get 100% click-through as opposed to the rest of the world that's just hoping that they get a half a percent click-through rate. And so they figured out how to buy that ad, that ad renders on your device.Matt:And then usually it's like an onTouchEvent. So when you actually just touch the device, they put a transparent overlay on your device. And that turns into a click or they'll auto click something on your behalf, or however they decide to inject their technology. But yeah, it's as simple as that. And I think it's lucrative, otherwise-Stephanie:They wouldn't be doing it, yeah.Matt:What they do is they try to do it at the lowest possible level without getting caught. So if you think about sophisticated marketers, what do you do? Well, you pick the right users, you maybe frequency caps so that you don't lambaste them with ads. You want to hit them at the right time with the right message and all that sort of stuff.Matt:And so these bad actors have figured out how to very elegantly and in a sophisticated fashion, they'll hit you with that ad. But the reality is they'll probably frequency cap you to one so you can't reproduce the experience and that's how they evade getting caught in most cases.Stephanie:Yeah. Very interesting. I didn't understand the whole backend of how that works. I mean, I do spend a lot of time thinking about building incentives for advertisers because we build up our own ad networks to advertise our podcast and we bring on partners all the time.Stephanie:And it's really funny thinking through how to build incentives for especially newer advertisers when you might say something like, "Oh, we'll incentivize you based on a download." Then all of a sudden you're getting all these fake downloads. No, not downloads. We'll incentivize you based on consumption. Like, does someone listen to the episode? They wanted to hear it.Stephanie:And then you see instead of actually having good people come through and consume the episode, the advertiser will say, "Okay, I'll pay you to review the ad or review the podcast, which makes it show that you were consuming it because you had to for maybe a minute to then be able to review."Stephanie:And it's always interesting trying to figure out, I mean, and these people are not good actors maybe, I'm not really sure. But it's always very interesting thinking, how do you incentivize people to do the right thing and actually deliver and not try and always get around the rules and just meet a number which I'm sure a lot of the platforms deal with the same kind of thing, but-Matt:It's interesting you use the word incentivized, and that was a dirty word in the early days where most advertisers didn't feel that the word incentivize was a good user because they didn't truly have the intent to do the thing that you want because they were being paid or a bounty or whatever the thing is.Matt:I saw the evolution of incentivized in my mobile career where it became really hard to get people to consume video commercials, like 15, six second whatever that metric was. And in the games world, they figured out this thing and they actually rebranded it instead of calling it incentivized video, they actually called it rewarded video. And-Stephanie:I feel like that's a little more, I don't know.Matt:Well, listen, and so I talk about one of the apps that I love is this app called Candy Crush. And I've been playing candy crush for almost 10 years now, I think. And when's the last time you played the same game for 10 years? Like never?Stephanie:Yeah. That's impressive.Matt:But they've artfully integrated video into their app. And I think if you run out of lives, you can watch a 30 second spot that is unskippable. So you have to watch the whole thing. And then if you, do you get rewarded with that extra life or whatever it is, maybe a lollypop, I don't know. But yeah, so I think there's different ways to approach it. But you're right, usually when you figure out the bounty, everyone else figures out how to capitalize on the bounty.Matt:And I think the interesting thing with Honey and Wikibuy is they've figured out how to get paid for the bounty or get credit for the bounty when lo and behold, they didn't really do anything. All they did was they had code that was resident on the machine that allows them to kind of get credit for that user purchasing when I think it's questionable whether they had any influence on that.Stephanie:Yeah. I've kind of thought that too, when seeing different Instagrammers with their promo codes for e-commerce site. And I always thought like, "Oh, how does that attribution work?" Because I mean, she's sharing it here, but I'm sure it's very easy for someone who doesn't follow her to also find that code outside of a Honey, but just be like, send it to my friend, "Hey, use this code." They never even followed her and now, they've got 25% off or something. So it does seem like attribution can be tricky, even if someone's not using Honey. How do you think that world's changing right now to make it easier for merchants to track where their sales are actually coming from? It feels very messy.Matt:Oh, I agree. I think it's a total mess. That's why we focused on the automation because I think that's one of those low hanging fruit, but big problems. Honey will tell the world that they have 17 million or so users. I don't know if Wikibuy which is now called Capital One Shopping, I don't think they announced how many users they have. But what I can tell you is both of those companies are spending a tremendous amount of money acquiring new users.Matt:Every time I log into Twitter, usually the first ad that I get is from Honey. All throughout the Christmas season, the holiday season just recently Capital One which owns Wikibuy Capital One Shopping, they were running TV commercials for this product with Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta. So there's like a tremendous push for them to grow these user bases.Matt:In talking with merchants and we've got, I don't know, we've got maybe 25 merchants using our product right now. And we're in closed beta. That problem that you just mentioned, which is, "Hey, I worked with an Instagrammer and I gave them a code. And all of a sudden two days later, I've had a vitamin company tell me that story. I've had a sporting goods company tell me that story. I've had a toilet paper company tell me that story.Stephanie:They're using Instagrammers?Matt:They're using Instagrammers. They're using YouTubers. They're actually using podcasts as well.Stephanie:I mean, interesting to see how they're partnering on toilet paper.Matt:Because they're partnering for the audience on these podcasts and they're hoping that they can get that audience to find out about their product and again, then they're incentivizing them to come and become a customer. It's basically the same net story. The vitamin company told me they're like a supplement company. They partnered with one of the biggest triathletes in the world.Matt:Let's just say they had 50,000 or 100,000 followers, but you've got to imagine they're probably rabid followers. If you're into that, then that's probably the gold standard of who you would listen to. And that person did some blog posts and did some Instagram posts and posted their code and as soon as it happened, they saw a surge in sales attributed to that person.Matt:Now, the marketing person at the company was like, "Oh my gosh, we figured it out. We nailed this. We knew that people would be rabid about that person's content. We knew that person had so much influence to get people to come and buy." And then they're like, "Oh my God, it's Honey." Because literally they went from zero sales to 80% of their sales that had coupons was that person on Monday.Matt:I think it's a frustrating problem. And I think the sophisticated marketers have woken up and are like, "Man, we're bleeding money." One merchant told me that when they started kind of parsing out the attribution that Honey was costing them. They did about a million and a half in revenue online per month, so call it a $15 million business give or take. They believed that these promo code extensions were costing them about 150 grand a month, 10% their overall value.Stephanie:I mean, we just had a guest who they ranted about their hatred of Honey, I mean, even on the show. So I think it's maybe a couple episodes before maybe when yours is going to go out.Matt:Call me. We can help.Stephanie:Yeah, I'll send the link so you can hit him up.Matt:Absolutely.Stephanie:He was not a happy dude about Honey. But I guess when I think about promo codes, it kind of feels archaic to me. Maybe this is just a me thing, but it feels like where QR codes were where all of a sudden they're gone and you don't even think about them anymore. Promo codes kind of feel like that to me too of just, it feels like a manual old way of attributing things.Stephanie:How do you think about attribution when it comes to influencers and stuff or anyone, without having to use a code? Are you guys even thinking about a new way of doing things or do you hear of people trying new ways of attribution that isn't like I'm putting in a manual like Stephanie 20, to get my 20% off? Is there a new way of doing it?Matt:I mean, we're thinking through all those things. I think the challenge is specifically if you're using these one-to-many mediums. In a perfect world, I think you'd have a unique code for every user and so you'd have to authenticate. We'd know that that code went to you Stephanie and if you redeemed it, I would know that you actually bought something and you bought something because of this engagement that we had. I think in these one-to-many mediums it's, how else can you do it? And some of the challenges that the one-to-many mediums like think of YouTubers.Matt:One of the companies that we're working with has a problem where they have a very high dollar ticket item. Their item that they're selling is about 1,000 bucks. And obviously, if somebody grabs a code of 20% off that you're losing 200 bucks, it's a lot of money. Their problem was that they were doing YouTuber videos and they were publishing a code within the YouTube video to reach the audience. And for them, it was extreme sports, the audience that they were going after.Matt:Well, literally the next day, and I don't know if you know how Honey works. If you have a Honey on your machine, the very first thing that Honey does is it scrapes out anybody who manually puts a code in. So in order for Honey to be able to grab that code, it has to happen once where a real person saw the code and was motivated to go and type it in and buy.Matt:If that happened to me, if I got that code, I would go in and type it in. And if Honey were on my machine and then I hit okay, Honey will scrape that code out and now everybody who comes after me gets access to that code whether they saw that YouTube video or not.Matt:The problem for this company is spending a lot of money engaging with YouTubers and creating videos and obviously, doing the presentation layer of these offers. Well, once Honey gets a hold of the code... And what they've also found is that Honey and the other extensions, are not very merchant friendly. The relationship between Honey and these merchants is actually quite adversarial. And so it leaves them with no other option.Matt:I guess the two options: one, you just keep running your YouTube thing and you resign yourself that you're going to be paying out a 20% discount to everybody who comes and has Honey; which that stinks, that doesn't feel right or you need to reach out to the YouTuber. You need to recut the video. You need to recut the voiceover. You need to kill that code. You need to put a new code in. And so it's made this sort of marketing endeavor with YouTubers and Instagrammers and you name it very hard, because you're actually turning off codes.Matt:We saw one email which was interesting. I always say to people, let's remember we're all consumers too, you and I buy stuff on the internet, even though we're deeply entrenched in the businesses that we're running. I have Honey on my machine, so I can understand what that user behavior is, so that I can actually talk with merchants.Matt:One of the folks on our team bought a pair of shorts from one of these companies that advertises on Facebook and Instagram. And they were out of stock after he had ordered it, so they sent him an email. And they said, "Hey, listen, sorry you didn't have it but guess what, here's a code. You'll save X percent. But please, make sure you use it within the next 48 hours because Honey has been grabbing our codes and we're going to shut this code off."Matt:How can people market, if you constantly have to play whack-a-mole. And if you now think of the analogy, it's back to what we do in the malvertising side. If you aren't going to solve things with software, you're basically playing this long cat and mouse game that you won't win.Stephanie:I mean, that's why I think about merchants turning on and off codes.Matt:It's a nightmare.Stephanie:We were handing out swag and me just trying to... I had unique links that could work for more than one person and just thinking, "That could be tricky and go really bad." But I guess that's why I just think codes just feel, like I said, a little bit archaic. Why can't I just go to a YouTube video?Stephanie:I mean, the internet knows so much about me and where I'm at anyways. It should say, "Hey, Stephanie watched Matt's video where he was talking about this toilet paper." And then all of a sudden she's at our website, you can say, "Stephanie, a 20% coupon awaits you when you go here."Stephanie:And then when I get there it should know who I am and then be like, "Your coupons applied. And it will be applied for the next three days on this website or whatever, because I know where you've been and what you saw and where exactly you came from." Why can't it just work?Matt:I mean, I wish it was all that simple. Listen, we are taking obviously, technology solution to what we think is a longstanding and challenging problem. And in the malvertising world, the people in ad operations were literally playing whack-a-mole. Like, "Let's figure out where this bad ad came from." "Turn that demand source off." Or, "Turn that buyer off." And guess what, the bad actors, they just pop up again.Matt:And so we believe that, and I've seen and talked to merchants who are like, "Listen, here's how I solved the Honey problem." And they're like, "We actually created promo codes for 10% off, but the promo code was Honey is stealing your data."Matt:Because if you use Honey, you know that when Honey pops up it'll actually tell you the codes that it's implementing. They went on a mission to discredit and put the fear of God in their buyers that Honey was doing... They were like, "Honey is doing nefarious things with your data." And guess what, Honey D listed them as [inaudible].Stephanie:Well, there you go. Now, you know how to do it, I guess.Matt:The irony is, is that was three months ago that I talked to that merchant. And yesterday they cameback in and said, "Listen, we have a problem again."Stephanie:Honey added us again.Matt:No, this time they've got a Wikibuy problem. The problem is going to be never-ending, I think. Ultimately, we're hopefully going to give e-commerce companies the tools that they need to go out and be able to operate their business and focus their time on the things that really matter, in my mind, which is driving incremental revenue; not playing whack-a-mole with your promo codes and having to go recut YouTube videos. Hopefully, that's one of the big things that we help solve for.Stephanie:That's cool. I mean, I do like the idea of that one merchant you were mentioning where they said, "If you act within the next 48 hours or whatever, it'll only lasts this long." And I just had a guest yesterday who said that. I think it was either Burger King or McDonald's made it so if you're within 20 feet or something of a McDonald's they would send you a code and say, "You have five minutes to get to a burger King to get a free burger or something."Stephanie:And I'm like, "That's interesting." That's a good way to make people act quickly if you know something's expiring, I know I act a lot quicker. But I mean, of course, solve the problem that's number one. But I do think that's an interesting marketing tactic too.Matt:And make it measurable. I think that's the key thing is that... I often say, "What gets measured gets managed." And so hopefully, what we're doing is we're taking one of the things out of the equation that is making measurement really challenging for merchants. Again, using the triathlete example, yes, the marketer was high-fiving the rest of their team going, "We finally solved this." And then when they actually looked at the data they were like, "Damn it. I guess we got to go back to the drawing board."Stephanie:It's also just so tricky too, knowing how much of those people would have bought otherwise or not. So even looking and being like, wow, we have all this attributed to this one promo code and maybe it was because of Honey. But how many of those people would have bought if there wasn't some promo in there? It's just hard to know.Matt:We're solving that problem. We're giving merchants some deep analytics on exactly what's happening on their site, because we think there's a blind spot there where they don't know. For instance, how many users actually came to your site that actually had an injection capability? One of the extensions of Honey, Wikibuy, Piggy, Amazon Assistant, you name it. So we give them that lens.Matt:And then we give them the lens of, what were all the promo codes that they tried to inject? What was the most popular promo code? And stack rank those things and then going deeper down to conversion rate. And guess what, what we're seeing in these early days is that when you block Honey and Wikibuy at checkout, the vast majority of users actually still convert.Matt:And so that to me is the icing on the cake which is, guess what, you take control back of your website. You take control of your margins. You take control of your revenue. You now have the data you need to be able to go out and drive incremental sales. We think that's pretty powerful.Stephanie:I mean, that makes sense. I've heard a couple of times that also, discounts don't matter as much as you would think. I think they were talking about, they did a study between 10% off and 20% off. And actually, they were kind of the same when it came to consumer happiness. And what can be worse though, is if someone has the ability to go in and put a promo code in or something and then it doesn't work.Stephanie:I don't know if you remember those days of just going to the internet promo code for macys.com and trying out 10 different promo codes and all of them failing. I was way more unhappy then, than just not having one at all, just buying at full value.Matt:Let me tell you the opposite of that which is the worst-case scenario, in one of our merchants experience and that's why they're using our software. They're in the home interior space, so they do drapes and carpets and wallpaper and all that sort of stuff. And they were trying to build favor with interior designers because they wanted interior designers to know their site and know their stuff and all that sort of stuff. And so they did a very exclusive but unfortunately, a promo code that Honey got ahold of that gave interior designers 50% off.Matt:Well, lo and behold, as soon as one designer used that code and also had Honey on the machine, that code then got swept up in the Honey and everybody, every order that had Honey was now getting 50% off. Their customer service nightmare was that they couldn't afford to give every consumer 50% off, so they actually had to cancel orders; believe it or not.Matt:They called customers and said, "We can't honor your order with that coupon because that coupon was not intended for you." Created a customer service nightmare for them. And that's what they want to do is, they want to control their user experience. They want to control their revenue and their margins.Stephanie:Oh my gosh, that's horrible.Matt:Out of control. But think of that disaster of having to call someone and say, "Hey, I know you wanted to spend $500 with me, but only pay me 250 bucks. I can't give you 50 off but I can give you like 15 off, that's kind of what you were probably entitled to." So anyways, just trying to get control back in these merchants hands and let them control their destiny.Stephanie:I love that. When thinking about back to the now advertising piece, how much do you think it's on the publishing platforms? Is it their responsibility to make sure that they continue to increase their efforts to make sure bad actors aren't out there anymore?Stephanie:I mean, I know they're probably doing a lot. A lot of people like to hate on the publishing platforms and they want them to always do more and more and more. Is it maybe on them or maybe not on them anymore to continue to try and track those bad actors, who like you said are kind of popping up here and then they shut down and then open up a new account and do one off things and then shut down again. How should we think about leaning on the platforms like that?Matt:Well, I say to folks, the value chain in that industry is actually quite wide. And so from the bad actor who's putting their hands on the keyboards to the consumer, there's a whole bunch of players in the middle. I think it's on everybody to really have defenses in place and to make sure that they're protecting...Matt:So if you're at the front end, if you own the demand side platform that the bad actor's using, you need to have your own checks and balances to make sure that you're not bringing in malicious buyers. But all through that value chain, the onus is on everybody. But at the end of the day what I say is, the only person that can be responsible to that end user, is the publisher.Matt:Pick your publisher, if you are Fox News or you're the New York Post or you're the Washington Post, you're the one that has that ultimate relationship with Jenny or Johnny consumer who is surfing your site and consuming content. So you're the last line of defense. You're the one that created the site. You're the one that drove the traffic. You're the one that is using ads to monetize your traffic. It's really on you I think, ultimately.Matt:Now the publishers, all those folks that I named and there's millions of them, they all want to look upstream and they should. And they should hold everybody accountable upstream. But I think they're the ones that are really the that last line of defense.Matt:Because if you go to one of these sites and you have a crappy experience, you don't really care that it came through an ad. Like the woman at Harvard Crimson last week, she didn't know the origins of why it happened. And here's the other crazy thing, she knew that when she went to the Crimson, she was delivered a crappy experience.Matt:Now, the crazy part. First time we've ever done it, we actually did a private webinar with the end user because we wanted to explain to her here's exactly what's happening. She told us this story, she said, "Listen, I use ad block." And obviously, the risk to publishers are, if you don't create great experiences, your users are going to start using ad block.Matt:What she said was, in the desire to get real news and in the desire to really understand what's going on in the world and in the desire to actually make sure that real news publishers are actually getting compensated, she turned her ad block off and this is what happened.Matt:So shame on the Crimson for not delivering a great experience, because guess what? Now that user's like, "I'm not turning ad block off the next time I come to your site. You're not going to get paid for the traffic that I'm going to generate." So again, it really goes back to the publishers, the onus is on them.Stephanie:And thankfully, I think there is like new technologies popping up that maybe we'll be able to enable them or even just thinking about implementing. I mean, I've seen some advertisers looking into blockchain and having that as being kind of like a more source of truth to be able to know a one-to-one relationship and knowing who's behind... You don't know exactly who's behind what, but if you have it in a way where they sign up and they can't just start creating a million different accounts because they've got their one single one that they can go off of, it seems like there's a lot of ways that it can improve over the next couple of years that maybe hasn't been so easy the past decade or so.Matt:I agree. Obviously, there's industry bodies all trying to figure this out together. There's companies like us who are innovating and coming up with new and unique techniques to block these sorts of nefarious actors. I do think the biggest and most important thing is to recognize that the bad actors aren't just sitting still waiting for somebody to solve this problem. They're innovating honestly, a more rapid rate than many of the industry leaders that you would expect that have hundreds or thousands of people trying to solve this problem. Bad actors unfortunately, are innovating at quite a rapid pace.Matt:So the problem I think is going to evolve and change. We've seen it evolve to not just being ads but obviously, compromised Chrome extensions that just seems to be a great vector. And so I think you're going to see the problem move around and especially, if there's a lot of money in it. If there's ways for these guys to make money, you're going to see them salivate with... You're going to put up this defense and they're going to figure out this way to get around it.Matt:And there's so many different browser types. There's so many different machines. There's security flaws. There's zero-day. There's so many ways for these guys to actually buy and target, to only focus on iOS 13 and below and blah, blah, blah to reach their audience.Stephanie:So tricky. Hopefully, it'll get solved over the next decade. Cool. Well, with a couple minutes left, let's move over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Matt?Matt:I am ready.Stephanie:All right. First the harder one, what one thing will have the biggest impact on e-commerce in the next year?Matt:Listen, I think it's been the gold rush for e-commerce merchants over the last year. In many cases I talk to merchants, they're like, "It was raining money last year." Sales were up five X, 10 X, who knows. I think the next year is going to be that year where folks actually look to efficiency, and they look to figure out where there are holes in the boat that they haven't had to look before.Matt:And I think that plays to our product because I think in many cases when it's raining money, you almost turn a blind eye to some of these sorts of things. But I think now folks are like, "Listen, if I can be more efficient. If I can take control of my revenue and my margins, I'm going to do that."Matt:So I think that's probably, this is the year of people now are catching their breath and they've figured out their distribution and they've figured out their fulfillment and their warehousing and all that sort of stuff and the panic that they had to do to keep up with the pandemic growth. Now, I think it's a deep breath of like, "Okay. Now, let's look at the math."Stephanie:Yeah. I agree, that's a good one. What one thing do you not understand today that you wish you did?Matt:What one thing do I not understand. I think the affiliate landscape is complex. I think there are a lot of legacy ways in which people have calculated incrementality and I'm not sure if they're all believable. And I hear a lot of feedback from merchants where it's kind of like they just brush it under the rug and they're like, "I know I'm probably paying for stuff that I didn't really get, but let's just let it go." I think every percentage point matters. That ecosystem, because I hear there's good guys and there's bad guys and I'd love to really dig deeper on that. And I think that's a big opportunity for us as a company.Stephanie:That's a good one. What's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you?Matt:Wow. The nicest thing that anyone's ever done for me.Stephanie:I like to go deep.Matt:Yeah. That's a deep question. I think I've been fortunate throughout my whole career in that, I have been given opportunities that I probably wasn't ready for. And by the way, I had never been a CEO before I was at this company. And so, who knew that I'd be able to do it.Matt:But I think it actually starts way back to when I first graduated and I was seeking my first job. And I had a mentor that took a risk on me and gave me my shot. And I worked my butt off and hopefully that translated and he and she felt great about what I was doing. So I think the nicest thing, I've just been given opportunities that I don't think I deserved and hopefully I earned that respect and trust over time.Stephanie:That's a good answer. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be?Matt:Wow. This lightning round is hard.Stephanie:Good. Needs to be.Matt:If I were to have a podcast. I love gadgets. I'm one of those guys that buys the infomercial type stuff. I bought one of those Rotisserie Showtime girls 20 years ago, I still use it.Stephanie:Worth it.Matt:Maybe it could be interviewing people who've built made for TV products and really understanding the backstories behind how they came up with the idea and how successful they were and God knows how much money we all made them.Stephanie:That's good. We had Kevin Harrington on the show, he was the original OG shark in Shark Tank. He basically made the infomercial. And it was very interesting hearing his perspective of how it started, where it's at now and Shark Tank.Matt:I'm fascinated by that ecosystem, it's super cool. And by the way, I always do buy one of those stupid things for my wife for Christmas and she hates me for doing it because she's like, "You're just burning money."Stephanie:I had fun buying it and watching the infomercial today.Matt:Believe it or not, one of my coworkers gave me a Squatty Potty for Christmas.Stephanie:I actually feel like those have good value though, the science is there. It's just a weird thing to buy your wife, if you got that for her. Someone gave it to you, got it.Matt:I was given it, by one of my coworkers, "By the way it works."Stephanie:And their marketing, I think that's the Harmon Brothers who did their marketing with the whole unicorn and they did the Poo-Pourri thing.Matt:Oh yeah, it's super cool. I love those kind of gadgets.Stephanie:That's a good one. I would listen to that show. All right. And then the last one, what's up next on your Netflix queue?Matt:Well, on my Netflix queue, I think I've got three episodes left on the Queen's Gambit.Stephanie:Love that show. That was a good one.Matt:I'm a documentary guy. I actually will tell you that I've been kind of hooked on HBO Max for a little bit. And I just finished the Tiger Woods documentary last night, which was fascinating. Nothing that you hadn't been told before. This guy through adversity has come back multiple times; knee surgeries, winning on a broken leg. So I'm into those sorts of stories. One of my guilty pleasures is The Bachelor, so it's on my DVR. I'm playing catch up on that.Stephanie:That's great.Matt:I love reality TV and that sort of stuff.Stephanie:I like where your head's at, me too. Well, Matt, this has been a very fun interview. Where can people find out more about you and clean.io?Matt:So you can find me at matt@clean.io. So if you want to send me an email, obviously happy to help you guys in any of your challenges and would love to hear your challenges if they're similar or if they're different than ones that we're solving for. Hit me on LinkedIn, so you can find me there. And our company website is clean.io.Stephanie:Awesome. Thanks so much for joining us.Matt:Thanks Stephanie. Thanks for having me.
Brands large and small are all fighting the same battle of customer acquisition. How you reach customers, and how much that effort costs, is in constant flux, which is why Nik Sharma is a big fan of constantly running micro experiments. Nik is the CEO of Sharma Brands, a company that remains one of the best-kept secrets among the DTC community and which helps brands scale into the tens of millions. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Nik takes us behind the scenes of what that scaling process looks like, including his strategies around customer acquisition. Nik explains how important constant testing is, and he shares some micro-experiments he recommends running regularly. Plus, he tells us why reading every review and every comment associated with your brand is the best leaping-off point for your creative process. Main Takeaways:Please Rate And Review: Reviews really do matter, and you should look at every single one to have a better understanding of what customers are saying, what they see as the value props and what isn’t working. You can then work backward with that information and create content that matches what your customers want. Mo Money, Same Problems: Regardless of how big a company gets, the main problem any brand faces is that of customer acquisition. Bigger brands can throw more money toward getting their message to customers, but ultimately it’s about getting the right content to the right people.The Mom Test: Your website experience needs to be seamless and frictionless that even the most technically challenged, or busy, can make it through without issue. It also needs to deliver the message that you want to send right up front. No one is going to search for the thing you want them to see, so put it front and center.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder at mission.org. Today, we're hanging out with Nik Sharma, the CEO of Sharma Brands. Nik, welcome to the show.Nik:Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.Stephanie:Yeah. Me, too. If we had video on, I would be trying to look at your whiteboard that you had on with probably 1,000 notes on it.Nik:All the secrets. It's got all the secrets.Stephanie:Yeah. What kind of secrets are on that board? I was really trying to zoom in like what's going on back there?Nik:It's got all the goals for the week, starting with nine hours of sleep, all the way to-Stephanie:That's a good goal.Nik:... how we plan to combat Facebook and Apple's big fight that's going to start January 15th.Stephanie:Oh, tell me a little bit about the big fight. I'm obviously not up to date on that. What's going on?Nik:Yeah. So basically in the new iOS update, Apple is going to give pretty much everybody multiple opportunities to block tracking. And so it's really going to hurt attribution for a lot of these ad platforms, especially for small business ad platforms like Facebook ads, Snapchat, et cetera. And so we're basically starting to think through how we combat that going into the new year because a lot of the businesses we work with, they're either brands that are just starting. And obviously, those are small businesses, but there's also some mid-sized businesses doing anywhere from 200 to 800 million in revenue, but they're also going to be just as effective. And so we're trying to think through how we go about combating that going into the New Year, basically making sure that there's not a ton of drop-off as it relates to the client.Stephanie:Yeah, I didn't realize this was happening so soon. I was paying attention a bit to the taking away cookies and tracking and all that kind of stuff. I didn't realize the iOS update was happening January 15th. So what are you guys thinking? What's your strategy? What are you advising your brands to do? I know I just jumped right into it, but this is really interesting.Nik:Yeah. Well, as of right now, it's a little bit up in the air. We have a few ideas going of how to combat it. But to be honest, there's not a ton of information out that we have to work with. We're trying to work with multiple different ad tech partners to understand how they view the impact happening. But at the same time, we're trying to think through how do we basically start creating our first party audience ads much faster than running ads when we need them, so whether that's by creating what I would call a prospecting CRM versus just a customer-centric CRM post-purchase, or trying to think through how do we still drive lower funnel conversion and attribute those sales properly, even though they might not be last click purchases. Yeah, it's a big cluster of unknowns right now.Stephanie:Yeah, that's tricky. I also wonder to what extent will a user maybe turn that feature off and then start to realize maybe how helpful that feature was when it comes to showcasing you the information that you want to see, or maybe ads that actually are helpful because I think right now, a lot of times people are like, "Oh, I want privacy and I want this and I want that"? But if you were to turn off a lot of the features that you're talking about, then you wouldn't really get the customized experience that people will do oftentimes appreciate in Google and other places. They wonder what that would look like.Nik:Yeah. Most of the people I've talked to have basically said a similar thing that they like the personalization and whatnot that comes with it. But there is definitely a pretty big group of people who would rather prefer that they never get targeted with an ad. Unfortunately, that's the threat to a lot of the small business advertisers out there.Stephanie:Yep, interesting. Well, when you guys have a little more insight into that, I'll just bring you back in here, how you guys are approaching it and what happens in January 15th.Nik:Yeah, definitely. Definitely.Stephanie:Cool. Give me a little background on Sharma Brands. I was seeing that you guys work with a lot of brands, some of which we've actually had on the show before, which is really cool to see. We've had [inaudible] and I think I saw two others. But tell me a bit about what is Sharma Brands and what do you guys do for the brands that you work with?Nik:Sharma Brands is like the secret of the internet. We don't really talk about it much publicly. But basically, what we do is we work with brands that are either just launching or have just launched. We either guide them through the launch or we pick them up right after launch. We work with brands that are midsize, brands that are doing really well and ideally want to do better, or we work with brands that are pretty big retail businesses that want to get their ecommerce business set up and on track. And so we come in and handle everything from strategy to execution, to implementation. A lot of it is testing, a lot of it is focused on creative and messaging and offer testing merchandising. We also do everything all the way to producing national TV spots, satellite radio, like basically helping brands venture out from the more traditional just Facebook ads or building a website.Stephanie:Got it. What inspired you to create Sharma Brands? I saw you had a lot of roles. You were the head of D2C for a couple of companies. I think you worked at Hint. Is that what led you to creating Sharma Brands, or tell me a little bit about that journey?Nik:Yeah. I've always had a knack for wanting to work on multiple brands, which is probably why Sharma Brands works. But separate from that, I don't know if we are even the perfect solution. I don't think we aren't because we don't really do everything. But there's not really a proper growth partner for a lot of these brands. There are media agencies, there's media companies, there are creative agencies, there are product development agencies, but there's really not many when it comes to true growth and helping them in things like scaling, going from 1 million to 10 million or 10 million to 60 million. And so we created this little niche where we help brands do just that. We try to stay on for no longer than six months per project. Our goal is to basically get in and do just an insane amount of testing so that by the time we leave, that brand knows exactly what's going to scale and what's not going to scale.Stephanie:Interesting. What kind of testing do you mean? What do you do throughout those six months to figure that out?Nik:It can be anything from copy, creative, landing pages, long form content. When I say creative, there's a whole variety of creative. There's the things like... We might test UGC, we might test influencers, we might test studio stuff, we might test just a whole variety of different types of content. We do the same thing when it comes to page experiences, so whether they're landing pages, whether they're listicles, articles, partnerships with companies like Morning Brew.Nik:And then of course, the last piece of it is the merchandising, so everything from offers and pricing to products, to what gets people in the door, what's the best product to sell them after that. And subsequent to that, how do we optimize for brands that are high consumption? How do we focus on subscription? How do we keep customer lifetime value high? How do we bring back repeat purchase rate without having to spend money to reacquire that customer? The goal is to figure an overwhelming majority of those types of things out so that by the time we're done, there's a very clear playbook that they can operate on for the next few months or a few years.Stephanie:Yep. I'm assuming that when you were working at Hint and other places, you started seeing similar things that were working and weren't working. Can you tell me a bit about what it was like working at those companies, or maybe you started uncovering a few universal truths around D2C?Nik:Yeah, working at Hint was great. It was a lot of fun. We grew really fast, which led us to a lot of challenges that we were able to overcome. But it gave me a lot of insight into the challenges that a lot of the brands face. Obviously, I think customer acquisition is one of the biggest things that brands don't necessarily understand or distribution, which is, I think, one thing we're really good at. But then after that, after you get to a point where you're able to acquire 1,000 customers a day sustainably and at reasonable prices, then how do you take those customers and service them further? How do you come up with products that feed those customers after what they've already bought if it's not a high consumption product? How do you think through unique partnerships that attract eyeballs that then give you the opportunity to sell those customers onto your brand? There's so many things. Basically, it all stems down to distribution. Good brands are really good at product and brand building. But then the idea of then getting that in front of other people is where the tough part comes in.Stephanie:And so how do you approach customer acquisition now, where maybe it was different than prior to 2020 because it feels like there's so many new companies in the space? Maybe not all of which will be here in a couple of years. There's a lot of companies. I think more businesses launched in 2020 than in 2019 and prior years. So how do you approach trying to compete and get the eyeballs and find new customers for your brands in a pretty competitive market right now?Nik:To be honest, we don't really take competitive brands into account. What we try to do is just be really innovative with the way that we message and get in front of people. For example, something as simple as like Judy, which is emergency kit you know, being able to really hone in on understanding whether it be by surveys or by looking at what types of messaging has better click through rates and conversion rates, understanding the types of messaging that people are reacting to, and then going really deep on it, all the way to coming up with funky partnership ideas like putting Poo-Pourri and Judy together because both brands service emergency situations.Stephanie:That's a really good partnership.Nik:Yeah, no, it's great. It's really just about like how do we stay ahead of competition? Most brands today probably run a very similar playbook of like, "Let's create some... text some images, put some ads up and run them to our homepage." We put that on steroids. We're testing maybe 17 different versions of creative or testing 7 different versions of landing pages or homepages or sites that they're leading to along with 37 different audiences that we're going after to understand which type of messaging converts better with which audiences.Stephanie:That's great. So how do you think about creating all those different types of messaging? How do you stay creative? I know when I'm thinking through ad copy, even for our company, once I create one or two or three, then I'm like, "That's all I got. I'm out." How do you guys stay creative and create like, what'd you say, 17 different landing pages? I mean, like a lot.Nik:Well, I have a team that's insanely creative, so that helps.Stephanie:That's helpful.Nik:But outside of that, I think one thing we do, which is honestly something anybody can do, is we try to look at every single review. So if we work with a brand, we try to read every single review and we will literally use a whiteboard and make a tally of the different value props and how many times they're mentioned and then use that to basically work backwards and understand messaging. So things like that to things like looking at comments on ads, to customer service emails and messages, to how are other people tweeting about it, how are other people taking press about a brand and then tweeting about the press or talking about that specific article. So we try to take in a variety of things. And then if all else fails, have a little glass of whiskey and take an approach with some fresh eyes.Stephanie:That's good. When it comes to large brands and small brands, we've been going through some of these challenges, but are the challenges the same for both big and small, or do you see completely different challenges depending on the size of the brand?Nik:I think that a lot of the challenges on the macro side are the same, but on the micro... On the macro side, for example, customer acquisition, right? A company that's doing 800 million versus a company that's just launched, both are going to be focused on how do we acquire customers smarter, better, faster, cheaper with higher lifetime value? But on the micro side, it's a little different because a company that's doing even 50 million in revenue has a lot more awareness to play off of. They have a lot more scale to go leverage things like partnerships with other brands, they have budgets to go to places like The Skimm and Morning Brew and other places like that versus a company that's just starting.Nik:They still have the same problem with customer acquisition, but they need to figure out even if they raised a little bit of money or if they did it, they need to figure out, "Okay, what is the fastest way for us to get 100 customers and then 1,000 customers and then 10,000 customers and then 50,000 customers." And obviously every time you hit that milestone, it gets easier and easier, but it's still the same. That's the challenge of how do you get in front of as many eyeballs as possible and also relevant eyeballs. You don't want to get in front of just eyeballs that are not going to convert for you.Stephanie:Yep. Are there any tools that you use to stay on top of maybe trends or what people are searching for, or even staying on top of like different kinds of audiences to reach and how to reach them in new ways, like new things you're doing maybe this year that you weren't utilizing in the past?Nik:One thing that we have started doing a lot more this year versus years in the past is really not taking creative too seriously. So, for example, like running memes as ads insanely outperforms things like really beautiful $30,000 photo shoots, or the way like... Do you use TikTok?Stephanie:Yes, I do. I love TikTok.Nik:I'm addicted to TikTok.Nik:With TikTok, I think if you look at the way TikTok has impacted culture or pop culture, I should say this year, it's pretty fascinating. Like when Instagram was big and there were Instagram models or even you could even say like... yeah, you could probably say even like big YouTubers, they don't really make news or make headlines, nor do they get, for example, flown out to fashion shows internationally to come walk in a runway. But TikTok has just completely taken 2020. And whether it's like TikTok is being flown out to Rome for fashion week or it's the fact that all of Snapchat discovers tabloid garbage is all influencers, there's something about TikTok that resonates really well with the masses.Nik:And so one thing we've been doing is testing, not only just testing TikTok's style videos, but also even the way... If you look in the comments of TikTok, I think the comment section is where the memes of tomorrow, or the memes of next month live. And so we've been [crosstalk] doing a lot of things where we test those. Those have been having really interesting results too. Just really like, again-Stephanie:All right, so give me some examples.Nik:... just a bunch of testing and fun stuff. My favorite is the... For example, if you were like this podcast is the perfect podcast for ecommerce operators, you would put the word operators in between the sparkles emoji, or just like random silly things that you see on TikTok. Yeah. It's hard to explain, but it just works so well.Stephanie:No, yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah. Well, tell me some of the most interesting comments that you've seen on TikTok that you've turned into memes.Nik:Well, the sparkles one is probably the easiest. Let's see. Outside of that, the eye mouth eye I think is hilarious. What else? What else? The concept of like it's the blank for me. There's just so many little inside jokes on TikTok that becomes so... Not only relevant on the outside world, but also people see it and they relate to it because they think they're the only ones that know about it because TikTok is such a one-to-one thing, you know?Stephanie:Yep, yeah. And then when you were talking about creating TikTok style ads, I'm assuming you're saying that you're creating an ad like you would create a video on TikTok and then you're actually putting it on other channels and platforms. Is that what you meant by that?Nik:Yeah.Stephanie:Yep. I was just thinking about that actually a couple of days ago. My head of growth is like, "Oh, can you create some audio ads and video ads and all this to help promote the shows or whatever?" And I was like, "Well, what's the easiest way for me to do that?" Honestly, creating it on TikTok, even if it's an unlisted video-Nik:Oh, 100%.Stephanie:Yeah, so much easier than trying to do anything else.Nik:The best ads in ecommerce are ones that do not look like billboards on the street. That's where a lot of brands go wrong is that when it comes to ads, they try to create this unique experience or this look that doesn't resonate with the common person. It's like no wonder they don't work because they look like if you see an ad, there's no chance you're going to sit there and be like, "Oh, an ad, let me watch this whole ad." All your ads have to feel like they're not ads. They have to feel like content that somebody maybe not wants to watch or needs to watch, but something that's intriguing enough where they're going to watch the first little bit, and then it's your job as the brand to hook them to watch the rest of it.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah, I love that. The other thing, now that we're talking about influencers and spreading things, I heard that your fridge is famous. You tell me a bit more about this because when I heard that, I'm like, "Isn't Nik an influencer? Why is his fridge famous and you're known for your fridge?" So give me the deets on this.Nik:Yeah, the fridge racks up impressions. That's for sure.Stephanie:Why? What is up with your fridge? Is it a fancy one?Nik:I'm just trying to look up real quick how many impressions the last one got. But no, it's funny because obviously I worked at Hint and I've worked with a bunch of different beverage brands. Yeah. So the last tweet about my fridge has 151,000 impressions.Stephanie:Why? What'd you say?Nik:It's nothing special. It's just the fact that a lot of people know me as a beverage marketer or beverage person. I'm just looking at this tweet from September 14th and my fridge has Taika, has Empathy Wines, it has Jock Coffee, it has Dose, which is like a new wellness shot, it has JuneShine, which is hard kombucha, it's got Sanzo, it's got OLIPOP, Red Bull, Orgain protein elements, which is a adaptogens beverage, and then a bunch of Hint Water.Stephanie:Close to D2C fridge. You're stacking it up.Nik:It's basically a D2C fridge. Yeah. And then depending on when you open it, you might see different drinks. There's another picture of the fridge I'm looking at. It's all RISE cold brew. It's got Lemon Perfect and it's got Cha Cha Matcha's ice tea lemonades.Stephanie:Interesting, interesting. And then so how are people engaging with this? How did it even start of you posted this picture and realizing people like to see what you were trying out, or what you were investing in, or what made them excited?Nik:Well, it started because a friend of mine, David Perell, basically posted a picture of my fridge, I want to say when I first moved to New York last year, or I think he might've done it when I lived in San Francisco. But then he posted about it and how like my fridge is basically a vending machine. And then all these beverage companies started responding. And then whenever I tweet about my fridge, I just get a flood of packages over the next 10 days from different beverage brands that want to be included in the next round of the fridge.Stephanie:That's really funny. But I also feel like it's helpful to see how to share things that get shared, that go viral because the best way to advise brands and other people is by doing it yourself.Nik:100%. That's always been the thesis behind any kind of public account that I have. Whether it's my community number, whether it's my email newsletter, whether it's my Twitter account, everything that I try to do is like, "Okay, I'm basically just testing it so that we can hopefully do this on a brand and it makes a big impact because maybe it's something that they haven't done before or just people in general haven't done before."Stephanie:Yep, yeah. That's very, very cool. So when you're working with all these brands, one thing that we've been discussing here at Mission lately is just about all these new users who are now online, a new demographic group is online shopping. They're getting used to it, they're going to be here probably for the long haul now that they have maybe ordered groceries or gone on Amazon for the first time. How are you working with your brands to ensure that their messaging and their interaction and that they may be personalizing things in a way that also connects with this new demographic of shoppers that weren't here prior to 2020?Nik:So basically, how should brands prepare for-Stephanie:Yeah, having like an older generation now who are ready to shop. And I'm sure the messaging or the way that brands are personalizing is usually towards millennials or 18 to 35 or 18 to 40. Everyone seems to focus on that same two generations, but the older generation are the ones that have the money. They're the ones who are ready to spend. They just haven't brought it really online until recently. But it seems like a lot of things have to change for it to also work well with them.Nik:Yeah. I think tactically, there's different things you can do, whether it's the channels that you choose to advertise on. So whether that's shifting budget out of Facebook and onto platforms like TV and satellite radio and connected TV even, or it's... One thing that I've found at a previous brand I worked with was that the creative we would put out that has, let's say, models or talent that looks like they're in their late 20s, early 30s is what resonated best with the audience groups over 45.Stephanie:Oh, interesting.Nik:So it might just even be something as simple as a shift in your creative to reach [crosstalk 00:27:11].Stephanie:Yeah. I wonder why that would be the case.Nik:Everybody aspires to be better looking or younger or smoother skin or whatever it may be. And that might be a reason. I think another way though too is thinking through just the ease of how something as simple like your website functions. How easy is it for somebody to come in and shop? I always send landing pages or websites to my mom. She'll look through it and be like, "This is confusing," or she'll be like, "This is perfect. It was one click and I was in the cart." And so we always go for the ladder as the goal. But the other thing too is like... One thing I always say is you got to treat your customers like Kim Kardashian on the red carpet and you're her assistant, right? The brand is the assistant. So you can't expect your customer, you can't expect them to go browse around your site and learn about your brand and learn why they need your brand, or how your brand is going to make their life better, or the deal that they might be able to get, or the coupon.Nik:There's so many brands that they clearly offer coupons when you Google, for example, like... I don't know. If you Google like... we'll say Jetblack because they're not a business. If you Google Jetblack coupon, there's probably 17 coupon sites that have a 10% or a 20% off coupon. But what you do is you now create an opportunity for somebody to leave the experience of checking out to go find that coupon. There's a good chance to just get distracted and never come back versus something as simple as like... Basically, what I'm trying to say is you want to create everything or you want to put everything in one simple experience so that somebody who has no time, somebody who has no patience, somebody you could assume they don't have the knowledge of how to navigate a site can basically come to your site and get what they need and they know why they're getting it and just create something really easy to use.Stephanie:Yep, yeah. I think frictionless shopping is the way of the future. The one thing about coupons though, I feel like they're just dangerous. Like you said, you leave the site... I know I used to back in the day, go through all these coupon codes and then I'd really get annoyed because none of them are working, all of them were expired. And yeah, it's still feels like there's room even on a website to be like, "You will never find coupons outside of our website. So don't try. Don't go looking around, don't go testing like 1,000 different codes. You'll find nothing. It's only here."Nik:Totally. The other thing too is like then you have companies like Honey, the browser extension, which are basically fraud companies, in my opinion, or scammy companies. And if you don't create something of an offer for let's say you run a... let's just say a beverage brand called Three Stars, and somebody comes to the Three Stars' site and they want to buy a variety pack because they're a new customer and they want to try the flavors. When they get to the checkout and they see, "Oh, there is no discount. Oh, but Honey says..." The Honey thing pops up and you click it because you're hopeful that there's a discount. Even if Honey generates no discount, Honey is going to refresh the page and now that becomes a 10% affiliate cut. The brand is paying the Honey without them even realizing it. The customer is not getting any value out of it. But because you didn't create the opportunity for them to check out without having to use Honey, you're now going to end up paying Honey 10% if they have it installed.Stephanie:Interesting. I hadn't realized that's how it [crosstalk 00:31:03].Nik:Yeah. Honey is a really scammy business. It's really scammy for brands.Stephanie:Oh, geez.Nik:I hate Honey with a passion.Stephanie:Oh my goodness. I actually think we had someone from Honey the long time ago before our commerce show was even live in the world. We had, I think, their COO on one of our other shows, Mission Daily. So if anyone's interested, go check out [inaudible 00:31:24].Nik:Yeah. It's a genius business model for them. Basically without showing the customer or without really showing the brand, they're just ripping 10% off of every purchase. And if you're selling like a $400 emergency kit, that's 40 bucks that they're making for everybody who just has an extension installed, but it's-Stephanie:And the brands can't control that, or they can't say-Nik:No, they can now. When I saw it, I went to them and said, "You guys, you're basically just taking credit for everything you're not driving." And they're like, "Oh, well, it's just the way that Honey works. We drive a lot of traffic." And I'm like, "No, you don't." So then we just shut them off. They just don't get paid now, even though they can still be used.Stephanie:Oh, interesting. So when thinking about outside of coupons, but more ways to connect with different users, what do you think about catalogs? Because we had a good discussion, I think, many episodes ago with one of the execs at Marine Layer, and she was talking about how great catalogs work for them. I haven't heard many people talk about it. So it seems like there's still an opportunity there though with so many people now working from home. I know I get excited about mail that's actually fun to look at and helpful. So how do you advise your brands on connecting with an audience through catalogs or paper mail?Nik:Personally, I'm a fan. I think it's a sign of luxury when I get a catalog, whether it's from a company like Buck Mason or Todd Snyder or [inaudible 00:33:06], like it's definitely a sign of luxury. The catalogs themselves are printed on very nice and chic paper. I think it just adds to the overall experience of being a customer at those brands. At the same time, if you're a brand that's just starting and you don't have the capital means to do it, I think there's ways you can create digital catalogs for fairly cheap and have them be digital experiences.Stephanie:Yep. When you have a catalog, I've heard some brands optimize for experience and fun and more of like a branding play versus others are focused on send them back to the website, get the conversion. How do you think about optimizing a catalog to work well?Nik:Well, I think it's two ways. One, you got to feature products that I think people want. So if your spring collection is 250 pieces of clothing or 250 different SKUs, maybe you feature the 27 that people really want. But then secondly, I think from a messaging standpoint, it's got to really make you salivate when you're going through it. That was [crosstalk 00:34:36].Stephanie:Like Trader Joe's catalog.Nik:Yeah. That was one of my favorite things about... Do you remember SkyMall?Stephanie:Yeah, yup.Nik:SkyMall just made you want to buy everything in that magazine because everything was like, "Oh, a random flashlight for under my desk chair. Sure. That now seems like something I totally need."Stephanie:Yep, yep, I agree. I just saw something in a catalog that I actually ended up buying. It's a... What is it? A candle lighter, but it's not like a big flame thing. It's operated by battery. It has this really long stick on the end and it's intense, it's awesome. Everyone should check it out. We'll link it up in our show notes. But I bought that from a catalog because it was showing it going inside a really deep candle. I was convinced. And it's amazing.Nik:Yeah, no, totally. It's all about like building... You want to build a use case for somebody to go tell their friends why they bought what they bought from you. That's like the best way to market.Stephanie:I think you also have to have good paper quality though.Nik:100%.Stephanie:I hate the catalogs that come with just like icky, thin paper, and it's just 1,000 pages and I'm like, "It doesn't feel curated. Just every thing is here. I don't even know how to look through this in a way that makes sense for me," versus the ones that are just 10 pages. It's what you want to look at, or just the best thing that feels like it's personalized, even though it's probably not. I'm okay with that as long as it feels high quality.Nik:Totally.Stephanie:Let's jump over to a little bit higher level ecommerce question of where do you guys think ecommerce as a whole and D2C is headed over the next couple of years? What are you preparing for right now, or what big thing?Nik:Well, I think that ecommerce, as a whole, is going... There's been a ton of innovation this past year and the year prior, both on the side of operations, things like understanding you can't blow cash on acquiring customers, all the way to understanding how to optimize shipping costs or manufacturing costs or even using tools like Settle, which let you basically hack your cash flow. I think, to be honest, over the next year or two, it's just going to be a lot of growth in the category across many different categories that maybe thought they weren't going to be ecommerce. Everything from sitting at a restaurant and now... Obviously, we see QR codes everywhere, at least in major cities, at restaurants for scanning and getting the menu.Nik:I think we're going to see that you're going to start paying your bill through Apple Pay after you order your meal, all the way to things like better experiences with packaging and unboxing or just how you learn about a brand for the first time after you buy it. But I think there's also going to be a rise in things like marketplaces. There's a company that I just joined called The Fascination. And basically, the entire idea behind The Fascination is to take a lot of these cream of the crop direct to consumer CPG brands that are independently trying to acquire the same customer and basically put them together, create content around it, and create shoppable content.Nik:So, for example, if you have a daughter who's moving to... I don't even know if people are going to be going to college next year. But let's say she's going to college next year, and it's like the ultimate list of things you need for your dorm, it's got your mattress topper, it's got your pillows, your comforter, it's got your desk lamp, it's got organizers. You would be able to basically shop all of this in one page with one checkout through The Fascination. And on the back end, all these brands are getting orders basically pushed into their order queues. The Fascination basically just takes a tiny cut, like an affiliate. But the brands own the customer, they own the relationship with their customers, they have the ability to remarket to those customers. And The Fascination acts as a front of acquiring the customer and now selling maybe eight things at once.Stephanie:Oh, that sounds really cool. I think that's much needed with so many new brands popping up right now too. It just feels like sometimes I don't even know who to trust and who's actually got their back end filled out. Is this just the landing page that they're testing out to see if people actually want a product that they haven't even developed yet? So it seems like it's needed to have a trusting source like that to say, "These are some of the best brands and we've verified them and you've got customer service here and we're reputable and blah, blah, blah."Nik:Yeah. And that's another thing too is there are a lot of sketchy brands that have launched because the barrier to entry is so low. What The Fascination is trying to do is basically the same way you have like a kosher sticker on food items or a gluten-free sticker that's very universally known. I think they're going to basically try to do the same thing, but for four brands.Stephanie:That's awesome. Yeah. I will have to check that company out, maybe bring them on the show. Sounds like [crosstalk 00:42:39].Nik:Yeah, yeah. They would be a great one to bring on.Stephanie:Yep. The other trend I'm excited to watch this next year is last mile and see how that evolves, especially with the food delivery companies and the DoorDash and Grubhubs of the world starting to actually just work with local retailers to fulfill last mile deliveries. And I think that whole industry is about to have a big evolution. So that'll be an interesting one to watch.Nik:Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean companies like Ohi or even FastAF, they're doing some pretty awesome things when it comes to last mile delivery.Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yep, yeah. I agree. All right. Well, let's move over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Nik?Nik:I'm ready.Stephanie:All right. What's up next on your reading list?Nik:Ooh, I would say the book Supermaker by Jaime Schmidt.Stephanie:Oh, that's a good one. Yep, sounds good. What is your favorite business book that you refer back to?Nik:Atomic Habits.Stephanie:And you're on it. You're like, "Are you top of mind? I got this great." Sounds great. What topic or trend do you not understand today that you wish you did?Nik:Bitcoin.Stephanie:I've had a couple of people say that. What's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you.Nik:The nicest thing anybody's ever done for me is-Stephanie:I had to stump you. You were too on it. You were too lightning.Nik:Yeah, that's a good question. Honestly, my favorite is when just people just reach out randomly and say, "Hey, how's your day?"Stephanie:You like that? Sometimes I'm like-Nik:I love it.Stephanie:... "What do you want? Get to the point."Nik:Yeah. Well, sometimes you can tell when people have a reason for asking. But when a genuine friend just texts you out of the blue and just says, "Hey, how's your day going?" It's always nice to know.Stephanie:Yep, yep. Okay, a friend. I thought you meant just like a random Twitter person.Nik:Oh, no, no, no.Stephanie:I'll get messages on Twitter like-Nik:No, no, no, a good friend.Stephanie:... "Hi, how are you?" I'm like, "What? Who are you? Why are you asking me how I am?" That's weird. Ah, 2020. What's up next in your travel destinations when you can travel again? Where do you want to go?Nik:I want to go to Jamaica actually with a friend of mine, Chris Hall, and a few of his friends. He's got a pretty good setup there in Jamaica for quick trips out there. So I'm looking forward to hopefully in February maybe go there for a few days and just unplug from work.Stephanie:Oh, that sounds fun. Chris, bring me out there as well. That'd be great. What's up next on your Netflix queue?Nik:Ooh, actually there was... I forget the name of the comedian, Andrew Schulz maybe. He just launched a stand up. I saw it yesterday and I added it to my list. So that's next up on my queue.Stephanie:Oh, that sounds good. I'll have to check it out. If you like it, I'll check it out. What are you most excited about to add to your fridge next?Nik:Ooh, that's a good question. There's a beverage that we are launching called Barcode in-Stephanie:Barcode.Nik:... Q1 next year. It's with the former head trainer of the New York Knicks, who's also a big celebrity trainer, as well as with Kyle Kuzma, who's a championship Lakers player. It's basically a healthier version of Gatorade and it tastes incredible and it's got everything. It's like everything he would prescribe or give to his athletes, but bottled up in one drink.Stephanie:Oh, that sounds good because I do like Gatorade. But then when I'm drinking, I'm like, "I know this isn't good for me."Nik:It's horrible for you.Stephanie:Yeah, it is delightful though.Nik:It is.Stephanie:All right. And then the last one, if you were to have a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be?Nik:I've actually been thinking about this recently. It would probably be about the struggles of commerce that people go through. So it would only be focused on problems people have had in their business, not the successes and not focused on people who've successfully exited. It is strictly focused on people who have, for example, not figured out how something works or how they're going to get through something. I don't know why, but I always keep thinking my first guest is going to be Paul, who's the founder of Prose, which is a haircare brand.Stephanie:Okay. I think that sounds great. I love stories like that, where people can actually learn something and because there's so many... Any media article is always like, "Oh, here's the end result. And now, they're a billion dollar company. Oh, and they exited, Oh, they got acquired." It's like, well, what actually happened where they failed because I don't want to fail too and I know they have some kind of knowledge of things that I could avoid, that's why I love biographies and stuff because you can read it and essentially accelerate your knowledge through that person's life and hopefully avoid some of the pitfalls they went through.Nik:Totally. And not only that, but also then for all the people listening who might be starting a business, or might be getting themselves into a position where they're not really sure what to do, it almost becomes an encyclopedia where, "Oh, Paul had no clue where to get you pumps at low MOQs for his shampoo bottles. How did he figure out what they were and where he could find them and not get ripped off?"Stephanie:Yep, yep, yeah, or I always love the stories when people are going overseas to find manufacturers and hearing things that they encounter. I forget what brand we were talking to on the show where they... I went into one of the warehouses and they were selling apparel and they were like... and all of the employees were smoking and all the stuff smelled like smoke. It's like I would have never realized that unless I actually went over there and was doing an audit before moving forward with one of them.Nik:Yeah, totally.Stephanie:Very cool. Well, Nik, thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing all your knowledge. Where can people find out more about you and Sharma Brands?Nik:The easiest is my website, which is just nsharma.co, or the second easiest which I read every tweet, every message is my Twitter @mrsharma.Stephanie:Awesome. Yeah, just go to Nik and say, "Hi, how are you?"Nik:Exactly.Stephanie:All right. Thanks so much, Nik.Nik:Thank you.
Access to goods is still an issue for millions of people around the world, but recently, ecommerce has been leveling the playing field. With so many direct-to-consumer operations in business today, the average consumer has more choice and therefore more access than ever before. But there’s one industry that stands out as lagging behind this trend: Coffee. That’s one of the reasons that Pernell Cezar co-founded BLK & Bold Specialty Beverages. Pernell is a long-time coffee lover and saw an opportunity to turn that passion into a business that could also make a big social impact. Historically, coffee has been hyperlocal, but he envisioned a business model that democratized access and brought specialty coffee to everyone. The only problem was that neither Pernell nor his co-founder had any experience in the coffee business other than as consumers. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Pernell reveals how they were able to turn BLK & Bold into a nationally-distributed product, including how they turned a mission-driven ecommerce business into a retail one by securing partnerships with places like Whole Foods and Target. Plus, he explains the importance of giving potential customers multiple ways to find your product, and the value of finding mentors to help you fill in your blindspots.Main Takeaways:The Way In: Having multiple ways and messaging for potential customers to find and want to engage with you is a great way to build a base. But when one of those ways is through a social impact mission, you have to also be sure the product quality and experience delivers. Tune in to hear how Pernell thought about striking this balance.Stick To The Plan: Entering retail can be an exciting milestone for your business, but it’s important not to rush the process. You should have a checklist of things you want/need to accomplish in order to set yourself up for success. Whether it’s with your packaging, other partnership, or logistics, be patient and get them done because a failed retail launch is hard to come back from. Share With The Class: When you’re just starting out, be open about what you are doing and on the lookout for anyone who might be able to help or mentor you. Small conversations can lead to critical connections that can propel you further than you’d be able to get on your own. You will have blindspots, and addressing them sooner means saving more time and money in the long run.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey everyone, and welcome back. This is Stephanie Postles, and you're listening to Up Next in Commerce. Today on the show we have Pernell Cezar. He's the co-founder and the CEO of BLK & Bold Specialty Beverages. Pernell, welcome.Pernell:Thank you for having me.Stephanie:I'm excited to have you on the show. I actually just saw some of your coffees in a Whole Foods around here. I was like, "Hey, he's joining us." It was perfect timing.Pernell:[crosstalk 00:00:30]. I love it.Stephanie:I'd love to hear a little bit about BLK & Bold, what is it? And let's dive right into your founding story because I know you have a good one.Pernell:Sure thing. BLK & Bold, we are a coffee roastery out of Des Moines, Iowa, founded about two and a half years ago really from the length of conversations that my childhood best friend, who's actually my co-founder, his name is Rod. I'll likely reference him a few times here. Him and I had just in teenagers, talking about whatever to being professionals and being time strapped and wanting to make sure that we were spending our dollars more consciously to support initiatives that we really felt we didn't have a lot of time to put into like we wanted to.Pernell:After so much ideation around our ritualistic beverages and coffee and tea, we really decided to focus on connecting everyday consumers back to their community by way of turning those beverages into vehicles for impact, and in which we launched BLK & Bold with the initiative to tangibly give back to disadvantage youth by way of giving 5% of our profits back to initiatives across the US that service specifically that demographic, but then also making specialty coffee and the delicacy of coffee and tea more accessible in conventional spaces where people shop already and not have it be confined to the independent shops that exist in neighborhoods across the US.Stephanie:Very cool. How did you decide to start with coffee? Because I read you didn't really have a background in that, and I was watching your video where you guys were starting it, I think, in your garage and you were trying to figure out what buttons to press and it was really fun just seeing how you really didn't know what you were doing. How did you land on that idea and decide like, this is the one.Pernell:Professionally, I didn't come from the coffee industry per se. However, as a consumer, I have user experience as a consumer. And going-Stephanie:You're a pro.Pernell:Yeah, exactly. Going across that journey, I always call it the coffee spectrum in the sense of what you like and what you don't like. And that's really where the curiosity book hit us where just traveling so much professionally in one state of my career and I just became immersed with the coffee shop culture. Visiting city A, city B, city C and falling in love with these different shops but they all have different menus. And so you learn to appreciate the different tiers of coffee, especially the specialty coffee, the more premium side of things, and really enjoyed that.Pernell:But again, the accessibility of these different experiences or product experience that we learned was hard to consistently access. And it then became a matter of like, "Okay, well, what is this? And why is this?" And from there, it was a matter of, "Okay, well, let me see if I can make this." And that hints the sample roaster journey back in our garage with me really just wanting to see how is this made, and the complexity of it went down the rabbit hole from there. So I always equate it to people that have heard someone's craft brewing story and starting that journey in their basement with a few tools here and there. It's pretty much the same approach from just a coffee junkie and wanting to learn more about it, but also have access to the different things that I was learning. So just kind of taking in our own hands.Stephanie:I love that. What were some of the biggest surprises when you were trying to find the beans and the equipment and all that? What were some of the biggest surprises you encountered when starting out?Pernell:I would say, the initial shock was just how massive, complex, the coffee manufacturing side is, whether you're talking about the sourcing of beans, which was part of your question, but also literally the manufacturing piece of it. The diversity of equipment needed, the diversity of capabilities, there's just a ton of science that goes into the process of turning a crop, which is coffee coming from the pit of a coffee cherry plant, or a fruit from a coffee cherry plant and turning that into this fine, ground product that you are brewing and drinking. And the nuances in between that to uphold integrity of that is really the really enjoyable part of the science that just, you don't know until you peek behind the curtain, fall down the rabbit hole and the learning process begins from there. So it's not as difficult to fall in love with if you're curious, because of just the many nuances in ways it becomes an art after you get going.Stephanie:That's very cool. And did you guys launch ecommerce first or were you also exploring retail as well? How did you think about that launch?Pernell:Sure thing. Obviously our go-to-market strategies much more cemented in our ideation of building the brand upfront. And so to make more sense out of that, for us, looking at building a brand in coffee in the modern day coffee climate, mind you pre-COVID, for modern day coffee climate where you have independent shops and then you have of course the conventional grocery isles and the lack of accessibility, but you also have ecom continuing to be ingrained in people's lifestyle in purchasing habits every single day. But when you look at part of the reason why coffee hadn't been accessible so much in more conventional spaces, ecoms, is because of how hyper-local the product is, and the hold coffee shop culture has on people's behaviors and what their preference is.Pernell:For us, it was a matter of, well, we are looking to shift the economics of how currency impacts domestic youth. And in order to do that in the commodity category, you have to be able to scale it. And if we go into shops, the margin is much tighter where we it's harder to make a sustainable contribution. But if we manufacture and we wholesale, it gives us more room to make the contribution more sustainable. And by way of that, we need to make more access and scalable environments such as retailer distribution and/or ecom. And so in thinking of that and understanding that, but knowing that, all right, we're going after this with little to no resources self-funded and with our own validation and learning curves to go from that. And so we for sure launched with ecom as our fastest point of entry, but also a place where has to validate the concept.Pernell:And so our ecommerce platform as well as social media, the idea of ... well, there's tons of micro roasters that pop up every day, but to pop up, but also with a very different rhetoric on being this domestic impact model, we needed to find validation that consumers were interested in that as well. And so very long-winded answer to, yes, ecom was the way we started, very much part of our DNA in the sense of being ready to own our message and also provide accessibility for people given that we don't have our own storefront.Stephanie:I love you started with the social impact model to derive results you wanted. How much did that really push you to think bigger and be like, "I'm not just going to go to one of the coffee shops and sell to them. We need big results with our model and to do that, we need the wholesale model. We need retailers, we need ecommerce we need like everything."Pernell:Yeah, for sure. We have to believe upfront, and building a hypothesis for a business that the sediments that resonated with us on there being a void of values and tangible values that were relevant for us, that other people, if that opportunity existed, we'd align to that as well. And I guess because of that, that allowed us to really focus upfront on what channels make the most sense, I guess. And so the shift in consumer behavior and the validation from consumers shifting their behavior, I want to back up and say, not behavior more so than mindset. We want consumers to still consume coffee, consume especially coffee, but we want them to know that brand B versus their brand A actually has a different value proposition that allows you to extend your impact without really changing your behavior. And that allows us to actually become considered a lot earlier than going at it in a more conventional way.Pernell:And so that was very much key for us in the sense of how do we make it easy for people to extend an impact without having to change their behavior, which allows us to then get them on board, allows us to get retailers on board, allows us to get businesses on board, all around shifting the commerce to be able to scale the impact domestically. So it's a little much of a lift for everyday people, but to have a much more relevant tangible sustained impact.Stephanie:Got it. And it seems like that story in that messaging definitely helped put you guys on the radar of a lot of new customers. Was that one of the key ways that you acquire new customers and they found out about you was getting that messaging out there and getting that PR out there for like what you guys stood for to then bring in new clients, or were there other tactics you used to bring in your first customer?Pernell:Yeah, no doubt. There's a fine balance because for us, we look at multiple entry points or propositions for where we can be in someone's consideration set. And then as they enter into understanding our brand and they learn more about what we stand for and ideally one if not all of them, resonate as well. And that strengthens the loyalty of if they have loyalty to the product, if they entered us through the product proposition, and/or from a brand values, and then they also love the product. And so the storyline no doubt allows for accessibility when we are introduced to someone in a non-tangible space. And so we can scale our story to impact this is normal that we're looking to bring in the sense of domestic social impact versus someone is shopping in the coffee aisle and so forth. So it definitely gives us a much more scalable share of voice that people can discover us a lot faster given the sensorial experience that most people usually choose coffee for.Stephanie:Got it. And at what point did you launch on Amazon? Because I saw you guys are listed there. When did you decide it was the right time to sit on Amazon?Pernell:Amazon was always part of our model as well. It was a matter of the prioritization of the learning curve. We launched June 1st of 2018. We had our core coffee items that Q4 of 2018 set up. And it was really a matter of just having them active so we can learn, and kick the wheels and make sure that we're not doing more harm being on Amazon and not for Amazon's sake but for, again, the learning curve. And then again, transitioning into, let's see, throughout 2019, the trial and error of learning that. But then with 2020 and prior ... let's call it, this 2019 was a matter of being digitally native, but ramping up and preparing to launch in brick and mortar.Pernell:And so once we got past that milestone at the beginning of 2020, of course, fast forward COVID, being on Amazon allowed us to pivot more fully into maturing, what that experience, that digital experience on Amazon looked like. And so while we were on Amazon, let's call it about 15 months prior to launching our formal storefront. When we launched our foremost storefront in early April this year, that's where we really were able to drive people to who we were, what we represented in a way that it was much more convertible given that people were ... this shift of coffee and consumerism and accessibility changed completely of course because of COVID.Stephanie:Yep. So essentially you were shifting over to retail and then COVID hit, and then you were like, okay, now back to Amazon, back to our platform and you had to quickly change once the world started changing.Pernell:For sure. I think the benefit was that we were already digitally native and our site being the hero experience, having an extension by way of Amazon and the size of traffic and consumers they have. But no doubt when it became time to diversify our revenue streams, fortunately, we were much further ahead of the Amazon experience look like then more of the, it's called the indie boutique micro roasters that relied on shops and didn't have a digital experience. They had to then began the learning process as well.Stephanie:You were already ahead of the game.Pernell:Fortunately. The case study for us was a matter of, can we accelerate our awareness curve of what we stand for in order to convert enough people at a healthy enough rate that without having a shop, we can convince those consumers to purchase more coffee for home or those that were buying coffee at conventional grocery areas that the quality and the value proposition of a slightly higher price point is still worth it for them at least to get them bought in? And so the shift of COVID and the states closing and all the shops being closed, it's completely changed the necessity of everyday people to have to purchase more for home and we were fortunate on the front end of that just from a digital standpoint. Brick and mortar as well, because of the timing of us launching was just ahead of the pandemic really showing his face, but the digital pieces was definitely huge.Stephanie:Yeah. Before we get into brick and mortar, I want to dive a bit more into how you sell on Amazon. How does it differ when you sell an Amazon or what are you seeing right now versus your customers that maybe buy from your website or customers that even buy from target.com or something? Do you have different messaging or what kind of things are you seeing behind the scenes?Pernell:We offer a singles as well as a bundles, two packs. And just from a sheer economic standpoint one of the old challenges from being a omni-channel brand that also lives on is retail price and the disruption of an everyday price with the retailer versus what he shows up on Amazon. For us, we worked through Amazon's fulfillment centers and allows us to control the price, but from a bundle standpoint, it allows us to ensure that we have the same product proposition, but in no way shape or form any pricing activity would disrupt because they are from a item count standpoint, different experiences. And so that was a core piece of how we stood up our business initially, and some of our bundle items do better than our singles. The ones that don't do better do about just as strong.Pernell:And so seeing people go on Amazon really as a basket builder, it has been huge. And even from an awareness play on the amount of users that Amazon has, we focus specifically our consumer acquisition on Amazon platform. So we don't really focus on driving people to Amazon because there's so much space to play and win within Amazon as we're still early on as well. To the other pieces, as our site continue to build, we have seen pure incrementality from the Amazon platform where we don't see the shift of trading one consumer from one to the other. It's very key to being an awareness play for us, but then just, we have to also come back to the reality of consumer dynamics. And what does the social landscape look like? What does the economical landscape look like that's impacting those consumers? And the focus on supporting small businesses, supporting black-owned businesses, and then the accessibility of specialty coffee.Pernell:People are much more intentional about whether they want to save a dollar for Amazon or shave two days off Amazon versus support individuals that are trying to build their businesses and support them where margin is much more supportive and favorable. And we've seen the incrementality on both sides from consumers that are more mature on Amazon and those that are really looking to put their dollar further into the business to support the businesses during these times.Stephanie:Yep. That's great. Your users on Amazon, do they seem stickier? Because I often think about like, when I'm checking out whether it's through using Whole foods or whatever on Amazon, they always give me the recommendations or they're like, "You'll just buy this again." And I'm very quick to be like, "Okay, sure." And it seems like I'm a very sticky user when it comes to reorders. How does that customer profile from your Amazon customers seem to differ from people who are maybe just going direct to your website because they want to make sure to support the business and the message and they understand that by going there directly, it's probably going to help margins and the story behind it.Pernell:To a certain degree, our engagement is really high on our platform and with our community and our email list as well as on social. And so we get a lot of stickiness from our existing community and bringing them in. And so from an anecdotal read, there's just a significant amount of loyalty, not just to what we're doing, but what we're offering. And our subscription business is really strong on our site. When we do drop new launches, we also see a quick adoption on those as well, and so we have much more flexibility on those. Just launched a limited edition collection just ahead of the holiday season. We're able to fluidly do that where in Amazon, while it's not a brick and mortar, you still have to have much more lead time built into that versus being nimble as a small business.Pernell:And so even in putting something else that adds a little bit more complexity, it's incremental from a experience, from a product standpoint. Our consumers also still highly converted on that even though we have a strong subscription business. The Amazon piece is, what we see is also very sticky, but we still have much more conventional tactics on whether it's a prize promotion here or there or the affiliate programs that come from press that are driving the Amazon. We see those strong conversion pickups as well. But I would say again from an incrementality, we are pleased with the learnings that we have right now from the stickiness of it, but at the end of the day, we still from the recording of today, we are still, in this pandemic and trying to navigate life through it and the loyalty from coffee isn't going away anytime soon. And so I think people, wherever they're most comfortable with shopping are still highly susceptible to converting because they know that they need that fuel.Stephanie:Yeah. I think that's smart as you were mentioning to develop a different kind of experience on your website, not only with subscriptions, but also limited edition drops. So you get early access to and developing that community seems key. How do you go about, not only curating and developing a community, but also keeping them engaged for that longterm?Pernell:Yep. No doubt. I think the most important piece of this is no doubt customer service and experience. What we don't want to be is a one trick pony in the sense of, hey, we can do these two things really well because coffee is very vast. And as I mentioned earlier, the spectrum of coffee is really wide. And so we don't want to be too linear to offering only certain flavor profiles whereas as people either discover new brands or their options of how they safely access their daily fix of coffee or caffeine, that we then follow it lower in the consideration, or we just have to lean on whatever consumer habits that they had in the current, but we'll then be in the past.Pernell:And so for us, it's a matter of continuing to diversify, evolve what the experience and options are on our platform in particular and try to drive our email list and drive as many people to our site, so we can capture and engage with them so we can continue to evolve with them on their coffee journey and make sure that our offering is healthy enough, that we can do that without gridlocking our operations and our other distribution priorities.Stephanie:Let's talk a bit about retail. You're in some good stores. I saw you're in Whole Foods, Target, and I was reading a bit about how you got in front of these retailers. I think you were going to sourcing call events where they had like pop-up events. And I was wondering, how did you get in front of these retailers? How did you peak their interest and what was that process like?Pernell:For sure. A big piece of BLK & Bold and my co-founder and I bringing this to life was our formal background prior to. We launched this in our 30s, our early 30s and Rod's background being in philanthropy and fundraising with higher education healthcare, and mine being in corporate merchandising, brand business development around packaged goods. And so the lens that we took to the white space of coffee was a by-product of what lanes exists within coffee. And the understanding that the accessibility gap was huge when you stepped out of a premium specialty coffee shop that's in neighborhood A somewhere, and trying to carry that across the country. And so, understanding that we know where the opportunity is, which again, ecom retailer shelves, now we have to build something viable enough that allows for them to consider us from whatever the right starting point is and from the way those retailers test or minimally launch.Pernell:And so our journey throughout 2018 and 2019 was operations, learning curve and validation of consumer marketing. We did a ton of road shows, just consumer shows engaging them on the product. And the aha moments for most of them were the 5% for our youth model that we have. It wasn't where they were introduced to us. It was supplementary validation for them. And so continuing to drive that part. But then also just from formal background within retail, understanding that there's different engagement points. We are a certified minority business enterprise, which is a national certification organizations out like that, where they have shows and tons of industries that attend these to meet diverse or minority owned businesses. And fortunately for us, we have visibility to select retailers that attended these as well.Pernell:In addition to digital platforms, there's one called a RangeMe for those that are not familiar, that is a virtual marketplace for all packaged goods brands and merchants, which is hyper dependent in today's climate, where corporate is not allowing people to travel. And so knowing where to start and having something viable was number one. Number two is being a student of those retailers isles. Understanding who was in the competitive space, how long they were there, what a swarm in they were there for so you can understand what their core consumer was, but then what value proposition do we incrementally bring for that merchant? What problem are we solving for that merchant? And so that was a big piece of when we had our opportunity to engage with these different retailers. Target, for an example, we understood what value proposition we were looking to bring to them. The conversation from there became a matter of readiness operationally, organizationally, to be able to launch and sustainably start with intention, of course, sustainably growing.Stephanie:And was there a bit of back and forth with the retailers when they were like, "We're interested, we love your model, the coffee is great." Were they giving you any guidance on, here's what we think will do well on the shelves or here's how to set yourself apart, or was that really all on you guys to do the research, figure it out and present, here's some maybe new packaging that we think will do well at Whole Foods?Pernell:Yup. For sure. It definitely, it can be either way. We had our first, let's call it national launch or a major launch was with Target Corporation, at the beginning of this year on about 300 ... it was 350 stores across the major markets within the US. The conversation and the process of having that launch was about a nine month process from introduction to essentially the product arriving on the shelf. And this was from our social media engagement and fortunately word of mouth being passed on to Target for a show that they were having, we received an invite and we were fortunate to have an introduction with the coffee buyer and allowed us to further the conversation, this is not only our business model, but our case, the consumer that we're looking to capture and the incrementality of that consumer to retail.Pernell:But then, thereby also helped us understand where our strategic priorities were in a sense of how this space is set up and where there may be room to identify the incrementality if it's really there. And so the feedback on just the core consumer that we're going after and aligning on that was very real. And quite honestly, for us, while we had that opportunity to have the connection and the conversation, we knew we weren't ready because where our packaging was, we had a checklist of key things that we wanted to accomplish before we entered onto a shelf, so we can have our best foot forward, and we were halfway through that checklist. And so the merchant said, "Hey, well, when do you think you're ready? Well, here's the key things that we need to accomplish."Pernell:B Corp certification was one, which was, we hadn't got through the finish line on it yet, and the rebrand on packaging and also some of our operational scalability. And so that nine month journey was really with, understand the strategic vision values and knowing that with accomplishing that, we can have a solid start together to go push it through. In January with that launch then gave us the opportunity to credibly approach other merchants with some understanding that we were already vetted and well equipped to enter into their shelves as well if we had the same alignment on the value proposition. So the Whole Foods conversation was a lot more in the sense of, "Hey, we see what you're doing here. Here's some of the assortment that you have that we think will work really well is some feedback on what may not be yet, but let's get started and let's find out together."Pernell:And so it was much more collaborative in the starting point and from my experience, that's exactly what you want. If you're pitching to retailers with the hope that they will take whatever you're pitching, I made the perfect vision, they didn't ask me a question, they're going to take it. Where the risk is that they don't understand enough of where your blind spots may be, and you're all going to find out-Stephanie:Yeah, you want to partner.Pernell:Yeah. You all are going to find out together and that's the last thing, because it's really expensive to back out of distribution. So any who.Stephanie:That's so smart. I love the idea that you had the checklist going into it and you were open with Target, like, here's the things that we need to knock out. Tell me a bit more about what else was on that checklist and why were they important? Like why were you looking to have that B Corp certification and what else was on the checklist on top of that?Pernell:Sure thing. The B Corp I would say is a major one. I have to remember some of the smaller ones, but the B Corp was a major one mainly from being in retail. And once you learn about B Corp, it's hard to unsee it. But it being a ... it's essentially a independent organization that certifies businesses, those that value stakeholders equivalent with shareholders. And so being for-purpose being equally as important as for-profit and you have organizations like Ben & Jerry's, Tom Shoes, Warby Parker, Patagonia, these major organizations that are all at B Corp, they continue to move into improving society while again, building sustainable businesses.Pernell:And for us with, having this domestic social impact focus, the model doesn't exist. It's unfortunate it doesn't, but that's also a core reason of why we decided to go into this space. And knowing that, given that it doesn't exist and at the scale that we have to start at, we want it to be taken serious to our consumers and our stakeholders on the intention of where we're going while we work on getting there. And so with the launch into retail and being on the national stage, we took it various cities to make sure that we have third party validation vetted out already for us, for people that can engage with the brand.Stephanie:I don't know much about court structures. Are there also benefits that come with being a B Corp?Pernell:Yep. There's different tiers of ... you can incorporate it as a B Corp if your state has that as a legal option. And that I think there's definitely a different tax implications for being a legal B Corporation. And then there for states that don't, and this is the way that it was initially set up is that there's a certification and you're certified by, it's called B Labs, which is the umbrella organization. So you're certified by B Labs. And then as they continue to build momentum and further penetrate their models where the states began to allow it to be a legal entity structure.Stephanie:Got it. And then tell me a bit about, so you're getting into these new retail locations and you're working on your packaging and getting certifications. Tell me about how you guys are preparing for the orders. What were you doing behind the scenes with distribution and logistics and setting up partnerships? What did that look like?Pernell:Chaos.Stephanie:Craziness to say the least.Pernell:Yep. Chaos. Again, self-funded bootstrap and never want to put the cart before the horse was really a matter of trusting our forecast and building enough bandwidth to at least get through the initial hump of a national launch. And so then instead of today, we do everything in-house. We source and we work with our importers. They move the goods right with export departments, but we are identifying what origins we want to source through. We're doing all of the testing cupping and validating the integrity of what we're putting into our product. We micro roast in-house, we package in-house and we work we shipping partners to get goods out the door.Pernell:And so at the time, we had graduated from the garage and in to a shared production space with a local brewery. That's where we had our commercial roaster and we essentially had to tighten up our ship, bring onboard a few individuals that had coffee background in roasting and packaging to help us get the Target launch out of the door. And so that was a mad hustle because again, it was, here's what we are, here's the bandwidth we have, we're going a 100% capacity, sometimes a little bit more than that to get the launch out of the door with the intention of sourcing a new location that we can grow into. And so, fast forwarding that story, we had identified a location and we're closing the deal in March. And of course pandemic changed all of that. And so we found ourselves still running idol in that location for a while, but it wasn't with a bevy of orders and things until we started getting further into the summer. And that's when we got flooded in that space with orders go on and so forth.Stephanie:If you were to look back and change anything, what things would you have done different if you were to start again? And it can't be everything. You just got to pick me like, there's this one thing when I was setting up my partners or distribution or with the retailers I would've maybe done this differently.Pernell:It's tough because there's been too many reasons because there's so many learnings and it sounds so cliche, and that's why I was trying to prevent it sounds so cliche, but there are so many learnings that if I didn't learn them then I'm going to have to learn them later and I just don't know it yet. Because we are continuously learning and it's not just about coffee, but it's about, you're in a space where we are looking to win over over the longterm consumers into not only what product was selling, but the impact that we're selling and there's so many curves along the way. And so I am happy to have the learnings that we do have in the bank checked off. I think more so it's a matter of how do we continue to broaden our view to mitigate blind spots?Pernell:What I would say is one of the things that was hugely helpful early on as we were initially launching with literally our hearts on our shoulder was sharing what we were looking to build with some other professionals, just more mentor related people in the network. And as our informal mentors, that fortunately connected in to a formal mentor that was previously executive within the industry and just gave me a history download on how coffee and the industry came to be. And that in itself, just broadened context more so than why you have to, you're crossing Ts and dotting Is and every single step of the process. But to have that broader context of how the industry around you got to its point just fast forwarded that blind spot for sure. I would just try to color it all in.Stephanie:Do you have other mentors right now that you rely on or that help when it comes to guidance or showcasing what else is happening in the industry or ecommerce as a whole that you lean on?Pernell:Yes and no. Informal, for sure. Students of work, without a doubt. I think it's important to have a broad lens on what's working across different industries in digital in particular. And so if you rely on someone that's hyper-focused on a particular industry, then it may mitigate you from having your antennas up to learn about other things that are working elsewhere. But I'd say informal, yes. But tapping into what's working for them and learning from there, it's really hard. This may be a me statement, but I'm sure it may resonate with someone else out there. It's really hard to move at the speed of entrepreneurship and startup, and to have someone that isn't as intimate with your business to give you specific guidance on building the business more so than giving you more visibility to things that work and that exist. So it allows you to be able to align closer and jumping into rabbit holes further that you know may be in the path where you're going. So much work is done offline that having visibility of things allow you to dive into it without having to bottleneck someone else's time and do it.Stephanie:I think that's really good advice. And a mentor might fail to give you a higher ideas or industry level things or maybe connections but I think it's the same thing when it comes to investors, the second someone starts giving you like really nitty-gritty advice on what you should do, you might want to be a little wary of that because you know your business best and you know where you're headed. What's next for BLK & Bold. Where are you guys headed? What are you betting on right now?Pernell:Sure. We're still young and awareness is still important, accessibility is still important. The more traction we get, the more we can further cement our contribution model. Now that we've kept the door open, even minimally in the product assortment that we do exist in, the more immediate is to continue to round out our accessibility, but with our key partners that have strategic alignment with us. And so we have retailers that we're on board with today, Target, Whole Foods, Hy-Vee in the Midwest and we're rounding out a few more that have shown very important strategic alignment with us. But then we're also looking to diversify outside of just retail shelves and moving into food service that allows us to have more B2B contracts that are now consumer adoption, but also businesses to help further the impact which ultimately helps drive consumer awareness as well.Pernell:And so from a ecom standpoint, home base is home base. And so we're going to continue to pour into our website to be more proactive in how we drive engagement, but also acquisition. And also, we're selling a tangible good. And so while that's key and that's great, we also have to look at supply chain, all the efficiencies, but innovation that's out there to allow for us to continue to connect and win with convenience and accessibility from what that means from a D2C space as well. We got some ideas under our belt on some strategic partnerships that can allow us to further that. But without a doubt, continuing to further develop our D2C. And the more important pieces that help our community better be more transparent with how we are building and continue to support from an impact model, but also to build more loyalty for that come in to see it in action.Stephanie:That's awesome. I'm excited to see, especially that B2B piece too. I think that could be such a strong partnership. I used to work at Google and I think about the road shows they would do and having companies come and all the employees would test out the coffees and the chocolate and all that. And that could be huge and very smart partnership to have that B2B angle in there.Pernell:No doubt.Stephanie:All right. We have a couple minutes left. Let's move over to the lightning round, brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to send a question your way and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready for now?Pernell:We'll find out. Let's do it.Stephanie:All right. What's up next on your Netflix queue.Pernell:Gosh, I just googled this yesterday. The Undoing. I think that's what it's called. We just ran through all the Schitt's Creek. So TBD on Netflix.Stephanie:All right, there you go. And I've got Hilary in this document say, "It's amazing, and it's on HBO." So that works.Pernell:Love it.Stephanie:All right. What's next on your reading list?Pernell:Oh my gosh. Besides emails?Stephanie:Yes. Besides emails. It doesn't count.Pernell:Oh man. It's a great question. I digest so much content through just online, but if I'm looking at something tangible, it might literally be a roasters magazine.Stephanie:That's great. We have not had anyone say a roasters magazine.Pernell:Yeah. In the anecdotal know of what's going on.Stephanie:That was perfect. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about, and who would your first guest be?Pernell:Oh, goodness. First guest would be Rod, my partner. What it would be about? I don't know, the random things we come up with throughout a day, which is a plenty, and most people don't get to see or experience. You're building something with a best friend you have for over 20 years. You can only imagine the randomness that comes about within a day.Stephanie:Oh my gosh. I love that. I could see that being really fun. Pernell and Rod's musings.Pernell:Love it. Love it.Stephanie:That's great. What topic or trend or theme do you not understand today that you wish you did?Pernell:That I don't, that I wish. Oh my gosh. This sounds terrible, but Twitter. I tried to figure out my Twitter game early on when everyone else was, and I was just too loyal to Facebook. And now here I am still trying to figure out how to not tweet on the wrong thing or something.Stephanie:Me too. Well, what's your Twitter handle? We'll get you some followers there.Pernell:It's Pernell Cezar. [crosstalk] name.Stephanie:Oh my gosh, you don't even know.Pernell:Yeah, I don't.Stephanie:Well, that's the problem Pernell, you don't even know your handle. I actually don't know if I know mine either. We'll link it up in the show notes. There you go.Pernell:Okay. Appreciate it.Stephanie:All right. Then the last one, what one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year? And it can't be COVID.Pernell:I know that's right. That's a good point. From a good standpoint, I do think supply chain, speed of delivery on native sites and not having to be relying on third party commerce platforms. We know the behemoths, they in-house a lot of that and they have major contracts that do that. But the comeback of boutique independence and owning their future I think really be a by-product of independent supply chain companies doing the same thing. So again, from a packaged goods or a tangible product lens, but I think BLK & Bold can deliver something in a matter of hours and not having to rely on Amazon, that just drives that much more engagement and loyalty for the longterm.Stephanie:That's great. Cool, great answer. All right. Pernell, well, I've had a blast talking to you on here. Where can people try out some BLK & Bold and learn more about you other than Twitter? They shouldn't go there right now.Pernell:Yeah, don't go there. But on social media platforms, BLK & Bold, spelled B-L-K and Bold, and then our website, blkandbold.com.Stephanie:Awesome. Thanks so much Pernell. It was a blast.Pernell:Yeah, same here. Thank you.
Do you drink kombucha? Do you even know what kombucha is? Don’t worry if the answer is no, you have plenty of company. In fact, various sources have put the awareness of kombucha at less than 50% for certain age demographics. Nevertheless, kombucha is big business (we’re talking a multi-billion-dollar market), and Health-Ade is right in the thick of the hunt for a slice of the pie. Health-Ade was created in a one-bedroom apartment when the founders were looking to create a product to regrow hair with the fermented tea's living culture. The kombucha liquid was just a byproduct, but after getting an offer to sell the kombucha at a local farmers market, they jumped at the chance. Health-Ade now generates more than $100,000,000 in retail sales, and is sold in 30,000 stores. But just like any brand in an emerging market, the company is looking for ways to grow even bigger.Enter Calvin Lammers, the VP of eCommerce for Health-Ade. Calvin joined Health-Ade after cutting his teeth at some of the biggest healthy CPG brands on the market, Kind, Bai, and Spindrift, where he launched a number of new products and elevated their ecommerce operations to new heights. But when he entered the world of kombucha, he had his work cut out for him. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Calvin talks through how he not only had to develop and execute content to help educate a consumer base, but also about how he had to build an entire ecommerce department from scratch. He gives advice to other brands who are facing similar struggles, including what to focus on when building an ecommerce team and what metrics to hone in on in the early days. Plus he discusses why it’s important to have a holistic view of the customer journey. Main Takeaways:An Eye Toward The Future: If you are building an ecommerce team from scratch or scaling up your ecomm operations, long-term planning is important. Think two or three years down the line at where you want to be and build toward that, but make sure you are not overextending or, overspending or over hiring because more is not always better. In fact, having too many resources might be crippling down the line as your organization gets into crunch time as you try to reach the next level of scale.Go Wide, Stay Shallow: Successfully launching a new product or product line is dependent on how many people you can get in front of. Regardless of if your product is niche, the goal should be to get your message to as many people as possible, and to have that message be simple and memorable. You don’t want to overload new customers or audiences with too much information, it’s more important to raise awareness. Small Tweak, Huge Impact: It’s not big or sexy, but focusing on small things like site load times and the checkout experience actually have the most impact in terms of ROI, so those are the things any ecommerce leaders should focus on when deploying their early resources.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey everyone, I'm Stephanie Postals, and you're listening to Up Next In Commerce. Today on the show, we have Calvin Lammers, the VP of eCommerce at Health-Ade. Calvin, welcome.Calvin:Thank you. Thanks for having me.Stephanie:Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on. I was looking through your background, and you've worked at some of the hottest, healthy CPG brands. I was looking at Kind, and Bai, and Spindrift most recently. And so, I feel like you have a lot of good knowledge, and you're a veteran in the eCommerce world.Calvin:Thank you. Yeah, knock on wood. Yeah, thankfully I've been able to be a part of some really great brands. I mean, it's been fascinating from a personal level. It's also been helpful from a selfish consumer level as I've been able to enjoy some really good product as well, while working for these companies. So, I think it's definitely shifted my taste buds, I think for the better.Stephanie:Yes. That's great. Yeah, I just started recently enjoying Spindrifts, and my two and a half year old wants one everyday now. It's probably a bad habit that I've formed. This is so perfect California kid wanting his sparkling beverage everyday.Calvin:That's amazing. No, I definitely got my niece and nephews hooked on Spindrift. And so, it's always funny whenever my family send me photos of the kids taking a big sip of Spindrift. So yeah, love it.Stephanie:Yep, you understand then. So, with all this great background that you have, how did you land on this eCommerce path? How did you first get involved, and know this is what you wanted to do?Calvin:Yeah. So yeah, I mean, it's definitely been a journey. Even just 2020 as a whole but even just getting to this point, it's interesting because I always like to say that there's no one linear path to eCommerce. I feel like everybody I've talked to that's been in this space for a while, or even new to this space, they've had a different journey than mine. So different. So, going way back when, I graduated from college and was in the mid-west in Minneapolis, and worked at Target Headquarters. Obviously, knew Target, new and loved it. So, thought that would be a great opportunity. So, worked in the snacks department there for a while. Realized, not quite for me, too corporate, very big company, and wanted to... And also was in the mid-west for a while, [inaudible] Change of pace. So, was looking to get out to New York, and looking for a retail related jobs.Calvin:And happened upon this start up, or newer company called Quidsi, which Amazon had just acquired right as I joined, and they had multiple eCommerce sites, they had diapers.com, soap.com, and a few others but obviously, I was familiar with Amazon at the time, still pretty early in the journey but was familiar generally with it but had never worked at an eCommerce company. And yeah, thankfully landed the job at this Amazon subsidiary, and really cut my teeth in the eCommerce space, building eCommerce sites, overseeing assortments, [inaudible] overall UX layouts. Really just ran the [inaudible] And I think it was exciting because there was just a lot of, what's now proven to be, it was a really good incubation for a lot of great eCommerce minds.Calvin:So, is Mark Laurie who is now the CEO of walmart.com. That was his former company, before he actually started Jet. There are a number of leaders there that they were at Jet, they started their own eCommerce companies, eCommerce D2C brands. And so, yeah, it just was really great learning around and realized I loved the entrepreneurial space, the vibe, and just loved that world. And so, obviously was working on the eCom retailer side, and decided to make the switch over to the brand, and basically be that voice and leader to build out eCommerce on the brand side, and have been doing that basically ever since. And so, as you mentioned earlier, I've been able to work either at a number of great brands, doing that same thing, in building a eCommerce focus and in channel strategies for the respective brands.Stephanie:That's very cool. So, at Quidsi, you were mentioning that there was a lot of great leaders there that you got to learn from. What is some of the advice that you remember, or that still stays top of mind from some of the people that you learned from there? Because like you were mentioning, that was a good name there, jet.com, that's great. I'm sure there's a lot of good things that you refer back to every now and then.Calvin:Absolutely. So, I think the biggest piece of advice, and I still... This is how I think I view eCommerce, and what I've carried with me, is really viewing even if it's a category, or viewing... Even if it's a certain sub-category on the site, viewing that, and as well as eCommerce, there's a whole in taking ownership, and business ownership, and really just viewing it as a business leader. So, through in through. So, while you might... Maybe you're focused on acquisition, but really having a full view of how it's going to impact the overall business where that's just going to help you work cross-functionally if you're on a team or a business leader, that's going to really carry through to being more strategic with all of your decisions, all of your investments, all of your prioritizations. Just really keeping that lens on whatever you're owning at that point in time, I think is crucial, and that's just how I've carried through to at my various stops in my career.Calvin:And even now, we're overseeing an entire eCommerce department, it really is a true business unit within the overall company since you have your separate operations, [inaudible] eCommerce divisions that companies have their own finance department, their digital marketing component. So, really having that lens, I think has been helpful for myself, and I think in general, that's just been a beneficial way to how I viewed my surroundings in business, depending on the company that I've been at.Stephanie:Yeah. I think that's an important reminder about how they are their own business unit but how do you make sure they don't become a silo? Because I think I was reading in one of the articles that when you were working at Target, the eCommerce group was in a separate building, and there was two people or something.Calvin:Yep, yep.Stephanie:And I'm like, obviously that was a long time ago, and that's how a lot of companies started out but how do you make sure that the team integrates with the company as a whole and doesn't become, "Oh, that's just the eCommerce group, that work on their own."?Calvin:Yeah. Even now, it's still a challenge, I would say but I think it's become less of an issue, or a challenge, or a hurdle, than it was when I was at Target, or at prior companies, just again with the changing views of eCommerce as a whole. But as I said, you still need to work to be integrated and fully aligned across departments, full company. And so, I think that's where... That's the other piece, is that, that's not always the case, it depends on the company. Some companies have eCommerce as it's own business unit, sometimes it lives in marketing, sometimes it lives in sales. And so, I've had differing experience but the biggest thing is, it is whether you have those individual responsibilities, or head count in the eCommerce department, or they still live in different departments, it is one of the most cross-functional areas as well for that exact reason.Calvin:Because you're touching operations, you're touching marketing, you're touching finance, you're touching brand. So, there's an innate need to interact, and work closely, and be involved with each respective areas. So, I think that's where it really the whose... Any eCom leaders, or practitioners that are either starting out, or obviously, well into their careers, really making that effort to both educate in terms of why they should be caring about eCommerce, what of the benefit, how will it impact them, how will it impact the broader company and organization? And really just being that leader, and educational voice, I guess, for the company to gain that [inaudible] And sign on. And I would say that's been one of the biggest focuses at any company, is really making those pitches, and sell-ins.Calvin:And then, obviously, at the same time, going the extra mile to show why it is beneficial for the respective department leaders to work closely with the eCommerce team, and myself personally.Stephanie:Yep. So, you were just mentioning around them being a cross-functional team, and when I think about a cross-functional times, I think about, a lot of times... And I was one of these back in my earlier days. You're not always doing the work but you're there to coordinate many groups, and bring them together, whereas in eCommerce, team having to also be a cross-functional team seems tricky. So, how do you go about building up a team like that? What are some best practices, and how do you make sure you hired the right people, and build up a good team who can do both of those functions?Calvin:Yes, I think that's... It's definitely something that I have very recent experience with. So, I think, a lot of times... And this has been the case at previous companies as well, where eCommerce was maybe less of a focus for a brand, or there weren't as many resources put into the company, or the headcount was on the lower end of the spectrum. So, you have to be very, very efficient, and careful with how you were filling any headcount openings that you had available because that might be the only one you get for the next year, or the next budget cycle. So, it's previously been super important for that reason but even now, as I just joined Health-Ade six months ago, when I joined, there was no dedicated eCommerce team. There were shared responsibilities but there was no eCommerce team to speak of. So, very quickly had to be mindful with the roles that we were building out and filling right off the bat because again, we were building this essentially from scratch.Calvin:So, had to be very thoughtful and mindful about, "Okay, over the next two years, what areas of responsibility, and what departments, or what coverage do we need? And will that last us for presumably the next two years? Because we need to be hyper-efficient, and competitive with how we're proofing out the success and viability of the channel. So, we don't want to overload, and hire a 10 person department before we break six figures in revenue." So, we want to be very strategic in that. So, with that, I think that also goes back to my mindset from Quidsi where I still very much have that start up entrepreneurial mindset. So, I've worked at companies where I was the only person on the eCommerce team for a year.Calvin:And so, it's a lot of work. I think it's been helpful for myself, as I've touched every aspect of the business, and while I don't work in a day to day at this point, I have at least a background and knowledge of how everything works, and I think that is really important for eCommerce leaders to be able to speak knowledgeably just about eCommerce fulfillment just as much as they are about eCommerce acquisition, or marketing. I think that is hugely important. And so, that's been my mindset, is hiring people that are not the jack of all trades, but maybe a utility knife, where they're able to... Quick learners, able to pick up things very quickly. They have an interest, they're super curious. But they're open, and willing, and wanting to touch multiple things of the business and not having very narrow minds that then, "Oh, that's not my responsibility."Calvin:Again, going back to having that ownership view, carries through to how I view headcount, and bringing on new team members because I think that's just hugely important. Especially early on, as you're building out a team.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah, you have to have those scrappy individuals who are ready to treat the company as if it's their own, and ready to jump in wherever needed, even if they're on a team that maybe isn't relevant to the task.Calvin:100%.Stephanie:So, let's talk a bit about Health-Ade. So, I'm a fan of Health-Ade. I have been following it for a while. I also just love the story. I mean, I think the CEO was selling it. She started with $600, and she was selling it at Farmers markets, and now I think I saw you guys generate over 150,000,000 in revenue, and you're in 30,000 or more stores. So, I want to hear a little bit more about Health-Ade, what is it, and what drew you to the company?Calvin:Yeah. So, obviously, great to hear you're a fan. I am myself, I like to say that, that's been very much a part of my career path and choices where I worked at, and wouldn't be joining a company if I didn't really enjoy, or love the product, and that absolutely was the case with Health-Ade. Yeah, thankfully, I got connected with the team here. As I mentioned, they were looking to build out their eCommerce channel with really no focus, or presence to speak of before I joined. I was a big fan, it's a probiotic tea, kombucha, is their primary product line, that's as you mentioned, founders and [inaudible] Where they started out a number of years ago. That's really been the key focus for the brand, and where we've seen most of that growth to that surplus of over 100,000,000 in retail sales.Calvin:We obviously have looked to expand the kombucha, and recently, we just launched a new product line called Booch Pop, which is a ambient soda made with kombucha. And so, looking to expand into some of these other areas but really, kombucha still is the first and foremost, and primary product line for us. And it's been great to see obviously kombucha as a whole, has been a huge growth driver and really fast growing category, and Health-Ade has really been the primary contributor to that growth over the last few years. So, love the brand, loved what it stood for. Just loved everything about it. The unique challenge, and I think the thing that caused me hesitation was just obviously, with the kombucha product, it is [inaudible] Requires refrigeration, it's also in glass bottles.Calvin:So, obviously, anybody that knows anything about eCommerce fulfillment, not really the easiest things to turn into a viable eCommerce business right off the bat. So, very difficult, very, very challenging, and very costly just from an operations standpoint. So, that was definitely the biggest hurdle, or thing that gave me pause but always like a challenge. I like to say that every single brand that I've worked at, I've wanted to make more difficult. So, I've gone from snack bars, to refrigerated beverages, so gone one end of the spectrum to the other, and the food and beverage space. And that's been a big focus for us, and making that a very viable channel, and obviously just making sure that our operations and fulfillment is a strength for us, out of necessity really.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah, I'm definitely going to be diving into the logistics piece in a bit, so be prepared. It seems like you choose brands too that... I mean, maybe everyone say, every brand needs convincing, to convince a buyer to buy it. But you choose brands that aren't very well know. I mean, I'm thinking about Kind, when they came out. I remember when I worked at Google, they started having the bars there but people still really weren't sure what they were. Same thing with Buy, the coconut water. And Spindrift more recently, I mean there were so many sparkling beverages [crosstalk] Convincing someone of why you don't want that artificial flavor, and why you [crosstalk] I mean, it seems like you have a pattern here where you're picking harder, and harder things, and now kombucha.Stephanie:I think I was just reading that maybe between 20 and 40 year olds, more that 50% still don't know what kombucha is. I saw that stat somewhere and I'm like... I mean, that's crazy to me. Maybe it's because I'm in California, and it seems like everyone here knows what it is but it seems like it's a hard market. How are you going about educating people? Is that why you chose to do the soda route where it's still kind of kombucha, but maybe might connect with a whole different audience, and bring them into the network of kombucha?Calvin:Yeah, no, and I think that was a definite thought and factor in the development of the Booch Pop product line, and having multiple ways in for consumers. To this point, there's been... You're a kombucha consumer but that's something that we've done studies on, and have research on in terms of the overall awareness and knowledge of kombucha. It is limited, it still is not as mainstream, or widely known as you would think at this point. So, that also is impactful to how we're approaching overall messaging, and advertising, and just overall content on digital for us. So, that follows through from everything from our Amazon product pages, to our own website, to our email flows, to our SMS marketing, to influencers. So, it's hugely impactful, and I think that's been a major, major focus for us in the brand, in that we realize that there still is a huge section of the population that not only doesn't know Health-Ade, but doesn't know even what kombucha is.Calvin:And so, I think that, at the end of the day, presents an opportunity, and I think is what we see as the open lane for us, or opportunity for Health-Ade, is really being a leader in terms of contents and education for kombucha, and gut health overall. And so, really making that case, and driving home that education piece around what is kombucha? What are the prebiotics, what are probiotics? Why are they important? What benefits do they actually help? How does that contribute to overall health and wellness? Because what we've seen, is that, that benefit is actually, strangely enough, unlike most food and beverage categories, taste is actually a second driver. It's actually the health and benefits that is the primary driver that we are focused on.Calvin:So, we're really making clear why somebody should be incorporating kombucha in their daily diets, what are the benefits? And just really driving that home. That's, I think, where we see the opportunity. And so, that also relates to content and messaging. And again, you have a better ability, or avenue to do that on digital as opposed to just your traditional retailing on shelf, and you're limited to just the label, or the packaging. So, I think that actually is where it helps brands like Health-Ade, or even start up an emerging brand, so you can create more engaging, and enticing, and interactive content in messaging that really can hit home the messaging and objectives that you're trying to drive, especially as you're building awareness, and overall education for the brand or category that you're in.Stephanie:Yeah, I think the gut health thing is still new to a lot of people. I mean, my friend the other day just got a test done to show the bacteria in their gut, and it was really bad, the test results, where she's having to do a whole entire diet reset, and take a bunch of things out, and then, re-introduce them, and take all these probiotics and stuff.Calvin:It's certainly been an education process for myself because yeah, certainly, I had somewhat general awareness of good health, and probiotics, but even the amount that I've learned, being at Health-Ade for the last few months, yeah, it's a very, very important part to the overall body, and there's just so many aspects to it, that it does require a decent amount of education. So, it's a journey that we've also got to bring consumers along. It is, as much as I'm going through the same journey myself.Stephanie:Yep. So, are there different channels that you utilize when you're maybe going the education route, and you want to get in front of the new people, and educate them on why this a good product to try out? Especially now when they can't maybe test it.Calvin:Yep.Stephanie:I mean, I remember, in the early days of Health-Ade, there was a lot of samples at Whole Foods, or wherever I would go, that's how it came on my radar. But what are you doing now to introduce it to people, especially if they can't really try it?Calvin:Right. Yeah, so I think that's where we have a couple of different channels that we're focused on. So, obviously, within the eCommerce and digital purview, we have our D2C businesses, we have Amazon, our eRetailers. And then, we also have Last Mile. So, obviously, on eCom, going back to the overall financials, and build of that business, it gets very difficult to [inaudible] individual bottles of kombucha. It just overall doesn't work, the economics don't work out. So, traditionally, we sell 12 packs, which again, are quite a bit of product for a consumer who's new to kombucha, or new to Health-Ade, and hasn't tried before. So, what we've done recently is that we built out some sampler packs, so included a couple of different flavors for our different product lines [inaudible] As well as our new Health-Ade plus line, which is our kombucha with additional benefits.Calvin:And so, that's been our primary focus recently in driving new customer acquisition in these sample packs, or variety packs, and we've seen some really good responses mixed with that education which again, via our different channels. So, via paid social, we've tested out a few different things for longer-form content, and driving to landing pages, and that's worked extremely well where you have use [inaudible] Initial tidbits, or insights that you include in the copy in the messaging with the paid social campaigns. And then, driving to the landing page which really fleshes out more of that storytelling piece. And these are all consideration and top of funnel campaigns and tactics, and we've seen really, really strong responses to that. And so, that's been super efficient for us, and seen really good responses.Calvin:And then, at the same time, we also are focusing on... We have our delivery partners in Last Mile, partners like Instacart. And so, with Instacart, and these other channels, you can obviously purchase just one bottle. So, been really leveraging the ad platforms, and some of these emerging platforms as the way to drive trial where the cost to entry, or the barrier to entry is a little bit lower, just because they're just buying one bottle. And so, we've been actively engaging in working with the Instacart ad platform to promote our products on Instacart as well, and really seen some huge gains there, and see that as a really good opportunity to drive trial on individual bottles when sampling isn't an option obviously, currently.Stephanie:All right, so let's talk a bit about launching products. So, you have launched a bunch of new products but also, for the first product maybe in the line versus launching a newer [inaudible] Like you just did with the soda. So, tell me about the differences when a brand is just starting out, trying to get the word out there, and putting out their first product or two versus launching something very different like soda to a market who's maybe expecting just kombucha.Calvin:Yeah. So, I think it really goes back to, I think, overall with the roll out and marketing approach. So, obviously, with a new brand, or really establishing any market space as a whole for a new brand, you're going to go to much wider, you're going to have to go much, much shallower with the content that you want to engage right off the bat because you're trying to drag overall impressions, and touchpoints, and just top of mind awareness for that new product line, or new brand. And you're going to have to go a little bit wider spread with your focus, and your tactics that you're employing, and really going true, true top of funnel brand awareness as opposed to a new product line. With Booch Pop, obviously, this is going to [inaudible] Similar or, if you're drafting off a different category, like at Kind is probably the best example where Kind had it's original nut bar line.Calvin:And then, came out with the clusters, then the granola bars, and came out with a number of different product lines. And so, with that, it's different because once you establish that brand recall and awareness, you're either able to leverage that and target within that specific category, or... I think this is the [inaudible] With Booch Pop, is that even people who might be aware of Health-Ade, or again, maybe they weren't interested in kombucha, or they hadn't tried before, and we've gotten this response to where it's like, "Is it too healthy? Do we want to target some more mass consumers?" We can draft off of that brand persona and establishment, and cache, and either go super targeted within that and say, "Okay, these are the specific audiences that we want to target, and draft, and leverage that brand cache."Calvin:Or, if there's just general awareness, the brand can draft and go into an entirely new segment or audience, and utilize that established brand elements as much as you can. Obviously, finding that right balance and depth that you go is the... End of the day, that's the biggest question but that's, I think, the difference that I've seen in my experience and how that's been incorporated to the roll out for new product lines, and yeah, very much similar story to how that played out at Kind as well.Stephanie:Yep, very cool. So, let's talk logistics a bit. So, you're talking about the cold chain process, and you've got glass bottles. What did it look like when you joined and they want you to build out the eCommerce channel, what did that look like behind the scenes? And what were some of the lessons as you've been going about that?Calvin:Yeah. So, I think right off the bat, when I joined, I guess the biggest thing is that we were utilized... And again, because Health-Ade, like a number of brands, saw huge demand and interest in eCom and direct-to-consumer earlier this year due to the COVID surge, and it was a minimal business. And so, right off the bat, needed to get things rolling forward to meet the increasing consumer demand. So, for the fulfillment itself, really hadn't been a focus for building out what that actual packaging, and refrigeration, and insulation looked like. So, we were just using styrofoam coolers to keep the kombucha cold, and adding some ice packs, and shipping to consumers. So, not the most sustainable, or eco-friendly option, especially as we're increasing volume. So, right off the bat, that was a big focus for us, is really finding, and implementing a sustainable, and eco-friendly liner and insulation option, which thankfully we were able to get in place pretty quickly when I joined a few months ago.Calvin:And so, that was one of the biggest pushes for us, is obviously, just fitting with our brand, and our persona, wanted to make sure we were also being very sustainable, and mindful with how we were actually getting product to consumers. So, that was the biggest thing right off the bat. Currently, we have three different fulfillment warehouses, and so that helps us get to most consumers in two day... Or, 95% of the country in two days. But it still poses challenges because there's still that refrigeration requirement, so that limits the number of days because we don't want a product obviously waiting in trucks over the weekend or anything like that, so it limits the number of days that we can actually ship.Calvin:And as consumers as we know these days get more and more... Their expectations for delivery times increases. There's an opportunity to decrease the delays in delivery times with their products, and so, that's the current focus, is how can we reduce from two days to even one day, or even next day delivery? Especially, in key markets So, that's really the journey over the last six months that we've been in. And obviously, it's been a lot [inaudible] In six months, and I got a lot more to go here going into next year.Stephanie:Yeah, and how's the forecasting process been? Because I mean, the world's just been so crazy, and especially, leaning into eCommerce right when things are crazy, how do you go about forecasting things so that you have what you need, you don't go out of stock, you've got your variety packs? I mean, it sounds like you've brought a lot of new things to the brand but that's a lot of new challenges that'll come with it.Calvin:Yeah, you hit it spot on. So yeah, especially, we have no historicals, no base line to go off of, so that's... Our team has been hyper focused in really nailing down, and narrowing in that forecast, especially, we added new SKUs to the mix. So, it's really been... Thankfully, our warehouse and 3PL partners have been super, super helpful in partnering with us, in maybe over-stocking based on previous demand to ensure that we have sufficient inventory, especially if we have an upcoming promotional push, or we're leaning more on any of our acquisition campaigns. If we were just going off of historicals, obviously, if we were selling a couple hundred cases a month a year ago, to then change and go to a few thousand cases, even alone, that's a huge increase. At first glance, it'd be very tough selling with a lot of partners, or 3PLs that would take the traditional growth and forecasting route.Calvin:So, with that, they've been really helpful in loading, and carrying more inventory than needed to anticipate any increases. But then, on top of that, it's really staying close to the vest and staying ery, very... Being very diligent with how we're tracking it. So, we built our reporting to track by location, by SKU, on a daily basis for inventory levels. And then, if we see any risk, working quickly to turnaround shipments to get out the door, and get us back in stock. And so, it takes a village to say the least, and thankfully, it's just again, having the right partners, and really having the team be hyper diligent, and stay close to it, has really made a huge difference.Stephanie:Yeah, I've got it. So, I'm guessing you've also had a lot of experiences when it comes to figuring out what platform you want to choose, or re-platforming at the brands that you've been at in the past. How did you do that with Health-Ade, and how do you figure out what platform's going to work, and what kind of features you need, and how to make it so it'll convert?Calvin:Yeah. So yeah, the platform side's been interesting because even that's evolved pretty extensively. So, for me, at the end of the day, you want to have scalability, and also enough customization, especially early on, that you can really make the full use of any platform. Calvin:Long term, you want a turnkey Platform that again, can scale, integrates well with most of their channels, apps you need but you don't want a very dedicated, or customized CMS that will require a lot of heavy lift, or work whether it's on the internal team, or external party because the cost and hours are going to quickly snowball from there. So, I think that's where for us, again with a limited team, or smaller team, and especially early in our journey, that, that customization, scalability is really the biggest piece for us in deciding with platform we ultimately landed on.Stephanie:Got it. And what kind of metrics are you looking at after you... You've got the platform up and running, what kind of things do you look at to make sure things are going well, and how do you figure out what you want to maybe test maybe, and see how to even optimize it further?Calvin:Yeah. And that's a big thing for us. Obviously, there's a couple of components there. So, there's the Platform A, but then there's the overall site design, and architecture. And so, that's the biggest piece that we still have in our journey, we previously were on WooCommerce with WordPress as the CMS. And so, a lot of that is legacy content, and pages, and code that's been built there that we've evolved and tweaked it over time, before we had the eCommerce team. So, that's where we're making... We're flying the plane as we continue to tweak it, and build it, but really, that's the biggest opportunity, is that there's only so much that a platform can do without the actual highly functional, seamless UX experience for consumers. Super engaging navigation and content, that's still needed in order to best leverage and utilize whatever platform you end on.Calvin:And so, that's the next piece, is we've seen... We continually are looking at our conversion rates, our balance rates, our time on site, our click throughs, and the time to conversion. And that's really what we're holding as our key metrics here, to measure true success of the website before we get into consumer journey, lifetime value, and things of that nature, just the overall site experience. So, that's the biggest thing that we're trying to address, and improve now over the next few months, now that have the right platform in place. So, working with an overall site redesign, and site build, to really bring our full digital experience for the website to match our brand persona, and really bring that up to speed, and make a viable experience for consumers that really will sustain us long term.Stephanie:Got it. Are there any changes that come to mind that have made the biggest impact around the consumer journey, or seeing those conversions increase? Even if it's maybe starting to introduce that variety pack. What do you think the impacts have come from this year?Calvin:I think site load times, honestly. So, it's just something as simple as that. Obviously, a second in the digital age, or a D2C experience is a life time. So, that was a big focus just recently, just reducing page load times, reducing font sizes, page weights, image weights, all these things. And almost impacting how the page are loading. Making sure that add to cart buttons are loading first, as opposed to maybe copy further down the page. So, just those small tweaks have huge impacts just right off the bat. And so, that's really what comes to mind right off the bat, is just making sure the time from landing to checkout is as seamless and as quick possible because you want to make it as easy for customers to checkout and give as little reasons as possible for consumers to bounce. And so, I think reducing the page load times has been crucial, as well as testing out... Again, just where we're driving new customers to.Calvin:So, we've updated our collections pages where we drive a lot of our traffic, and just updating the layout, and the overall structure, adding add to cart buttons on the collections page. Again, just to remove another step needed to checkout. So, those minor tweaks are really what we're focused on now until we completely revamp the website as a whole, and thankfully, they've made some significant improvements, and had a marked impact so far.Stephanie:Very cool. So, where do you see the world of eCommerce and D2C brands headed in the next year or two?Calvin:Yeah, I mean, if I had $1,000,000, and wish I can do and embed on that because yeah, I mean, if anybody told me that in 2020 we would see eCommerce penetration go from the five, 6% to... I think the last figure that I saw was 11, 12% just in 2020 alone. Yeah, I would have said, "You're joking." So, who knows at this point? But at this point, I don't think we're going back. I think this is the new standard for new consumers. I think that's what I've seen, is that every consumer, or most consumers that have either been forced, or shifted purchase behaviors to online, especially in the grocery space since food and beverages still being the lagger in terms of under indexing versus other categories in eCommerce penetration, and that's changed tremendously over this year. So, I think that the consumers are going to stick with that trend.Calvin:So, a lot of consumers that have tried grocery delivery for the first time will likely stick with that over the next couple of years. I think it's going to be more... I think the biggest thing is that it's just going to become more seamless with... Especially, on the brand side with how they view channels, I guess. So, instead of having this prior mindset where it's like, okay, there's brick and mortar, then there's this eCommerce thing, and they're separate channels, you need to be mindful of the entire customer journey because yeah, you might have a consumer that you have a programmatic ad that they get started with, and then, they're purchasing in store. Or, they see a programmatic ad, and they're purchasing on last delivery, or maybe they're in store, or buying a pick up order, or maybe they're ordering via an SMS channel.Calvin:So, I think it's just becoming more holistic with it's not a matter of channel separating but having a true, unified vision of that customer journey, and approaching that as such as a company, and a brand, and that's very much what we're thinking off as we're building out our collective efforts at Health-Ade.Stephanie:All right. So, how are you guys prioritizing retail versus eCommerce? Where are you investing right now? Are you pulling back a bit from retail, and learning more into D2C, or how are you thinking about that?Calvin:Yeah. So, I think that goes in line with my previous comments. So, we're absolutely still supporting our retails channels since as I mentioned earlier, that is where the bulk of our business is currently but we're also changing in how we're activating and supporting those retailers. So, maybe traditionally, or previously, we might be supporting retailers in on shelf, or POS material, instead we're running geo-targeted display ads, or paid social ads, or running a programmatic display campaign to support a specific retailer. So again, just leveraging more digital components as well as supporting the last deliver, or Last Mile platforms like Instacarts that still... Obviously, the revenue in volume is being pulled through the retail stores.Calvin:So, it's definitely not a shift of focus, or priority, or in an investment, it change in terms of how that support is played out, I guess. So, that's, I think really been the biggest change for us. And then, on top of that, obviously [inaudible] that support from the eCommerce piece, and how that plays into the mix. What I've also seen at previous companies, and a number of white papers, and research that I've seen, is that any eCommerce advertising, or digital advertising, it will drive eCommerce, and it has obviously a huge impact on eCommerce specific sales but a lot of the impact is actually seen in your traditional brick and mortar, or retail sales. And so, having that lens, and that... If you're spending a dollar for eCommerce advertising, it doesn't mean that entire pack is going to eCom, it is also driving the overall brand awareness, and retail sales.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah, which is definitely a tricky thing to measure, and then try and convince maybe [crosstalk] It's having brand awareness, and it's also driving those retail sales but I can't exactly track it right now.Calvin:It's the age old debate. Yeah, I've been there all too many times. That's a fun one.Stephanie:All right. So, with a couple minutes left, let's move over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question, and you have a minute or less to answer.Calvin:Oh, man.Stephanie:Are you ready, Calvin?Calvin:I think as ready as I'll ever be, so let's do it.Stephanie:All right. What's the best piece of advice you've ever gotten?Calvin:Best piece of advice, I guess is... Again, don't look back. Take ownership, and own your mistakes. I think you can't shy aware from your mistakes, just make sure you don't make them again.Stephanie:I like that, that's a good one. What's up next on your reading list?Calvin:Next on my reading list, I would say right now, I actually got a book that I've been meaning to get to for a while. It's called The Sympathizers, it's a historical fiction novel set after the Vietnam War, in the US. So, it's one of those that I've had on my list for a while, and it's about time I finally get into it.Stephanie:Sounds good, I'll have to check that out. What do you not understand today that you wish you did?Calvin:I would say the biggest thing that I understand today that I wish I did was just the impact to that eCommerce operations and fulfillment has, and in total business. I've said this, I think, in the past speaking to other people but if I knew then what I knew now, I would have gone back and got an MBA in logistics and supplier chains, just with how much of an impact that has on eCommerce. And again, going into it, had no idea how crucial that is to a viable eCom business.Stephanie:Got it. That's good, you pivoted the question which now I think I want to ask going forward because you took it in the route of what do you understand now, that you didn't understand that you wish you did. So, I like that. That's a new question I'm going to have to add in.Stephanie:So, if you were to have a podcast, what would it be about, and who would your first guest be?Calvin:Oh. I would say it would probably be about pop culture in... I guess pop culture and entertainment in the '90s, and my first guest would definitely be Conan O'Brien, I think just because in general I love just talking about pop culture, and entertainment in the '90s, and Conan O'Brien was one of... It still is absolutely one of my favorite late night hosts, and his podcast has been one of my favorites, and it's been a good one to have a hefty playlist for his podcast episodes to get through the past few months.Stephanie:That's a good one. All right, and then, the last one, what one thing will have the biggest impact on eCommerce in the next year?Calvin:Biggest thing I think will be, I guess technology at the end of the day but then, also, just again, how consumers are changing their shopping behavior. So, I've said this in other forums but previously, my biggest expectation is that integrating technology into just the kitchen and the pantry, again, speaking more on food and beverage since that's been my space, my territory. I think that really seems like the opportunity where you want... Especially, if consumers are shipping more to eCom and digital delivery, having that be less of a top of mind thing, I think, and making it more efficient and removing any legwork on the consumer side will be beneficial in the long run. So, whether that's scales that you're placing products on, so that your subscription knows when you're almost out of your coffee, and you need a refill, or anticipating based on your purchase behaviors, I think that is probably the next trend.Calvin:Especially, on the consumable side. That's, again, just going to remove pain points in consumer's journeys, especially when you're getting it delivered to home, that's really the biggest one at the end of the day.Stephanie:Cool, I like that. That is a really good, unique answer that we have not had so far.Calvin:Oh, great.Stephanie:I like it. All right, Calvin. Well, this has been very fun. Thanks for coming on and sharing all your eCommerce knowledge. Where can people learn more about you, and Health-Ade?Calvin:Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, Calvin Lammers. And if you want to check out more about Health-Ade, and read some more about that education content that I mentioned, you can go to health-ade.com.Stephanie:Thanks so much.Calvin:Thank you.
How to succeed on Amazon is a mystery that many DTC brands have tried and failed to solve. There are tricks to winning on the mega ecommerce site — tricks that no one tells you when you first put your product up for sale in the Amazon jungle. That’s why we’ve invited Ju Rhyu on the show. There were a lot of things that Ju wished she knew before she and her co-founders decided to launch Hero Cosmetics on Amazon. Things like what is brand gating? And how do you win the buy box? And what do you do about counterfeit products that pop up right when you start to have a little success?Ju found the answers to all of those questions and learned so much more as she grew Hero into one of the buzziest skincare brands on the market, which went from 0 to $1 million in year one, and now not only sells on its website and on Amazon, but is also featured in retailers like Target, Madewell, CVS Pharmacy and more.On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Ju spills the beans on what it takes to win big on Amazon, and how you can level up from there.Main Takeaways:Boxing Out Your Opponent: On Amazon, the first steps to success are winning the buy box and brand gating. It takes time, but if you take the steps to prove that you are the true owner of your product or IP, you’ll be able to avoid much of the pain that comes with selling on Amazon.If You Build It, They Will Come: Getting your product into retail locations is a mix of luck, perseverance, and creating your own destiny. Relentlessly pitching your product to anyone who will listen, and then jumping on trend-seeking retailers is a strategy to get your foot in the door. Also, having a PR strategy to build buzz may help drive interest in your brand. Far Out Future: Because 2020 accelerated the adoption of ecommerce, DTC brands are in a position to set the stage for where business is headed. From bike delivery to the creation of a DTC mall, Ju has a lot of predictions on what to look out for down the road.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hello and welcome back to up next in ecommerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles co-founder at mission.org. Today on the show we have Ju Rhyu the co-founder and CEO of Hero cosmetics. Welcome.Ju:Thank you. Thanks for having me.Stephanie:Yeah. I'm really excited that you took the time to call in from Paris. That's so fancy when I say Paris, maybe you're like, this is normal for me, but you feel fancy.Ju:It was a fun fact that I tell people, "Oh, by the way, I live in Paris."Stephanie:So tell me a little bit about Hero. I would love to hear the founding story of how you started it. I mean, it has tons of news coverage and I was reading so many different stories. And I want to hear from you though about how you came to found it.Ju:I mean, the story is I was living in Korea. I was working there as an expat in Seoul, South Korea, and I was suffering from adult acne. I don't know exactly what was causing it. Maybe it could have been the changing environment, the lower air quality change in lifestyle, or maybe stress, I'm not sure. I was really frustrated because I kept breaking out and it was always just hard for me to find a solution that worked for me. But in Korea I noticed a lot of people walking around with these acne patches on their faces. So I got really curious. I went to a pharmacy, I bought some, and then I was just amazed at how well it worked because it sucked everything out and protected me from touching the area and picking at it.Ju:It was really gentle on my skin. And then I immediately started wondering why I was learning about it then, and not like 15 years ago and why it wasn't more available in the US so I did some research and then that's when the idea of like, Hey, I should make this available in the US I think people would really like it.Stephanie:That's so cool. I mean, it seems like Korea, all the beauty trends right now are coming from there, everything when it comes to double cleansing and [inaudible]Ju:Well, the 12 step regimen.Stephanie:Yes. I try to follow the 12 step regimen. And I got a little overwhelmed. I'm like, Oh, this is a lot to clean my face. So you found this product in Korea. What did you do next? How did you have the idea? Because a lot of people find other products in other countries. I know, I at least have, or my oldest T brands really good, or Oh, this hammock is really good, whatever it may be. And I don't always think, I'm going to bring this back to the States and do this. So what were your next steps? Why was this the product that you wanted to bring back and start?Ju:First of all, for me, it solved a real problem that I was struggling with it worked better than anything else I had ever really used. And I just got to thinking if this is helping me, this could probably help a lot of other people state side as well. And then actually in Korea, when, if you're a cosmetics manufacturer or distributor, you're obligated to print the name of the manufacturer on the back of your package, that is not true in the US actually. And so the first thing that I did was I started contacting these patch manufacturers to see how much it would cost to buy them from them, how the manufacturing side would work. If they could work with me to develop something that I thought would be suitable for the US market. So I went to a bunch of pharmacies. I bought up a lot of packages. I looked at the backs of the boxes to see who the manufacturers were. And then I started my outreach.Stephanie:What were some of the biggest surprises when you're reaching out to these manufacturers?Ju:I mean, a lot of them didn't return my calls or my emails. I don't blame them. I mean something like random person contacting them about buying up a much of their patches for a business idea that was still very nascent. And so that was a little bit frustrating, but there were a few that did reply to and then there was a little bit of a language barrier just because I mean, I'm Korean American living and I was living in Korea. But my Korean isn't totally fluent. And so a little bit of a language barrier, but I got really lucky because I landed on the manufacturer that we work with today, who was more than happy to get my email was super easy to work with was very open and developing relationship. And that's how, probably how we got to where we are today. From that one cold email he happened to respond and we've been working together for now over three years.Stephanie:Oh, wow. That's really cool. So were they open to creating custom packaging? Because I know when I've looked into this space before, it seemed very black and white. You can have our packaging or something very expensive, but like it's still going to be our design. How willing were they to have something really custom?Ju:They were pretty willing. They were willing to customize design and basically customize anything that we really wanted. So they were pretty open to that. This is their business, they make products for other companies and other brands. And so they were pretty familiar with how that whole process works.Stephanie:And did you end up using a very similar or exact product of what you got in Korea that you started selling here? Or did you make any updates or changes?Ju:Yeah, I worked with the manufacturer to adjust to some things I thought were really important. So things like the adhesion or the stickiness or the absorption power of the actual patch of the hydrocolloid patch. So there were some customizations that were made for this product because I definitely wanted to create like the perfect acne patch. And that's how we landed on what we have now.Stephanie:That's great. And do you feel like you had a leg up because it looked like you've been working in the world of digital and e-commerce prior to Hero. Was there anything that you learned from your past life before Hero that you brought into founding the company?Ju:Oh yeah. All the time. So my background is I actually got my MBA at Columbia business school and then I worked in corporate America for a really long time. So I worked at Kraft foods, American express, I worked at Samsung. That's what brought me to Korea. And I mean, I still lean on my, on all those experiences. I lean particularly on my Kraft foods experience because that was in brand management where they train you in a certain way of thinking for marketing. So, consumer is always first to teach you about the retail landscape and there's a distinction between your consumer and your customer. They talk about like the brand ladder. There's so many things that I still fall back on and use to this day. And then for some of the other companies, things like processes or even knowing about email and open rates and how to really digest analytics like that, are things that I still use today.Stephanie:That's great. So I'm going to get a little crash course in craft methodology. So earlier you just mentioned distinction between consumer and customer. What do you mean by that and how do you practice that?Ju:Yeah, it's funny because in my mind they're very different, but I know sort of in the public, they both get used interchangeably, but the way that a lot of these CPG companies work is they didn't exist before at DTC world. So they always sold through a retailer like a Walmart or Costco or target, et cetera. And so those retailers were always referred to as the customer because those were the people that were actually buying your product. And then you would refer to the consumer as the end-user of the product. So the person who would inevitably eat your Oreo cookie or use your Clorox cleaning solution. Usually the consumer ended up being the consumer of the retailer. So it's really not like if you're working at Kraft foods the consumer is not technically your consumer. I mean, it is, but by way of the retailer. And so that distinction was always very important when it was written out.Stephanie:That's good. All right. So you've got your manufacturer, you've got your product being built. What next?Ju:Yeah. I have two co-founders Dwight and Andy, and then I do a lot of the product, the marketing, the PR basically the sales person. Dwight handles a lot of the supply chain ops. And then Andy, he does all our design and creative. So we had gotten together we decided the three of us were going to do this. We had the product concepts so it came. So the next thing was to come up with the brand and the product name, the brand name. And for me, it was really important that we choose a name that was very like evokes emotion or something emotive because I felt like acne was a very emotional category. There are a lot of people who feel bad about themselves or feel insecure when they have acne.Ju:And so I wanted a name that was really, I don't know like instilled confidence or was like a just evoked positive emotion. And so that's where we came up with the name Mighty Patch. And then we had to create designs does on the box really kind of create the whole brand feel of this product. And then the initial strategy was we were going to sell it on Amazon. So we launched it on Amazon. That was how we were going to distribute it. And then once we had the distribution part then came the other part, which is how do you sell it? So we had to get people to know about it buy it, leave us reviews and things like that.Stephanie:So let's dive a bit into launching on Amazon because I always hear very mixed emotions about selling on Amazon. And I want to hear your thought process about, starting their first. And did you do research on the platform to kind of see, what the space was like? Like what kind of things did you go through before deciding like Amazon's actually a good spot to start?Ju:Well, so we started this business almost like a side hustle. It was a side hustle and we were bootstrapped, we didn't raise money. And so for us, Amazon was like the most logical place to start because you have access to hundreds of millions of buyers. It doesn't take a lot of resources or investment to launch on Amazon. You can take advantage of their backend, like warehouses and fulfillment centers to help with the fulfillment part. So for us, like Amazon made so much sense and then also, back then it wasn't... we just had a hypothesis. And the hypothesis was that if we bring this product category to the US and position it more as a beauty product that it could do well.Ju:And so for us, the easiest way to test out that hypothesis was on a platform like Amazon. So rather than having to spend all the money to build a website and find a three PL and do things like that, the easiest and quickest way to test out our hypothesis was to put a page on Amazon. We said, let's see if people buy it. If people buy it, then we'll work on phase two, which would be launching a DTC channel.Stephanie:That's awesome. I think that's such a great way to have that, like MVP products. See if it works before investing too heavily into a big website and yeah, like you said, setting up three PLS. What kind of hiccups did you experience when you launched on Amazon or started that process?Ju:So one was we actually proved out our product market fit very quickly. And we actually ran out. We either I can't remember, but I think we almost ran out of inventory or we did run out of inventory. We had like our second order on a boat and it was supposed to be released, but like the timing didn't work out. And so it was really, really tight in terms of inventory planning. The other issue was we were getting people were now brand gated, but before we were brand gated, we're getting people attaching themselves to our listings as we were getting more and more popular. And so I don't know how many people know how Amazon really works, but a lot of times when you have a product page, it's not something that you own, unless you're brand gated.Ju:It's something that other people can sell that product, leveraging your product page. And then the idea is yeah, everyone has to win the buy box. And the buy box is when you're on an Amazon product page, and you add to cart, the person who's winning the buy box is the first person whose product you would add to your cart. So I didn't know any of this when we first started, I was like, why do you have to earn the buy box?Stephanie:I had no idea. I mean, I see that from a consumer side where it's like, you have other options, but I never go to those. It's like whoever's first is who I go with.Ju:Yeah. And it's really smart on Amazon's part, because as a seller, you have to earn it either by having really good reviews, like seller reviews or you have to earn it by having the best price. And so there are a lot of sellers, they'll price a penny cheaper, or like 5 cents cheaper, and then they'll win the buy box. Which inevitably is a very dangerous game because you can just sort of discount this product to zero. So anyways, we were getting people attaching themselves for a page, which wasn't good because we wanted to protect our products and our IP and all that. And then the other issue that we ran into was we started getting counterfeits mixed into our inventory. So there was a time where and I have a photo of it. It's like someone had literally ripped off our designs created like their own version of our box. I'll be at the designs were not like you could tell that it was fake. It wasn't a perfect copy. But somehow it had gotten mixed into our inventory. And then that fake product was getting shipped out to customers.Stephanie:How is that happen? I mean, was that like on the manufacturer or how does it get mixed into your inventory?Ju:I don't really know, but I think what happens is they probably attached themselves to our page at that time. And then won the buy box and started shipping this big products to these customers. I think some of them were returned, like people would return them and then it'd get mixed into our inventory that way. Stephanie:Oh, that's tricky. Yeah, because I've seen that in reviews on Amazon where people would be like, this is the authentic one. I've been buying this for five years and now it's a knock off. And I'm like well, how's that happened? But I guess he just didn't understand how that could happen, where I'm like well, the brand wouldn't have a knockoff, but yet now knowing how the buy box works and yeah, that can be really tricky. So how did you get those people off of your page when they started attaching themselves to your page? Like what did you do to rise above them?Ju:Yeah. So there's something that you can do on Amazon called brand gating. And you have to prove that you own the IP or the trademark to your brand name. So you present them, you submit all the evidence and then they will brand gate you, which means that you are sort of no longer a public page where people can attach themselves to your page. You and only you can can moderate or edit or sell on your page. And so that's what we did. And then since we've done that, it hasn't been a problem.Stephanie:Well, that's a really good lesson for anyone new trying to start out on Amazon. That is a possibility. Very good to know. So what's changed on Amazon since you launched there in 2017, what kind of things have changed?Ju:Well, our category now has just exploded. And it's funny because in September when we launched this September, 2017, it was us and maybe like one or two other products when you looked up acne patches, but now when you search for acne patches, there are like pages and pages and pages of acne patches that show up in the search results. And so sure competition [crosstalk 00:19:00]. We're the best seller, we have the best-seller badge.Stephanie:How did you get that? Just from actually being a bestseller or was there anything else behind that. I'm thinking way off course by looking at the Amazon page now.Ju:Yeah. So it's like a three-pronged strategy. One is you need to support your product and your page within the Amazon paid media ecosystem. As you need to run your sponsored product ads and your display ads. And so there's a whole advertising strategy. The other is you have to optimize your organic content. So your product titles, your page titles, your descriptions have the right key words, a plus content, video content, images. So that's the second strategy. And then the third part is kind of building your outside ecosystem. So having press point to your Amazon page or having influencers talk about your product and being available on Amazon and just sort of building your brand halo. So you have to be relentless. It definitely takes time. It took us about a year to get the bestsellers badge from the moment where we really started going after it.Stephanie:So let's talk a bit more about the competitive space, because like you said, beauty is very competitive. So many people are launching products. Like what do you all do to stay ahead from your competition?Ju:We will look at our messaging a lot. We always want to be sort of one step ahead in terms of how we message our products, why we're better really talking about our differentiation. We're also really evolving in terms of product portfolio. So we're best known for our patches, obviously that's whatever it is our bestseller on Amazon and elsewhere. But since then we've launched a lot of other products with like we have rescue bomb and then lightning won and then we're coming out with a bunch of other things next year to really build kind of a routine and regimen for acne. And so, I get the question a lot, like, why is your patch different from others? Like tell me about the patch. Like, they just want to know about the patch, but part of my job these days is really telling people that we're about much more than just the patch, we're really an acne brand. And so I think that tactic is something that is also differentiated from a lot of other competitors out there who may only have like a single patch product.Stephanie:Yeah. [inaudible] great because it shows that you're really invested in that whole market and you are always finding new products to offer to your customers, which is only going to help. Like how do you go about developing those new products and know what your customers want?Ju:It's a mix of art and science. It's some of it comes from well... We have a great PD team, product development team. Part of it comes from sort of research where we're always looking and reading at trends. And we're trying to react to white space that we see in the market. Part of it also just comes from our collective acne issues. Like sometimes I'll break out and I'll say, I really wish I had a product that did this. Why doesn't it exist? And then I'll talk to product development team. And then we'll create something that addresses that issue. Some of it also comes from research that we do with our customers or our consumers, excuse me. Well, we'll ask them what are you looking for? What else do you want to see from us? What other types of acne issues do you have that we could solve? So it's a little bit of like intuition comes from our own experiences. Some of it comes from data. It's kind of there's no perfect recipe, I guess we're coming up with your products.Stephanie:Yeah. Cool. So let's shift over a little bit into more wholesale deals and getting in retail, because I saw some of the retail locations that you're in, like Madewell and target J group. Very impressive. And so I'm sure everyone's like well, how did you get into those retail locations?Ju:Yeah. Okay. So we launched on Amazon September, 2017. I immediately started pitching retailers our product, and then anthropology was actually the first one to take us in January of 2018. And they took us as a-Stephanie:That's quick.Ju:Yeah. It was really quick which again, for me it just affirmed the idea that there was a need in the market for this type of product.Stephanie:What was your pitch? Tell us the magic.Ju:It was really like just a cold pitch email telling them what the product was, what it does, why it's gray included a picture in the email. So they had a visual really just use concise bullet points. And I mean, that's kind of it. I didn't attach a deck or anything like that.Stephanie:And did you have any data that you included that maybe won them over?Ju:I think I had talked about how acne patches in Korea were... so back then KBD was really hot. And I think I'd talked to them. I think I had mentioned that acne patches were really popular in Korea and that and there was a Korean brand that was quite popular. And so I wanted to bring like an American version of that product to the US so in a way that, buyers are usually trend seekers, they pay a lot of attention to the trends of their category. So I think she knew that acne patches a developing an emerging.Stephanie:That's great. So you got anthropology as your first retail partner. Was it easier to get the rest after you could point to anthropology and be like, see we're in here?Ju:I mean, it's definitely validation gives you street cred. But I think in 2018 when we launched in a lot of specialty retailers and I credit that to I'm a big believer in, if you build the demand, the retailers will come. And so once I started our PR push and we were mentioned in, into the gloss and business insider and Buzzfeed, I actually started getting quite a bit of inbound requests from buyers. So I remember like American Eagle was an inbound J crew, I believe was an inbound, Neiman Marcus was an inbound. So as we started getting more press and becoming more known on Instagram and things like that I actually started getting pitched from these buyers. They would email me and say, Hey, I heard about your product. I really want to try it. Can you send me some samples? And so that was sort of special.Stephanie:That's awesome. So how did you get this press to get in front of them? What kind of avenues were they finding you on, like, were they finding you from Instagram or was it actually in these articles that were somehow ending, ending up on their computer screen? How did that work?Ju:So there's a service that I used called Launch Grow Joy. I recommend to, I recommend them to like every entrepreneur that I've talked to, because it's sort of like DIY PR so you pay like a monthly or yearly fee, you log into their system and then they give you access to all these editors that are looking for content or products to talk about in their next article. I did all the pitching early on and like had mentioned before the first article that we really got was an into the gloss. And immediately after that article went up, I think I got like two or three inbound emails from retailers saying, Oh, I just read about your product. I really want to try it. And so I think if you know, what the buyers re like, usually depending on your category, they read certain things to know what the trends are and to know what's like new. So for beauty.Ju:And so the gloss is it's a publication that a lot of people read. And so I just got really lucky, I think with that first article and then just started pitching other beauty related publications and then sort of build [inaudible]Stephanie:That's really great. So now you're in many retail locations at that point? What kind of lessons did you learn that maybe you took to new retail partner you got?Ju:That's a good question. I think packaging is really, really important. I think that's why initially I think we stood out because our packaging was very colorful and it was very bright. And then it was pretty clear with product did on the packaging. And so for me, like anytime we make a packaging change, I always run it by our buyers. So when we launch new products and we're looking at a different color scheme or something like that, I'll always send it to our buyers to get quick feedback, because they'll know if it'll do well or won't do well. So that's a big one.Stephanie:Do you change packaging based on different retail locations whatever connects with anthropology might be very different than target.Ju:No, we don't, maybe we'll do different pack sizes, but we won't really change the design. So I think that's a big one. I mean, I've learned that working and staying close with the buyer is really important because they'll have a lot of input into your innovation too. Because, because sometimes like they're looking for a certain type of product and then they'll come to you and they'll be like, Oh, we'd love this. We'd love it if you made X, Y, Z product. And so I try to stay close with the buyers on innovation pipeline. I think it's really important to hold price. We started selling on Amazon. And then I actually was very worried in the beginning that no one would take us because we were on Amazon, because to your point, a lot of people have this love, hate relationship with Amazon.Ju:But actually what I found was that no one had a problem with it because we're three on Amazon. So we sell on their marketplace. Therefore we control the price because we could control the price. A lot of other retailers were okay with it. And in fact, they kind of see Amazon success as validation that it will probably do well at their store as well.Stephanie:Yeah, that makes sense. Very cool. So now with where the world's at today, and a lot of retail locations, declaring bankruptcy, what are you guys experiencing right now? And what's your go forward strategy?Ju:Yeah, this year has been an interesting year. We're luckily one of those businesses that actually benefited from COVID in a way and really two reasons, I think one reason is our distribution strategy. So the biggest channels that we sell in which are D to C, Amazon and Target are, they were always online or they never say it another way. They never had to close this year because like Target was considered an essential retailer, Amazon, they're online and then D to C is online. And so luckily we weren't a company that depended heavily on a retailer that did have to close so that, so we saw minimal impact. And then in fact, like, as these essential retailers, they get stronger. Our business actually just gets stronger as well. And then the other issue is since we all have to wear masks the masks because acne, and there's a term that people use is called [inaudible 00:33:08].Stephanie:Have not heard of that.Ju:Have you not? Its called [inaudible] And it's caused by either like the friction. So when you wear the mask, sometimes it rubs on her face and it causes friction and then that'll cause you to break out or I don't know if you've noticed this, but when I have the mask on it, it creates humidity when you talk like when you talk and when you breathe, it creates humidity. and that humidity gets trapped and creates bacteria, which causes you to break out. And so we've seen a lot of people suffer from mass MI looking for a solution and then they end up finding our products and our company. And so that's another reason why we've actually benefited from COVID in a way.Stephanie:Oh, that's good. So are you going after the masks masks me keyword or any other cameras coming?Ju:Yeah, actually when I first heard about maskne I don't know, maybe it was like April, like may or something like that, I immediately told my team and I said, Hey, we need to double down on this, on this word, let's write a blog post, let's do social content. We need to own maskne. I think we were the first ones probably to come up with like content around maskne and to do, to even create a bundle on our website for a mass me. And then since then I've seen some other people do that, but I saw that as definitely an opportunity for us.Stephanie:Yeah. That's, really good. So I want to move over into the mentorship category now, because I saw that you have Jamie Schmidt as your mentor and she created schmaltz and she started in a farmer's market and then ended up selling it to Unilever. So amazing mentor. I want to learn a bit about the types of things that she's guiding you on or the most memorable pieces of advice that she's given you.Ju:Oh gosh. So she helps me a lot with distribution because she also obviously had built and sold a company that's similar in terms of distribution strategy. Like they weren't just D to C. They also sold that big box retail and had a pretty extensive they had extensive distribution. And so I remember when we did a mentoring session for Inc magazine, one of the questions I asked her was around like succeeding at target and how to do that, how to ensure success because it's a really important relationship. You want to make sure you get it right. You don't really have a second chance. So she gave give a lot of really good advice and tips on that and also how they support it.Ju:I remember her saying that they ran a lot of geo-targeted ads and some of the top like 50 or a hundred stores to drive traffic to, to the target stores. So that was a really good idea. And even, even now I hadn't recently sent her an email about sort of international distribution, because I know they have quite a few international distributor partners how to navigate those relationships what those relationships should look like. And then people should definitely follow her on Twitter. She gives a lot of really good advice on Twitter for free. So I'm always following what she tweets.Stephanie:She's very smart. I follow her as well. So what kind of thoughts did she have around expanding internationally? And are you working towards doing that or are you already international?Ju:We're kind of international, like we sell on Amazon Canada, we sell at Liberty London in the UK. It hasn't been a big push for us just because US market alone is so big and then we already have so much work. But it's definitely something we have our eyes set on just because for us, acne, we want to make our products available for anyone who has acne. I think they really do help people who break out. And so that's obviously not just limited to the US it's really a global problem. Anyone who breaks out should be able to access our products. And so it is, yeah, it's in the strategy for sure. I think it's a matter of prioritizing it when we have the time.Stephanie:Cool. And so by taking a product that you found in Korea and bringing it back here, it seems like there'd be a lot of room to go other places and be like oh, and here's another product I can bring to the US and another one, like do you ever get tempted when you travel or traveling to buying other products and be like this worked once. Why wouldn't I just launch more things on Amazon?Ju:Yeah, I haven't had a product idea yet, but living in Paris I do see things here where I'm like oh, wow. I wish I could introduce this to the US. I think it could do really well.Stephanie:What are some things in Paris doing well, or unless you don't want people to steal your idea because we have many customers who might, I don't know.Ju:Well, I'll say there's a retail idea. There's a retail chain that does quite well here and that doesn't exist in the US and again, it was sort of the same thing. I'm like, why does it exist in the US? And I think you're right. I think that's like one of the great things about traveling is you get to really explore and learn a different culture and discover different products or different services that could be adaptable to a different country, a different market. And so I kind of have two ideas that are kind of like that already.Stephanie:All right. So I want to move into a couple more like higher level ecommerce questions because you've been in the industry for awhile. I want to hear what kind of trends or patterns are you most excited about right now?Ju:I think there's a lot of cool stuff in food that's happening. I think I'm really interested... For me personally, I'm really interested in the environment and sustainability, and I see a lot of cool ideas around local delivery by bike. So it's zero emission. It gets a product from point A to point B. It is a lot more sustainable. I think that's really interesting. I think food again is also interesting. And especially with COVID and this year and how I think the uptake with buying food online has probably skyrocketed. I think there are a lot of people who weren't used to doing their groceries online. So I'm really curious to see innovation that comes out with food. I'm also very interested in sort of this marketplace concept that I see coming up and popping up. There's a new marketplace called [inaudible 00:41:57].Stephanie:Yeah. I was just reading about that this morning.Ju:Yeah. So it's sort of like a D to C. I guess it's a good D to C marketplace or some marketplace for D to C brands, almost like an online mall, which I think sounds really interesting as well. So I don't know. I mean, there's just a ton of stuff going on. I think for sure, like ecomm is going to be it because we've seen the adoption just really increase in penetration over the past eight months, I guess. So I'm curious to see what the innovation is going to be like, but I already see a ton of ideas happening at the moment.Stephanie:Yeah. Awesome. All right. Let's move over to the lightning round, brought to you by Salesforce commerce cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready Ju?Ju:I'm ready?Stephanie:All right. So what's up next on your Netflix queue other than Emily and Paris, obviously?Ju:Oh, I'm watching the Crown, the newest season.Stephanie:Is it good? Someone just said that yesterday.Ju:Oh yeah. Because it's all about princess Diana and Prince Charles. So yes, it's good.Stephanie:Awesome. Where are you traveling to next when you're able to travel again?Ju:I really want to go to Korea actually. I want to go to Seol.Stephanie:Find more trends.Ju:Yeah. Find more trends. I want to see my relatives. I want to meet my vendors. Yeah, I would really like to go there.Stephanie:Fun. What do you not understand today that you wish you did?Ju:I wish I could understand TikTok better.Stephanie:Do you guys use TikTok?Ju:We're very heavy on TikTok. It's one of our most important social channels, but I don't know. I find it so time-intensive to make the videos and create the content and stuff, but there's some people who are amazing at it.Stephanie:So what kind of what are your best performing videos on TikTok?Ju:Oh, the peeling off the patch and that video. Yeah, because it's like kind of like a doctor Pimple Popper moment. It's kind of gross, but satisfying. And those videos will get like millions of views in like 48 hours.Stephanie:I had a feeling that was going to be what it was. I can advertise those videos all the time. I don't know what I clicked on at one point in my life, but I can all that advertised to me on Facebook and wherever I'm at. [inaudible] stop following me. Cool. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be?Ju:Oh, that's a good question, because I actually thought about having a podcast. I would have a podcast around entrepreneurship. I don't know exactly how it would be different from other topics, but something around probably entrepreneurship, maybe how people made the first million dollars or something like that. And then my first guest would probably be Jim [inaudible 00:45:11].Stephanie:There you go. That's to mean you already have that connection, it sounds like a hit to me. All right. And the last one, we talked a little bit about trends or patterns you're excited about. This is a little bit different. What one thing do you think is going to have the biggest impact on ecommerce within the next year?Ju:Well, I mean, I guess the pandemic has already had its impact. In the next year... I don't know. I mean I think probably this big sustainability push is... I don't know if it will be in the next year, but I think we will start to see it impacting ecommerce in a significant way, in packaging in your carbon footprint. And I think we're going to see a lot more of it in the next year for sure.Stephanie:All right Ju, this has been a really fun interview. I love talking about how you launched on Amazon and how to get into retail. I feel like there's a lot to learn. Where can people find out more about you and your cosmetics?Ju:You can find more about Hero cosmetics either on Instagram. The handle is Hero cosmetics website, herocosmetics.com. And then for me, you can find me on Twitter. It's just my first name, last name, J-U-R-H-Y-U, and then same handle on Instagram.Stephanie:Awesome. Thanks so much for joining.
From the baseball field, to the Nascar track, to the tennis court, in sports, ads can be found everywhere. Brands and sports have been linked together through sponsorship for decades. And now, with the rise of social media and influencers, athletes can create even more profitable relationships with brands than ever before. But a sponsorship should be more than just a way for a brand and an athlete to make money. Today, more than ever, that message matters. The story you tell makes a difference. And the purpose behind a brand is what is drawing people in and converting them to loyal customers. At POC, that belief is what has been driving the company since its founding, and it is influencing its unique content strategy, which is successfully driving people to its website and into its ecommerce channels. POC is a Swedish company that makes top of the line protective gear for athletes around the world. David DeMartini is POC’s Global Chief Marketing and Digital Officer and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, he explains why the purpose- and data-driven content strategy the company has devised is working, and what other brands can learn from what they have built. Whether it’s more of a focus on original, serialized video, or a different approach to working with influencers, POC’s marketing strategies have far outperformed traditional methods. Learn how and why on today’s episode! Main Takeaways:Propose a Purpose: More than ever, consumers are driven to brands that have a clearly-stated purpose or mission. But simply having a purpose written out on your website is not enough. Brands that develop an ambitious purpose, stress test it, and look beyond the problems of now to understand how their purpose can drive them in the future are the ones that will succeed.Don’t Be Old School: Athlete sponsorships are not new in the marketing world, however, brands like POC are finding creative ways to expand those partnerships. By investing in different marketing channels like video series, movies, and other long-form, engaging content, brands can set themselves apart and tell stories in ways customers will connect with. More Than The Data: Every organization should be using data to guide organizational decisions, but data should never be the only factor. Data should be used in conjunction with what you know about your customers on an intangible level to create a balance that is analytics-based but still feels human.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hello, and welcome back to up next in ecommerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Our guest today is David DeMartini, the Chief Marketing Officer at POC. David, welcome to the show.David:Hi, Stephanie. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.Stephanie:Yeah, I'm really excited to have you too. I just went into a Wormhole watching some of your guys' videos with the skiers, flying down the mountain at lightning speed and I was like, "Could I do this? No, probably not." But they were great to watch.David:Yes. Oh, well, thank you. And I sure you could do it. We have an amazing roster of athletes that do a great job of telling our brand story through their actions and our goal is to do everything we can to keep them safe. So, it's fun to create content or let them create content and it helps us tell our story.Stephanie:Yeah. I love that. We'll definitely be diving into all of that in a little bit, but first tell me or anyone who's listening, what is POC?David:Yeah. So POC is a Swedish company that was founded in 2006, 2007 timeframe. We are a protection brand. We're the world's leading protection brand, currently servicing athletes and participants across bicycle sports and snow sports. And so, we have a really strong mission and purpose to save lives and protect those pursuing their passion, and enable people to really find more joy in life through using our products to keep them as safe as possible when they're doing the things that they love.Stephanie:Yeah. And you have very nice looking products as well. I haven't been snowboarding in a while, but I'm like, "If I was, I would want this helmet here and they even have mouth guards nowadays, which is mind blowing to me." I mean, very helpful, but I have not seen any other companies. You have a helmet with a... Is it called a mouth guard? What is the word for that now?David:Yeah. Well, on the snow side, we have a couple of different disciplines that we service. And I think the product you're referencing is one of the helmets we have on the race side of our business. When slalom skiers or even some GS skiers are running gates. There's a chin bar that attaches to the helmets to make sure none of [crosstalk] end up smacking them in the face as they're making their way down the course. So, always looking for ways to better protect our athletes in our customers. And that's a pretty handy service with that chin bar because taking a slalom gate to the face is not much fun.Stephanie:Yeah. It does not sound like it. I also looked at them like this would be perfect for my two and a half year old, and he is always falling and hitting his face somehow, or his chin I'm like, "You guys need some kids versions of this."David:Yeah. That's a good point. We have an amazing children's line that we call poquito-Stephanie:Oh, cute.David:Kids helmets and there's some really cool safety pieces built into that. We found that the most accidents that happened with kids on a ski slope or on a bicycle are scenarios where someone larger than them, whether it's a larger kid or an adult just simply doesn't see them. And there's a collision that happens. So we have a really great visibility story built into our kids' products, but we hadn't thought about the chin or face protection for the children, but maybe we [crosstalk 00:03:28]. Yeah?Stephanie:Yeah. So when I was looking through your LinkedIn [inaudible 00:03:33], I also saw that you have a background in media and sports, and I was wondering what drew you over to POC?David:Yeah, so I of cut my teeth at an agency in Colorado working across an amazing book of brands that the agency Backbone Media service at the time. And it was really an amazing opportunity for me because I got to really dig in and understand some of the challenges that brands have really all maturity level, where we're trying to overcome. Everything from a larger, more established brand, like Eddie Bauer or YETI Coolers, all the way up to startups looking at how do they just continue to raise some money to propel their businessDavid:And so, as I was working through and learning and absorbing and working with all these amazing people at Backbone Media, I was really fine-tuning the things that were interesting to me and knew I always wanted to be in marketing and direct-to-consumer but really found an understanding of what specifically in those areas were interesting.David:And then after about five years with Backbone, POC was one of the clients of Backbone for a long time. And one of the accounts I worked on and an opportunity came up to join POC internal as the marketing director for North America and I took that and I've been lucky to find myself in some opportunistic positions within POC. And my skillset has allowed me to rise to the ranks here as well which has been really fun and really rewarding.Stephanie:Yeah. That's great. I also love how POC has the same messaging across all the platforms. It was very clear about what you guys stood for. So tell me a little bit about... Did that draw you in when you saw, "Here's our purpose. Here's why we're here." How did that impact your decision to jump over to work with them?David:Yeah. I think that one of the key attributes that you see as particularly important and something that a lot of brands in the outdoor space focus on is purpose. And the term purpose can be applied to business or the way that a company operates in a lot of different ways. But I realized early on that a trend that I was seeing with the brands that I worked with at Backbone Media, the ones with a solid foundation, a clear purpose and a really clear and ambitious but not to the point where the brand platform and the mission of the vision didn't really mean anything. Those are the companies and the brands that were doing the best.David:And so, I quickly realized how important that was. And so, as I thought about what was next, I knew that, that was core to any organization that I could see myself at, for an extended period of time. And so I made that one of my priorities and starting to look around for whatever was next for me was that purpose has to be there. And I have to really be able to connect to that purpose in a meaningful way because if I can't, in a lot of ways you're trying to fake it to make it, and that just gets really taxing and is tiresome and hard to do. And it comes back to, if you can act to the purpose it's very easy to find the motivation to really give everything you have to the business and these days you have to do that.David:So, POC has had it. It's a really amazing a brand platform and admission and vision. That's been with us since day one and credit to the founder, Stefan Ytterborn who created the brand in 2006, to address a problem that he saw in the form of... His kids were becoming ski racers. And he looked around at the head protection at the time and said, "This doesn't seem all that great and I think I can do this better." And had the foresight to realize that spending the time and really ironing out what he was there to do and what their mission and vision looked like, was crucial to make sure he built something that could continue to live on and be successful.Stephanie:That's great. Your kids always seem to be a driving force sometimes with businesses or new products. And I love that story, having an actual reason to develop something and being like, "Oh, everyone actually needs us in this industry. And it's not good enough. I'm going to fix it right now."David:Yeah. He saw a problem that was specific to him and where he was in his life and realized that, he's probably not the only one feeling this way and really created something special and it's been a fun ride since then and continues to do well. So, again, it goes back to the core purpose of the business is real and meaningful. And that's really valuable and making sure that we make the right decisions on a day-to-day basis.Stephanie:So, since you've been able to see many brands, especially why you were working at the agency, what are tips or best practices around maybe a new brand coming up with their purpose, but then actually following through, because I think that's a tricky thing with a lot of these new companies popping up it seems like a lot of them say they have a purpose or here's what we're doing, but it doesn't actually come through. It's just like the messaging. You don't see actions behind it. Is there any advice or things that you saw when you were at the agency of like this work and this did not work, everyone should not do it this way?David:Yeah. It's a good question. And I think the answer to that can take many different forms but really what you're looking for is something that's balanced in something that is, it can stand the test of time. And so what I saw at Backbone was it used to be that you could identify a problem, find a solution for it, and then take that and run with it. And I think that that worked for a long time and that was the traditional approach to starting a business. But I think the consumer today has evolved so much to where they look for more than just helping them solve a problem. You really have to be invested in the solution and in the problem itself to a point where it's authentic and real.David:And so I think for anybody who's thinking about starting a business and can't stress enough, the importance of making sure you spend the time and put the work in on building a brand platform and then pressure testing that through all different mock scenarios thinking about where you're going to be in five years, 10 years, 15 years, and beyond. And making sure the verbiage you use in the core of that brand platform can remain constant. I see if a new company is... It's almost like you can't be too focused on the problem you're trying to solve, you have to think beyond that problem, that future problems, and make sure that your approach and what you're creating can solve future problems as much as it can solve the problem here and now.David:And it's a really hard thing to do, and it takes a very specific approach and creative mind. And it's not easy to achieve. And so I feel lucky to be part of an organization where, we were able to achieve that. And the founders that started POC went through that exercise and it's cumbersome and difficult. But I think it's super important.Stephanie:Yeah. I completely agree. It reminds me of... I don't know if you've heard of the, Clock of the Long Now, it's a 10,000-year clock, and it's all about encouraging long-term thinking. And every time I start thinking about longer-term thinking, and where is this headed? I always think about that clock, it's my motivation.David:Yeah. I think that's a great connection point. And it's really hard to visualize and come up with mock scenarios as to what could happen in 10 years because who knows what's going to happen in 10 years. But I think just going through the exercises and putting the time and the effort and we'll help you find the right balance between to immediate here and now, and then on the other end of the spectrum is... I don't know if you know a guy named Scott Galloway, but he uses the term, yogababble where you use so many buzz words and it's so conceptual that it actually completely loses all of its meaning. You got to find someplace in between there that is balanced and can stand the test of time to a certain degree.Stephanie:Yeah. That's a good mentality. I saw you have another title, which you didn't mention in the intro, and I'm not sure why, of executive producer. I was looking at the one video, American Downhiller, which is really good. I only got to watch 10 minutes of it, but I think it's a good segue Into some of your marketing and content strategies because the video was so well done. I mean, is it on Netflix? If not, it should be. Tell me a little bit about how you guys go about thinking about developing videos.David:Yeah. I'm really glad you brought that up because that's a really, really fun and amazing project that we just launched to the world earlier in... I think it was in October actually. I was going to say November but, launched in October with a world premier here in Park City, Utah, and then a distribution program with U.S. Ski Team and skiracing.com. And like I mentioned, we got our start in ski racing and it's incredibly important in Colorado business. Compared to other snow sports categories, or the bike category. It's relatively small, but it's so important because in the athletes... Really on any level that are competing or skiing gates on a consistent basis.David:I mean, that's where the stakes are at the highest. That the speeds are incredibly high. The snow conditions are ice essentially these days. You have skis with incredibly sharp edges and the possibility of things going wrong is quite high. And so, we work really hard to continue to innovate on behalf of the ski race community and find different ways to apply the different technologies and safety features that we develop to their world. And so, through the years we've become really close to this ski race community. Like I said, it's not a huge community, but it's very tight-knit one. And one that we're very happy and proud to be part of.David:And over the years, looking for opportunities and being very close with the U.S. Ski Team, we saw this story that was really amazing and hadn't really been told on a mass level around the men's speed team, and how brotherhood really formed through, I guess you could say it through unique adversity in the sense that no ski racing in the U.S. is not what it is in Europe. When you go to Austria, you go to Norway, you go to Switzerland, ski racing is... I mean, the Hanukkah in Austria is it's like the Super Bowl, it's a huge deal there. They have amazing massive fan bases and so being an American and on the American team, when you're competing, most of the races are in Europe. And so the challenge is that the U.S. team had to overcome were unique.David:And I'm not really qualified nor want to say that their challenges were harder or worse to overcome than some of the Europeans, but they were just different. You're not able to travel home on the weekends. You're spending so much time with your other teammates and it really cultivated this brotherhood that organically evolved into this story that became... They took the name American Downhillers, and that term became a tool to represent this brotherhood and the function of some of the veteran guys on the team working to help develop and help some of the younger guys that were coming up to the speed program navigate some of these difficult scenarios that they were in, where you're in foreign country, you're not able to see your family. You're not able to go home on a consistent basis.David:And really that story was just so amazing that we were working with skiracing.com, and we finally said, "Hey, let's try and tell the story." And so, it came to life and I believe it was 2017 where we started to do some short episodes in conjunction with skiracing.com. And we did that for two or three years, five minute, eight minute, 12 minute episodes, focusing in on different elements of this American Downhiller story.David:And towards the middle of 2019, we said to ourselves, "Well, these episodes are great but we haven't really done anything like telling the story from start to finish. Is something we haven't done and it would be an amazing piece for the ski race community." And so, we partnered with skiracing.com and a woman named Claire Brown, who's an amazing producer and has an amazing team of filmmakers. And she's been a part of the ski race community since she was a little kid and she raised competitively through college and I believe she was an All American. And as a staple in that industry and community. And so, we worked with her to tell the story. And so we were able to tell the story from start to finish and pull pieces from the different episodes that we had. And it turned into this really amazing piece that, gives some insight and some behind the scenes look into what it truly means to be an American Downhiller and then some of the challenges that they had to overcome.David:So a really, really fun project that Claire and Elizabeth Reeder, who's one of our Sports Marketing Managers, did an amazing job facilitating and putting together, and we're super proud of it. And we're excited we're going to continue on with this theme and this first one was focused on the men's team, and there's equally as interesting and amazing stories on the women's side. And we're excited to continue to tell these amazing stories that happen in American ski racing, and the next one up we'll be focused on the women's team.Stephanie:That's great. So, where does this content live? I definitely want to finish it. I mean, like I said, it seems like it should be on Netflix or something. It's very, very well done, very professional. It gets you right from the beginning with all the skiers hopping in and saying what it means to them. Where do you guys put this content after it's all made?David:So the distribution for it... We launched a lot of amazing new ski race product this season. And so, we had an objective to reach and engage and build our connection with the ski race community. So the initial rollout plan with this was to work with the U.S. Ski Team work with skiracing.com. and obviously we would support it as well, but we have it living on YouTube and we've seen really great results from an organic grassroots distribution plan. We are looking at some film festivals throughout the country over the next few months and have submitted it in a few of those and we are looking at some larger distribution. There's possibility that some of it might run on NBC, this winter, which would be amazing.David:And we're looking at the subscription viewers or platforms like Netflix and Apple TV and Amazon as well. And trying to figure out how we can get it up there. The goal with the larger distribution platforms is... Again, the story is what's most important and the story can help inspire the next generation of ski racers or particularly American Downhillers. There's a utility function to that and we want to make sure that, that's available to any and everybody that wants to see it on an ongoing basis. So there's a long tail distribution plan to this as well, to make sure that anybody who wants to learn and understand this story has the ability to do that through some of these larger platforms.Stephanie:That's cool. It seems like there's definitely a lot of angles. You've got the partnership thing going on. You've got... Yeah, being able to tell the story holistically, like you wanted to and then the long tail of possibly be able to sell products as well when people see them, yeah. At the perfect place, perfect time while they're watching it.David:Yeah. And we were very intentional about... We didn't want this to be something that felt like we were artificially trying to place product throughout it, the commitment was to the story. And like I said, we've been a partner with U.S. Ski Team for so long that now our product is visible, but you'll also see product from our competitors. And that's okay. We feel like if the story's great and we can help facilitate telling it we don't need a ton of branding. We don't need POC products sitting next to every interview or we don't need the traditional product placement in these stories, feel like we're doing a service to the community by facilitating telling it, and for us, that's what we're here for. So, we take a bit of a different approach to content than say some brands do or some brands previously have.Stephanie:Yeah. Well, how do you guys approach product placement? Because that seems like a very... I mean, it's always been around, but I see a lot of brands doing it way better now. I was just talking about it, the Netflix series of one about organizing and how well the container store did after that. And I don't remember really being slapped over the head with the branding, but it was more me wanting to check into it afterwards if like, "Well, what were they using to organize their entire closets?" And it was very organic. So I see brands doing a much better job now when it comes to product placement and partnerships around that. How do you guys explore that avenue?David:Yeah. So our sports marketing organization does an incredible job and partnering with athletes and getting our product on athletes has been core to our marketing strategy since day one. And so, again, do think it comes back to the purpose conversation we had and we are not delivering on our purpose if we are not supplying the best in the world with our products, because we truly do believe that they're the safest products out there. And so, as you mentioned it, when you take an approach of... We want personalities, we want athletes on our roster that have similar beliefs but of course their own brand and their own way of executing on those beliefs. But we want people who stand for innovation, progression, and we want to make sure that the partnerships we develop with athletes, we truly are helping them pursue their passion and helping them progress the sport that they've dedicated their lives to.David:And so, we have an amazing list of a roster of athletes that we're always looking at and adding to. We have some amazing development programs as part of our sports marketing strategy. We have a three layer level approach. We just launched a revised regional or grassroots athlete program that we call the Aspired Collective and that is solely intended to give up incoming athletes across both snow sports and the bike world. Give them opportunities and help them continue to progress in their careers to one day be the next superstar. And so, doing what we can to support the communities and support the activities in sports that we service through supporting talent within those categories you naturally find yourself with your product on the right people more often than not.David:And so, again, it's a little bit... We try and take a maybe a less manufactured approach and we don't go out and say next year we think so-and-so is going to be the best ski racer. So we've got to get our stuff on this person, this guy or girl, and then the next year it's someone else. And so we go after, we look for longer-term partnership opportunities people who truly believe in what they're doing and partnering with us helps them do what they're doing better. That's the stuff we look for.Stephanie:Yeah. It seems like athletes sponsorships, that's like the original [OG] influencers. Influencers are big now, but the sponsorships of athletes, it seems like it was already going on for a really long time. But what seems really hard to do is figure out how it's driving sales or how it's influencing your marketing campaign. How do you guys think about that when you're setting up these partnerships, you're picking out what athletes you want to work with? How do you think about what the end results should be outside of just wanting to work with a great person of course and making it long-term? What are some metrics you hope to achieve with these parties?David:Yeah. I think it's a really good question because I think the rise of influencer marketing has put such an emphasis on follower number and engagement metrics and all these things. And I think what we've seen is that those things are all important and I'll get into how we look at those, but you can't focus so much on just the numbers to where you lose sight of the individual, the personality, really the non-tangible that an influencer or an athlete or any partnership brings to the brand. And we've been very careful to... We have an objective to be results driven and measure what we can and take a data-driven approach of course but we also want to make sure we don't over index on that to the point where we lose some of the intangible stuff.David:So, when we look at an athlete, a lot of times their Instagram follower account or their YouTube page is an important metric and in the equation but they're also three or four other metrics that are equally as important. So we look at personality, we look at opportunity to have a longer-term relationship with this person. We look at how they compete, where they compete, these sorts of things and make a very balanced call on whether or not they should be somebody we should pursue or not pursue. But to answer your question about measuring influence that athletes or influencers have, it is difficult. And there are some data tools that we have, whether it's being smart about how you distribute content for them to work into their communication outreach with specific links and stuff that we can track through our website.David:But a lot of that stuff is specific to a single campaign or a single program and there's really not a great way going back to the equation that we look at, there's not a great way to measure the intangible stuff, but we know it's important and we know it's working and it's a core element of our positioning in the marketplace. And so, we measure what we can, but we also try and be real and be okay with... There's simply some things that are just hard and difficult to measure and we trust ourselves to say, "This is this things that aren't measurable, we can..." I trust our people and we trust ourselves to say, "This is worth the investment and it's providing a lift to our brand in a way that we just simply can't measure."Stephanie:Yes. What are some of your favorite marketing campaigns that you've done that you really remember, or that were most successful?David:Oh, that's a good question. Favorite marketing. The American Downhiller is definitely up there just because it was so different and new, and we'd never produced a feature like them but we've already talked about that one. Earlier this fall, we launched a signature series, excuse me, around Fabio Wibmer who's an incredibly talented mountain biker, whether it's trials or downhill riding or, dirt jump riding. He is arguably the most popular mountain biker in the world right now and we created a signature series with him that we launched earlier this fall. That's really, really cool and we took the approach of, "We're going to create the product for you, but we really want you to create the marketing and the messaging and launch this product in your voice."David:And that was a really fun approach to take to this because one, it took a little bit of the stress off us internally, and two, it allowed for our audience to hear a message that they're used to hearing from us, from somebody different, which I think in a lot of ways was quite refreshing and something different. And Fabio's team is incredible at creating highly engaging video content and his YouTube following is massive. And so, we basically said, "We'll help you make the product. We'll support some of the distribution of the content, but we want you to create that content." And so it was a different approach for us and a pretty fun one because it brought a different tone of voice to a launch than we're used to having.Stephanie:That's really fun. I mean, and a really good point because I can think of so many brands who work with people in their industry and they end up squishing their creativity by saying like, "This is our brand messaging. This is how it needs to be done." And you can tell you're like, "This is not Oprah Winfrey talking. This is not that Oprah does that." I don't know, but they squish the creativity of the artist or the influencer by all their rules. And it ends up not being very organic and then no one's following actually ended up connecting with it.David:Exactly. And the value that these athletes and influencers and anybody that we partner with bring to our brand is they have their own community and we want to help them build their own community. But if we come in and say, "You need to talk to the community that you've built in our voice and in the way that we speak and over-engineer that, one, their community is going to say, "This is stupid. I can tell this isn't new, or I can tell that this isn't the person that I committed to either through a click on follow or some other way." And if we give that freedom to the person to communicate the points that we're trying to get our audience to understand, and in the way that feels natural to them it's going to come off better, it's going to be a better end product in terms of the creative and again, it's going to resonate with the audience more effectively.David:And we lean on our athletes in our roster of partners very heavily because they're good at what they do. And for us to come in and say, "We know how to do what you do better," it doesn't feel right and I don't think it's right.Stephanie:Yes. So you had a good quote that I saw, but I'm probably going to botch it. So you can just tell me if it's wrong. It's all around data and you were saying that the data that you gather around your customers is your true North. And I wanted to hear a little bit about, what data do you look at and is that influencing your products, or how are you using it day-to-day?David:Yeah. I think that you got the quote exactly right so, thank you for that. And I guess maybe a little counterintuitive to my last point of the balance between tangibles and intangibles, but when we do have data available, we need to make sure we're using that. And we are still a growing organization and we are far from totally dialed in terms of our data management and pulling and curating as much data as we possibly can. But we have gotten a lot better at doing that, really the past three or four years. And part of being able to actually use your data effectively you have to start with your systems and your tech stack and we've been really lucky to be able to partner and use Salesforce suite of services with Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud.David:And the decision to run with those platforms was specifically so that we could start to organize our data and get our systems to speak better together and learn more about our customers. We have all kinds of different touch points with these customers. And the fact that Salesforce Commerce Cloud can speak with Marketing Cloud, and even with Service Cloud when we get a customer service inquiry that scenario really at least gives us an opportunity to maximize what we know about our customers. And so, like I said, we have a long way to go to be where I would say we're A+ rating in terms of data management,` but every day our team gets smarter and we make right the right decisions and we learn more.David:And I think in terms of using the data as your true north and bringing it full circle back to the idea of balance, you got to be able to analyze the data, understand what the data is telling you, but then put that information or that insight into the context of the other things you know about your customer base. I think one of the things I feel very lucky in that, we are a relatively small team, a marketing team of 25 or 28 people across both the marketing team and the digital team. One of the benefits of that is that, we don't have a lot of redundancy and every individual in the organization you naturally have to gain an understanding and you got to know our customer relatively well for almost everything that we do.David:And so, that contextual understanding and knowledge of our customer, coupled with some better data management and insight going actually does give us a pretty good understanding of our customer. What's important to them and how we can deliver on that. Whereas I think a lot of times in bigger organizations I've seen, if you have a lot of not necessarily redundancy, but a lot of very specified positions that do one thing and do one thing very, very well, it's a lot harder to understand the big picture and gain of an accurate profile of the contextual things that go along with your customers. And so, I guess what I'm saying is in a larger organization, it's very easy to look at the data and only the data and it's sometimes hard to bring your head up and look around and say, "Okay. Well, this is what this is telling me about this specific point or insight. How does that connect with what might be happening over here?" And so there's of course the challenges with being a smaller group but I there's also a lot of benefits and that's definitely one of them.Stephanie:Yeah. I completely agree. I mean, thinking about how do you get to that holistic approach where... I mean, I've been at larger companies before and things get siloed and you have your customer service team over here, and they're probably hearing so many good nuggets from customers about new product features they want, or something that might help the experience better or the unboxing experience. And a lot of times that they just get stuck there and you don't know how to incorporate into your new product launches and stuff. And so, I hear a lot of companies, especially smaller ones that are very quickly growing, experiencing issues like that, where things are all siloed and they don't know how to look at the data, but then also take a step back and use your gut and be like, "That's actually sending us in the wrong direction, or that's not really our customer who's saying that."David:Exactly. Yeah. Being a small group allows us to... Our customer service manager can easily stand up and walk across the room or these days, tap our Digital Director on the shoulder and say, "Hey, three of my team members said this and they're hearing this. What does that mean for what you do?" Those conversations are really, really important. And since we're lucky. It's a little easier for us to facilitate those just because we're a smaller team.Stephanie:Yes. So what digital trends are you excited about? Where are you guys headed over the next three years in the world of ecommerce?David:It's a good question but there's lots of them. I think one of the things that I'm seeing in and we're actually acting on is that, consumers are... Their expectations have evolved to a certain point to where the traditional tactics in terms of driving a sale, there's more options there. I think, you're seeing a lot of brands think about the needs of their customers and really looking at it and saying, we need to be able to add more value than we're looking to extract from our customer base. And to do that, you have to really think about what are the challenges or the struggles, or the other complimentary problems you can solve for your customers on behalf of them to help strengthen that connection they have with your brand.David:And I think what we're going to see is that, we're going to see a lot less mass trends, I guess, in a sense or mass tactics in the sense that brands that are going to be successful are the ones that are going to focus on building a community that is tight-knit has a very meaningful value prop for the members of that community. And ultimately places a little bit more emphasis on lifetime value and holding onto the customers that they have and building a better relationship with them versus turn and burn customer acquisition bring them in, make a sale, move on to the next.David:And so, we're really excited about that because we have a lot of the ingredients necessary to build a meaningful community and we have to do some ideation on this idea of providing more value than we're looking to extract, but it's a new set of challenges and one that I think is a little bit more fun because you're becoming a better partner to your community and keeping hold of that and looking for ways to solve other problems for them and make your brand more appealing and one that they want to connect with on a deeper level. And that's really fun, and so we're excited about that.Stephanie:Yeah. That gets back to the whole idea of long-term thinking. And yeah, I think the companies that'll rise above the rest, especially with so many coming out right now, we're going to be the ones who think longer-term like that. Think how to build that community and really engage your customers. That's not just driven on that quick conversion.David:Exactly. Yeah. And if you look at the mega brands out there right now that are being successful, they're looking at that exact equation, obviously in a different way than we are, but you see brands like Peloton and Lululemon's acquisition of Mirror, they're looking to check a series of boxes, whether it's vertically integrating owning the hardware, developing a reoccurring revenue model. All these things that compliment and go hand in hand with a tight-knit community of consumers that are truly committed to you as a brand.David:Yeah. I think literally Lululemon's one of the most amazing examples because they do such a good job of developing a community, creating these ambassador programs towards, there's one up here on main street, you walk into a store and you look around and the imagery they use our local ambassadors. You look up on the wall and you see your friends up there and it's like, "Wow, one, I didn't know they were in a massive, that's cool." But also to be that smart to actually integrate local ambassadors into their communication and retail is just such a cool thing and makes the brand feel truly invested in this area [inaudible] do that-Stephanie:Yeah. I didn't know they did that. That's really cool.David:Yeah. And so they're all in on the community thing, and I think this acquisition they made of this mirror product is a great way to continue to facilitate that at scale. And it'll be really cool, not really case study, but brand to follow over the next couple of years and see how they continue to evolve because they truly are the best in the biz.Stephanie:Yes. I agree. All right. Well, let's shift over to the lightning round, brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready to go, David. All right.David:All right. [inaudible] this might be tough.Stephanie:I've done a done, I'll have to cut you off.David:Yeah. Cut me off. Don't be shy.Stephanie:All right. What's up next on your Netflix queue?David:Oh, Netflix queue. I don't know the name of it, but there's a film series about the Formula One circuit that has been recommended to me and I wish I could remember the name, but it follows some of the drivers Formula One and it's supposed to be really, really good. So-Stephanie:Drive to Survive.David:That might be it. I think you're right. It saved in our account, which is very helpful. Thank you Netflix. That's the one where we're super psyched to see next.Stephanie:Right. That sounds cool. Yeah. I think someone on our team actually recommended that as well. And I think they told me to watch it from a business perspective. I'm not really sure why. I need to check it out.David:Wow. Well, you have to let me know what you think.Stephanie:Yes. What's up next on your travel destinations when we can get out into the world and travel again?David:Man, that sounds so nice. Doesn't it?Stephanie:I know. That's why I asked it.David:Yeah. My wife and I have been talking about... And we originally were going to do it for a honeymoon, but things didn't work out the way we want it to at that trip, but we still have not skied in Japan. And that is on our list for when things settle down, is to go and Japan such an amazing place and it's such a great culture that we're super excited to experience that a little more in depth than my business trips have allowed. And you would also get an incredible amount of snow. So this seems quite good as well.Stephanie:Yeah. Well, that sounds really nice. And then you can go and hang out in the hot bath with this monkeys. Have you seen that?David:I have seen that. I think my wife might be more excited for that than she is the actual skiing.Stephanie:Oh, I'll go with her then.David:Yeah.Stephanie:I went to Japan and I missed that because we weren't in the right area and that's very sad. I'm like, "How fun would it be to take a bath monkeys?" I don't know. Maybe it's a tourist trap, but either way I want to try it.David:Yeah. It sounds pretty entertaining.Stephanie:Yeah. What one thing do you not understand today that you wish you did?David:Oh, man. I mean, so much. It's a good question. Well, here now, I'm getting ready to take the next level of avalanche certification and understanding how avalanches work so that we can ski and travel through the back country safely. I have some training on that, but there's a lot more that I don't understand. And so that is fresh on my mind as the snow is starting to fall and I'm excited to continue my education on understanding snow pops and risk assessment and making sure that we can [inaudible] snow, but do it safely.Stephanie:I mean, that's a good one. And that is a unique answer. No one else has said that so far. So David-David:Thank you.Stephanie:All right. And then the last one, what one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?David:I mean, the thing that comes to mind feels a little bit like a cop out just because it's been so talked about, but I think 5G is really hard to ignore and when that fully rolls out the mobile trends that we're seeing are going to become even more important and pointed. So, it's going to put so much more emphasis on the computer you carry in your pocket rather than the one that you sit in front of it at the desk. We and a lot of other brands are still working on how do you crack that device in a way as meaningful as it could be in maximizing the value to the business that comes from a mobile device. So, I think that's going to continue to become more and more important and it's a tough one to solve.Stephanie:That's a good answer. Or it's not a cop out because no one else has said that so far. I thought you were going to say COVID-David:Oh, right.Stephanie:And then I was going to be like, "No. [inaudible 00:51:09]." So-David:No. I didn't think of that. It's the new normal, I guess.Stephanie:I'm glad. Yeah. Exactly. All right, David. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people find out more about you and POC?David:Yeah. So, come find out more about us at pocsports.com. Can learn more about our product offering, our amazing roster of athletes and the things that are important to us and want to moment just to thank the amazing team of people, not just with marketing but everybody here involved with POC. Like I mentioned, they are as committed as anyone can be to why we exist and that permeates through our business and so many different ways on a consistent basis. And the people here and the talent that they bring and the drive and passion that they bring truly is what makes us an amazing organization. So, would rather say, thank you to them I guess than promote myself, if that option is okay.Stephanie:That option is okay. That sounds great. Thanks so much, David. Yeah. It's been great.David:Yeah. I appreciate it, Stephanie. And great to speak with you.
The ecommerce industry has historically been dominated by some familiar verticals: apparel, footwear, home goods. In 2020, the world of ecommerce exploded to include a few more at the top of the list, including grocery and fitness. One industry, though, hasn’t necessarily emerged as a leader in the ecommerce zeitgeist: home security. But just because you don’t always think about an industry as a part of ecommerce doesn’t mean that it isn’t making waves among its digital peers. The perfect example of this is Ring. Ring was founded in 2013 as a company called Doorbot, which failed to get the investment of any Shark Tank sharks, yet persevered to become a leader in home security before being acquired by Amazon in 2018. Today, Ring is valued at more than one billion dollars and, through its website sales, is bringing home security to customers everywhere. Robin Choe is the Head of Ecommerce at Ring, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, he explains how Ring has built a successful business through creating a community of neighbors and what it means to be driven by a shared goal. Plus, Robin touches on his past experience working in ecommerce overseas and what the differences are between the Asian market and what’s happening stateside. Robin also details why he believes that companies that are able to foster a sense of community and safety are the ones that will rise above the fray in the business world. Main Takeaways:United Nations: China has been ahead of the curve in its ability to build a digital landscape that permeates throughout its society. The country is more adept at creating social connections via technology, building direct, dynamic marketplace models, and optimizing the supply chain. But other countries, including the U.S. are starting to close the gap and create more widespread access to those same experiences.If You Stand for Nothing, What Will You Fall For?: Leadership is critical in any organization, but it is even more important in one like Ring, which was acquired by Amazon, one of the biggest companies on the planet. Creating specific team-by-team missions that all ladder up to the top of the organization and then also falls in line with your parent company is a difficult task, but a necessary one if you want to have long-term success and buy-in from all parts of the company. Having those shared missions also sets up the possibility of setting measurable goals and a true north to strive for and build toward.Avoiding the Upsell: Customers don’t want to be sold to, they want to be offered solutions to real problems. Rather than trying to push products on people, a better approach would be to understand each customer’s specific use case and deliver personalized solutions to meet those needs. That technique is much more likely to lead to a sale than simply shoving the newest and coolest products at potential customers.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Everyone, this is the Up Next In Commerce Podcast. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, Co-Founder at Mission.org. Today, we're chatting with Robin Choe, the Head of Ecommerce at Ring. Robin, thanks for joining us.Robin:Thanks for having me.Stephanie:So, I was looking through your background a bit. I wanted to start there, because I saw that you had worked previously at Mattel for a while. I think it's a good starting point. Then we go through your background in the world of ecommerce before coming back to Ring.Robin:Sure. Yeah, so I started in Mattel in 2008. My first role there was customer strategic planning, so everything around retail strategies and working closely with retailers to try and drive share of voice, market share, and ultimately, sales and brand growth at the retailers. What was unique around the starting point there was I had a hodgepodge of different channels and accounts. So, everything from Kmart, believe it or not back in the day, which is a much bigger retailer back then.Stephanie:Wow, bringing it back.Robin:Exactly. Also, working across what they call the emerging channels. Part of that emerging channel group, everything from grocery and department stores, drug channel, tried to grow our leadership share there. But Amazon was the one that really stood out to me back then, because it was still evolving, it was still smaller, but it was one that was growing substantially year over year and starting to catch the attention of our leadership and obviously something that I was preaching about internally to make sure that we're aligning and prepping ourselves to grow with them.Robin:From there, for about five years in the US, I moved to Hong Kong. I became the Head of Shopper Marketing or Customer Marketing for the Asia Pacific region. So, did that for about two years, and was also playing a hybrid role where I was the ecommerce excellence, best practice lead for the region, working closely with our regional accounts, our specific local accounts that are a lot bigger today like the Tmalls of the world, Lazadas, which are growing and ultimately trying to drive greater ecommerce best practices across the region.Robin:From there, I pivoted to a general manager role. So, I've had an unconventional career, where I was asked to take on the Country Manager role for Korea. So, everything from leadership across all the various functions, supply chain, finance, accounting to marketing and sales. And then my role expanded from Korea to North Asia. So, I had Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan, which are all the best food markets, still residing in Korea. My role expanded to the North Asia cluster, again, driving all the sales and marketing commercial activities and leadership there.Robin:And then in 2018, decided to come back after being five years in Asia, and take on the role of Head of ecommerce for Mattel, which was quite unique. It was a newly formed role, where they consolidated a lot of different functions under one leader. Four different pillars that I would say we focused on, the first one was our direct-to-consumer site. So, think about Hot Wheels collector and Barbiecollector.com and trying to drive our sales and our engagement with them. Also, all websites across the world was under the first pillar. The second pillar was CRM acquisition, analytics and design to everything regarding fueling the acquisition efforts, engagement, and also the experiences on our sites. Also, even our retailer sites, believe it or not.Robin:Third one was digital operation. So, this is a team that really was sourcing the best-in-class assets and copy, everything that really fuels a great merchandising experience on our own sites, but also on our third-party retailer sites. So, we are basically managing all the PDPs, the brand stores for our bigger retailers like Amazon and Target and Walmart, and syndicating and deploying assets there. And then the last pillar was around digital customer marketing and digital shopper marketing, where we have a team that was specifically focused on growing our share of voice, our leadership share with Amazon.com, Target.com or Walmart.com.Robin:So, we had this full end-to-end scope of responsibilities where they were all connected. They were all in need of similar assets and strategies. Obviously, there was nuances between what we were doing internally and externally. But overall, it was a challenging experience but a great one, because it was broad, but also, we could see how things were lifting each other up as we're going through the process.Robin:And then about a year ago, made the move to Ring. Really the objective behind that was to go deeper into this ecommerce in general. I think I had a pretty broad role at Mattel. Even in my previous experience, I worked a lot with digital retailers. But being able to just dive into a brand that I love and that I was able to use as well before I even came to the company, just the mission around the brand of making neighborhoods safer, it was just one where everything just made sense for me to go in.Robin:It's pretty clear, and I made this clear with my boss back then. I'm not the most technical savvy guy. I'm not the guy that's going to be doing your coding and development. But I'm a guy that can come in and really drive some vision and strategy in terms of, "What are our immediate needs? How do we serve them? At the same time, how do we identify a vision for the mid- to long-term, so that we can be ready and planful and execute against what we believe to be the evolving changes that will happen and we can embrace them and ultimately deliver upon them in terms of customer expectations?" So, it's been quite a ride. Happy that I'm still here and that things are relatively going well.Stephanie:That's awesome. Yeah. So, I have Ring cameras around my house. Specifically, the one I love is the front camera with the floodlight on it, because it would blast people if they walk by and I think they're a little bit shady. But yeah, I really like Ring. It seems like a very different transition, going from Mattel to Ring, especially when you were for a little bit there focused in Asia, which in a lot of ways, I think Asia is actually very ahead when it comes to ecommerce and social stuff and community building. Were there any best practices that you learned throughout that journey that you're maybe bringing to Ring now?Robin:Sure, I think there is a ton to learn. Like you said, you had a variety of different business models out in Asia. For example, you had the direct model, which was unique. It wasn't normal like it is here in the US with Amazon, for example. But it's one where it's more of a marketplace model, where you're basically the manufacturer that's selling on a respective third-party platform. So, whether it's Timo, whether it's sites in Rakuten, in Japan or even in Korea, where you have coupon, you have such a dynamic and a different approach as it relates to how to connect with a customer.Robin:So, I would say some of the things that I was able to carry over here is you're right, it's very digitally connected in most of Asia. They are well advanced in terms of just being able to stay connected from a digital platform perspective, but also connecting with consumers in unique ways. So, I feel like maybe what they've done in terms of social commerce, for example, or being able to find ways to navigate supply chain challenges or complexities, they've done a great job to accelerate that. I think they've been ahead of the curve in terms of the US for probably another... They're probably ahead by one or two years, but I think the US has been catching up.Robin:So, I would say best practices, back to your question, it's basically how do you connect with the consumer in a way that is relevant for what they're looking for? For example, PDP pages in Asia are very long and extensive, meaning you could scroll for miles. That's what they're expecting there, because they want to make sure that they know what they're buying, that it's quality, that it's a trusted brand.Robin:Here in the US, it's not as long, obviously. You do have some scrolls to get to the bottom of the page, but you're not looking for as much. Maybe ratings and reviews are more important here in the US. It's also important there, but they're also featuring, "Is this the best seller? What's the ranking on the skew versus the category?" So, that's a good question. I think, for me, it's connecting with communities and also just best practices in terms of merchandising and how they do it differently and how we can take some of those and deploy that here in the US.Stephanie:Yes, yeah, I love that. I always think it's something good to watch, because I mean, they are much more mobile first. Whereas a lot of people here-Robin:Sure.Stephanie:... grew up on desktop. All those people actually just leapfrogged past desktop and have just been used to doing everything on mobile. I know especially around the podcasting space, it's an area that we also keep an eye on, because they have so many social functions that they're just used to. That I'm like, "Why don't we have that here?" So, it's always good to keep an eye on what other markets are doing.Robin:For sure.Stephanie:So, let's get back to Ring a little bit. So, Ring's owned by Amazon now, right?Robin:That's correct.Stephanie:So, I think that would be really good to talk about how that relationship is working, specifically around earlier you mentioned leadership. I want to touch on what that transition looked like from Ring being its own separate company to then being acquired. I'm sure you had new teams that you're working with. You had to really distill your mission and the shared values and everything that you had, the influence with the new team or company in general. So, I want to hear a little bit about how you led that or how you're leading it now.Robin:Sure, yeah. I think the beauty of Amazon and Ring is you're taking the strengths of each company and you're marrying them together. I've worked for big companies like Mattel. I've also worked for small companies and startups as well. So, I love the mash up between the two where you're able to be entrepreneurial. You're able to really be nimble and agile in this small setting of what Ring actually started off as, as a startup.Robin:And then taking the successes of a startup and then marrying that up with this successful company, Amazon, the biggest ecommerce company, at least in the US. In the world, I would say at least a leader. It's one where you're able to leverage the infrastructure, the resources, the mechanisms and the processes that they've been able to deploy, and they've been so successful with. So, that's something that I find to be very interesting.Robin:I think with Ring, we still are led by our founder today. He's our CEO and our Chief Inventor. It's one where he does drive a lot of vision and strategy in terms of not only the mission of establishing that, but also everything around products and services. That continues to grow as we speak. In terms of team and leadership, I apply the same model that I do in every circumstance that I've been in. It's like I spoke on earlier, I've moved to three countries in a matter of five years. That's not easy with-Stephanie:That's crazy.Robin:... a family of kids. Being able to embrace change and being able to pivot and establish yourself amongst different cultures and teams and environments and business models is quite hard, even with language barriers as well. So, I think coming into Ring, I applied a similar approach in terms of leadership. It's one where we have to pause as a team, because the team could be in any sort of condition in terms of their history. Whether they were without a leader in the past or they have gone through significant changes where they we're acquired, whatever the case may be, what I typically do is I come in. I spent some time, just parking time with the team and our leadership to say, "Hey, look, how do we get focused on what matters most?"Robin:The first thing I want to do is, "Let's establish a shared mission. Why do we exist? What's our purpose? Why are we here? Why do we get up every morning?" As an ecommerce Team at Ring, it's something that is really critical, because we're moving so fast. There's constant updates and changes and features and functions and migrations and transitions and new product launches, you name it. It's one where we got to slow down and establish, "Why are we here? Why do we exist?" I think that's even more important today, especially as we're navigating this pandemic.Robin:The second thing I also do is look at, "What's the shared vision look like? Where are we going? Where do we want to be three to five years from now?" Also, establishing values. So, we typically pick three values, whether it's trust, whether it's communication, whether it's collaboration. That's really what we center on. We'll spend time and it doesn't take a one-hour session. It takes multiple days and hours and dedication to really grind through and work through the rigor and discipline of saying, "Okay, this is why we exist. This is how it ladders up to Ring's mission of making neighborhoods safer. This is how it ladders up to Amazon's mission of being the Earth's most customer centric company." So that's really important.Robin:I think, because we did that and we do have an ecommerce Ring-specific shared mission, which is something that we identified and we have not just put on a wall, but it's really something that needs to live in our hearts. But I'll share that with you. So, our ecommerce group at Ring exists to communicate to our current and future neighbors, how we provide products and services that protect what is important to them. We do this by building strong relationships with our partners to deliver the best digital experiences for our neighbors. We call our neighbors, our customers, because it's just that important. So, that's really something that I do.Robin:I think what's been great is not only is it the shared mission and vision and values that you build upon and that you live by and you keep each other accountable to in terms of the way we behave and operate day to day, but it also helps to step back and say, "What are our key priorities? What are those big rocks that we need to move in the mid- to long-term? What are those things that we need to do in the short term to address the business needs and the evolving changes that are happening?"Robin:So, I would say that it starts with the team. It starts with having an aligned and a shared... It's not just my mission. It's a shared mission and vision and values. And then being able to build on processes like mechanisms, whether it's quarterly, weekly business reviews and roadmaps, and align that across not only the internal team, but across the organization. So, that you can drive success and make sure that your communication, your execution is as consistent and aligned to all objectives, at least the key priorities, that we deliver on a day-to-day basis.Stephanie:Yeah, yeah, I love that. I've definitely seen and heard of quite a few experiences that are full of friction when companies are getting acquired and on both sides. So, how do you work to garner trust from the employees who are getting acquired, where some people might not really want to go to a big corporation? They might want to stay at that startup vibe. On the other side as well, what do you do to actually get them to be on your side, be ready to move forward with the mission? Because I could see some people being not really on board with it, not really caring about the vision, being like, "Oh, that's just all words." How do you get in the weeds with them to really get them on the same page?Robin:Yeah, back to just leadership, I think it's really important that we stay in... This is my philosophy as well. It's servant leadership. It's also compassionate leadership. So, being empathetic, right? So, there's people that have come from all backgrounds and different experiences. Whether they were at the company before they got acquired, whether they joined afterwards, even for those that we haven't even seen in person post-COVID, it's empathy. It's about caring for people. People are people at the end of the day. They're not machines. They need to be cared for. They're not human doings. They're human beings.Robin:So, my philosophy and approach has always been around empathy and just trying to put myself in their shoes and understanding, "What are their goals? Are they aligned to our goals? How do I listen to them in ways that can really make them feel that they're heard?" That anything that may conflict or go against the mission or the goals or values, let's talk about it. If it's something that you feel differently and you're not aligned to this, maybe you don't belong here. Maybe this is not the right place for you.Robin:But in general, I would say the majority of the team and I guess the team overall, they are bought into the mission. I mean, we defined it together, which makes it powerful. I think that's where you nip that bud up front. You're able to just journey with each other through the ups and downs and challenges, but ultimately, the successes as well.Stephanie:Awesome. So, I was looking through Ring's website before this. I didn't even realize how many products you guys had, because like I was mentioning, I only have these two. I want to hear a little bit about, "What is the customer journey look like on the Ring website? How has it evolved, especially over the past maybe six months?"Robin:Sure, I would say the Ring website is quite unique, where Ring is not just the doorbell. Ring is a multitude of products that have continued to expand to meet and deliver that mission. So, if you look across our products, we have not only doorbells. We have security cameras. We have alarms. We have accessories too that attach to these various devices. We also got the Smart Lighting. We have third-party partnerships. I don't know if you recently heard about the announcement that we made, but we're coming out with even new categories, whether it's Always Home Cam, which is an autonomous drone that flies across the inside of your house.Stephanie:Wow.Robin:You can basically train it to go to certain parts of your house to check on whether your stove is on or your pet food has been eaten or any other areas where you may not have a camera setup. So, I think it's again innovation and evolving to a customer need or pain point that we're trying to deliver on.Stephanie:Okay, I need one of those.Robin:Yeah.Stephanie:Does it stay flying or does it go back to its little nest and then like get up-Robin:Yeah. So, it stays in the nest. And then based on whether if it's alarm, trigger or notification, it'll basically come out of the nest. There's obviously a sound so that you can hear it. We think about privacy always and security and keeping that in mind. It'll go to specific places of your house that you trained it to. So, you have to map that out-Stephanie:Got it.Robin:... and then ultimately, come back to its nest. So, I think it's going to be-Stephanie:Can it go outside?Robin:... amazing. Right now, we're not building it to go outside. I think it's one where it's not an actual design drone to go outside, but for now, we're keeping it in the house. We're calling it Always Home Cam.Robin:But yeah, so new categories, even car security. So, we're starting to expand there, because we're hearing a lot of times from our neighbors as well feedback around, "I wish you guys had car security that connected with my Ring app and my overall Ring ecosystem." So, that's really exciting as well. Whether it's your Tesla or card dash cam to even just the 99% of cars that are out there, just being able to have a peace of mind around bumps or doors opening are areas where you're not feeling as safe. So, that's another cool category we're entering into.Robin:Also, my favorite, which maybe is not everybody's favorite, but I love it, is like our mailbox sensor. So, imagine when you open your mailbox, you get a notification. That's also could be connected to your devices, whether your camera turns on in a specific area where your mailbox may be or your Alexa Echo Show 5 also is all integrated as well. So, that turns on. You can watch it and say, "Hey, Alexa, show me my front door. Show me my mailbox," whatever the case may be. It's one where you can again see and review and just make sure that you have a total sense of peace of mind.Robin:I would say also, to add to that, we also have our subscription plans as well, which you can view, record, share out, and also do professional monitoring. So, I think that's a really big benefit. We've heard countless stories. I also have my own use cases as well where neighbors are feeling so thankful that they had their alarm on at home. So, that they weren't going to show up when the burglar shows up or they're able to record specific event that leads to finding somebody or something or whatever the case may be. There's countless stories that you could find and you can hear about I'm sure when you talk to your friends and neighbors that do have some of our products that just really speak to the power of the brand and products and just the services that we provide.Robin:And then we also have our Neighbors app, which is great as well. That also lives within the ecosystem of being able to connect with your neighbors and understanding who they are and any notifications or alerts around the community and even also partnering with those in your community, especially in a time like this. So, I love the brand. I love the products, but I also love that it lives within this ecosystem that connects us to each other and gives us a peace of mind like never before.Stephanie:Yeah, so that was actually a perfect point where I wanted to touch on, the neighbors piece to it, because I think it's brilliant from a UGC perspective of your neighbors are generating this content that you don't even know them. I mean, I am addicted to watching what's happening to my neighbors. Like the other day, some dude was trying to break into their storage locker, someone's bike got stolen. I sit there. I will watch the video and see if I know the person. Obviously, I never do. But it's really good from a content generation perspective.Stephanie:I mean, I see you guys are using some of those videos on your website, which is very fun. And then also from, like you said, a community building perspective. So, I want to hear a bit more about, "How you guys are pursuing that UGC perspective? Is it mainly just for security, or do you see a community building aspect and actually turning into a social network is how it feels to me?"Robin:Yeah, I think it ladders back up to our mission, making the neighborhoods safer. It's one where it plays a role there. So, whether it's like public announcements around COVID to fires in your area or different ways to have safety preparations around different use cases. Yeah. So, I think it's a combination of trying to serve solutions for specific needs or things that may come up that we want to make sure that we are prepared for and also just connecting us with our neighbors.Robin:As people are home more than ever, whether it's working or school from home or shopping at home, it's one where our neighbors are critical for connection and also a peace of mind and watching out for each other. So, I would say that the Neighbor app definitely is a point of connection and also sharing relevant and pertinent information that can help to make neighborhoods safer.Stephanie:What's the craziest video you've ever seen? I guess that'd be real crazy.Robin:I think the fun ones for me are around animals. When a bear comes and just starts to get on top of a car and wants to get in there to eat some food. Where I live, there are a lot of coyotes. So, I get a lot of neighborhood posts and notifications that there's a coyote roaming around early in the morning. They're all in these different pockets and areas and just make sure I'm not jogging or walking that area during that early time in the morning.Stephanie:That's great. I've also seen little neighborhood tips breakout on my app anyways, where neighbors will argue about whether it was real or not. I don't know if you guys have seen that. It's pretty entertaining. Like I said, it feels like a social network sometimes.Robin:It does. I mean, it just shows you the reality of what people have to deal with and navigate every day. I think, if anything, it's like making neighborhoods safer. That's important to everybody. I have a family. I have kids. Especially as everybody's home more, it's like, "How do we help each other? How do we make sure that we can create a community that is in support of each other and ultimately safer neighborhoods?" So, I find that to be really powerful. It's one where I'll do everything in my power and I'm sure my neighbors will to help each other out during these times.Stephanie:So, maybe let's touch on the subscription model a little bit. So, a lot of people right now are interested, of course, in subscriptions. Everyone is thinking about trying it if it's right for their business. Tell me how you guys are exploring it and maybe any hiccups you've experienced and things that you've pivoted or changed, anything that other people could learn from?Robin:Today, we have two different subscription programs. Robin:I think as we continue to expand in various categories, we're constantly thinking about, "How do we offer a similar experience and that peace of mind, so that you can access and even store?" So, thinking about the car category, I'm sure they're thinking through what that could look like as well there. As we expand our categories and services, subscription will definitely be top of mind as part of the services that we'll look to offer.Stephanie:Yup, how do you position it in a way that a customer will sign up for a subscription before something bad happens? Because I know I've experienced this, before I had Ring, I had a bunch of cameras. I didn't feel the need to store things really until one day when I was like, "Oh, I actually wish I would have access to that." So how do you position maybe the language or the sell to actually get someone to sign up for that subscription before there's a catastrophe?Robin:Sure, I mean, the benefit is like when you buy device and you activate it, you'll get 30 days of free, call it, subscription. That's the Basic Plan. And then you get the choice after that to opt in or opt up to a Plus Plan. So, it's one where we try and make it as user friendly and in the control of the user, ultimately, to make that decision.Robin:I would say also that the benefit of the Ring subscription plan is that you're not locked into some contract. So, you get to basically opt in and opt out in any time of the month. Again, we're trying to create flexibility and user control, ultimately; versus locking them into an annual account where you pay hundreds of dollars, but you're frustrated because you're not being able to use it in a way that's easy and intuitive and also beneficial for your needs. Stephanie:Yeah. During that trial period, the one thing that I oftentimes see happening is that a user isn't interacting with the services until they're done. And then they're like, "Oh, I never got a chance to try it." Are there certain methods that you're trying to get the user to interact and learn and figure out the platform to see the benefits of it before these 30 days are done?Robin:Oh, for sure. I mean, that's really the efforts around different marketing levers that we're trying to deploy to make sure that they see the benefit of turning it on and the different features available. Whether it's a nudge here or email there or different types of messaging, that we're trying to make sure that they are not only purchasing the device, but they're utilizing it in its full capacity.Stephanie:Yup, got it. So, for your guys' website, specifically, tell me a little bit about how you guys think about selling on there? Are you selling mostly on desktop? How are you finding customers? How are you bringing them in? What does that process look like?Robin:Sure, sure. So, obviously, you have direct where they're showing up. I think Ring today is a very prominent brand, or at least, top of mind brand that has awareness, especially in a category that our Founder created, the video doorbell. Obviously, there's other folks that are in this space, but I would say Ring to me would be... That's the first thing I think about is Ring when I think about home security and starting at the doorbell and being across different parts inside and outside your house, for example. But I would say yeah, it starts with the direct.Robin:Also, there's a lot of obviously acquisition efforts to try and be on top of mind in terms of whether it's people searching for our products to different types of campaigns to drive traffic to our site, whether they're social related, UGC, like you said. We do a lot of social care types of activities to make sure that whether it's responding to different posts or things like that will point them to solutions that are being offered on our ecommerce site.Robin:And then as they come to the site, we want to make it as easy and seamless. I think this is the goal of every ecommerce company. As your portfolio grows, how do you make sure that you can train... Not train, so that's probably the wrong word. It's more around, "How do you help them find what they need?" That's the easy question to ask, but a hard question to answer. So, that's one where we're constantly thinking through user research and test.Robin:Yeah, I think what's different today is that a lot of companies are always trying to attach this or grow a market basket. It's all about increasing EOB. Those are all important. But to me, I think what's most important is that you're not just trying to upsell, but you're really trying to deliver on a solution. So, meaning, having a camera at your front door, for example, a video doorbell at your front door, that might be good for the first three months and then you may move to a bigger house. You'll need, for example, a floodlight cam like you have. So, that you feel a greater peace of mind that surrounds your house. So, you have this whole home solution, security solution that you could leverage and apply across different parts of your home as you continue to evolve and potentially move, or you want to just expand.Robin:So, it's one where we're thinking about, "How do we recommend the right products for you? How do we surface the right recommendations for you? How do we help you differentiate which doorbell to buy?" Because we do have quite a number of doorbells now. What's right for you basically, based on your use case? Or even the alarm, how big is your house? We have a quiz on our Alarm page, for example, that people engage with that they want to know like, "This is my square footage. This is how many windows I have. This is how many doors I have." How do we make sure that we get them to a place where we offer up a package solution that they can feel confident about and then purchase and ultimately experience the peace of mind that they were looking for?Stephanie:Cool. So, to talk a little bit more on Ring before we move into general ecommerce, I want to hear how you guys are staying ahead of the competition? Because there are other security companies out there, how do you really show that you're the best?Robin:Yeah, I mean, I can't really speak on the competition. I would say that our priority is to constantly push ourselves to empower users with affordable, effective ways to monitor and secure their home. So, back to the making neighborhoods safer, everything ladders up to that. I think about companies that offer a product or a specific service, and it's just that one thing. They're all about to selling that product.Robin:I think the mental model and the approach that we have is quite different at Ring, which I love, and I totally respect. It's one where we're constantly thinking about the mission. So, everything ladders up to that mission. So, whether it's a new product, whether it's a new service, whether it's a new feature on the site, or whether it's a new experience that we want to deliver that's thinking outside the box, that we're constantly trying to think outside the box, so that we can deliver upon that mission.Robin:That's the way that I would frame it up for you. That's different than just looking at the competition and saying, "What are they doing?" I'm sure we can learn a lot, but it's one where we're really focused on our customers and working backwards from them and ultimately inventing and delivering effective, affordable, easy-to-use products, all in pursuit of delivering on our mission.Stephanie:Cool. Yeah, I'm sure you guys get a lot of customer feedback. Do you implement that as you hear what customers are looking for? Does that have an influence on maybe products or the subscription model or the app or anything?Robin:Yes, we do get a lot of customer feedback. I think what's unique about Ring just even in my past year is our Founder's email is on every product. It's even on our websites. He is probably one of the most customer obsessed individuals that I know. I really respect that about him. It's one where he wants to hear feedback.Robin:We also get feedback internally that we can share and a way for us to facilitate that and hear it, because ultimately, our goal is we want to make the customers feel safer. Whether it's buying our products, calling into our customer service line, whether it's a recommendation on, "Hey, I didn't know that this product was featured with your subscription plan. You had this rich notification that comes with it," how do we surface that up in a way that's clear and transparent on our website, so that people don't have to ask a lot of questions that they can get everything they need in one place?Stephanie:Yup, cool. All right. So, you've been in the world of ecommerce for a while. So, I think you should have a good answer to this. What does the future of online commerce look like to you, maybe in the next five years or so? What does that world look like?Robin:Yeah, that's a great question. I think the reality is, is ecommerce and digital adoption has been accelerating rapidly. I hear all the time from colleagues in the industry, "The past six months, eight months, basically, we're able to accomplish what we would have in five years." A lot of that is just based on the times-Stephanie:Yup, a lot of guests have said that too.Robin:Yeah. I agree with that. It's one where, obviously, to lead in this environment, like in any environment, we need to embrace change. But I would say overall, the ecommerce future is bright. There's capabilities that continue to just wow me. It could be simple things to complex things, whether it's complex things like personalization.Robin:With all the millions of customers that are coming on your site, how do you make it as frictionless and just a great experience for them to get the checkout and personalizing that experience for them based on who they are as a cohort to even simple things. I see the simple things, especially in the area of digital retailing, meaning a lot of folks aren't going to stores as much, obviously. It's one where they're constantly thinking about how to pivot and embrace the change.Robin:I love recently what I saw with Target and how they were able to create this Halloween activation, where they are taking select stores. They're able to convert it into a Halloween environment and pass out some goodies and basically doing it all through the comfort of your car. So, imagine, Halloween is going to look very different this year. So, they're able to provide something that is going to be a memory and a delightful experience for users. But at the same time, they're directing traffic back to the site to say, "Hey, if you can't come to this event, maybe we're not featuring in your hometown. We got everything you need from a Halloween perspective."Robin:So, I think it's one where you can get very innovative and capabilities are there. The times today have forced us to really think bigger and to embrace the change and to pivot and be flexible and agile. No idea is a bad idea. I think any idea is relevant, just because we're trying to figure out how to address customer pain points and needs, especially as the times have evolved.Stephanie:Yup. Yeah, I completely agree. It's been fun seeing the levels of creativity that have come into some of these campaigns. Like you said, people now have to think on their feet and think of new ways to do things that they've never had to before. So, it seems like there's a lot of opportunity coming out not just in marketing, but just the way of doing business in general.Robin:I agree. The other thing I think there is boomers and how they're obviously being forced to shop online. I had my mother call me the other day, because she doesn't shop online as much. She was like, "Can I put my name and credit card number in there and shop?" I'm like, "Of course."Stephanie:No, mom. No.Robin:Yeah, exactly. So, it's one where they're not as digitally savvy, but they're being forced to be. It's one where how do you take the traditional models today, whether it's direct mail or whether it's phone calls or just the ways that are comfortable with the past and deliver that mixed with the digital experience?Robin:So, I'm thinking of things like virtual consultation. For example, the doctor, the hospitals, they call you now and they do a virtual consultation before coming in. It's one where how do you bridge the gap between folks that are coming on to the side for maybe some of them the first time, but getting them comfortable in ways that can help them transition into being fully digitally capable? So, those are things I think that are exciting as well in terms of getting back to a mix of the past but also the future.Stephanie:Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say is that you've got this whole new group of people who never would have been your customers, probably at least not in five years. They're here. So, now, you have to adapt to that. But then I also think what's old is new. I mean, I've had quite a few people talk about direct mail. I think they'd have done some surveys of younger individuals who say they love direct mail, because they're not used to it. It feels very personal. It's fun to get something in the mail. Maybe older generations would be like, "What? That's normal. I'm used to getting catalogs, I'm used to that stuff." But maybe bringing that back might be a way of the future. It's a more personal things than maybe everything digital all day.Robin:I agree. I mean, I think some folks, especially parents, are probably limiting screen time for kids these days. Maybe there's some fatigue behind that, even for the younger generation, but it's one where I think companies are being forced to really think outside the box. Direct mail may be the way to go for certain categories.Robin:I just think about what Amazon has been doing. I was in the toy business before. Everything was digital, whether it was a holiday toy book. When Toys R Us and even the toy industry was disrupted with Toys R Us going bankrupt, that business model being gone from the overall environment, it's one where Amazon started doing physical holiday toy books along with the digital experience. They're trying to make it as they want to have the physical touch to the toy, because kids like writing down what they want for Christmas. They want to flip through the pages. At the same time, Amazon has a PDF toy book where you click on an item, and then it takes you directly to the PDP. You can purchase and add your products there.Robin:So, I just love seeing how things continue to evolve over the years based on the shifting of consumer demands. Also, it's staying true to what the patterns are in terms of behaviors around people using toy books and still wanting the physical touch and also providing it digitally. So, that you can transact and get it in your household in two days or one to two days.Stephanie:Yup. Yeah, completely agree. All right, let's jump over to the lightning round brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question. You have a minute or so to answer.Robin:Okay.Stephanie:Are you ready?Robin:I'm ready.Stephanie:All right, the first one, what one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Robin:I would say, the supply. What I mean by that is we're always going to have Christmas holiday, which is very big for respective categories. But it's one where the demand has shifted throughout the years based on people or companies being able to pivot and offer up Black Friday in October, for example, and starting early and trying to manage the flow of traffic to the stores and being cognizant of that. So, I would say supply. The second one just to add to that is contactless and touchless experiences, I think that'll disrupt the ecommerce industry.Stephanie:Yes, completely agree. What do you not understand today that you wish you did? It can be an ecommerce or at Ring, whatever comes to mind.Robin:There's a lot of things from that list. I think we're all a work in progress in terms of learning and growing. I have a ton to continue to learn and build on. So, I don't think there's one particular thing I can put my finger on, on that question.Stephanie:All right. What's next on your Netflix queue?Robin:My Netflix is controlled by my kids. So, the next one is The Octopus Teacher.Stephanie:Sounds intriguing.Robin:Yes.Stephanie:All right. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be?Robin:I value leadership. I have mentors across different areas that I reach out to. So, to me, I love leadership, because companies are about people and not profit in my opinion. This is why I love Ring. It's one where leadership is really what helps you to emerge and helps you to navigate whether it's crazy times or great times. I think that's what holds true and keeps you grounded and successful.Stephanie:Cool, love that. The last one, what piece of tech are you playing around with right now that you're loving? It can be just personally, or it can be ecommerce tools that you're trying out or having success with.Robin:Yeah, I would say that one that I'm being forced to use nowadays is chat bots, just because of the inability to connect with the customer service agents at different companies. I mean, some of that is obviously trying to drive efficiency and automation, but it's one where it is pretty fascinating in terms of being able to try and address your question or your request, for example, into chat bots. And then having this AI, back machine powered on the back end that try and answer and address solutions.Robin:Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Some people prefer just the person on the other side of the phone. But I think the chat bots and that area in terms of automation is something that I've been looking at. That's been pretty fascinating, but also at the same time, thinking through, "What would somebody really need that they want to just call the customer service line?" That's even great as well.Stephanie:Yeah, that's definitely an interesting area. I think I was just reading a research report that was talking about how most consumers would prefer a chatbot, if nothing. If it's no chatbot or having one, they want one, but then also make sure that you get it right where I feel like there's definitely still room to grow to make sure you can at least answer a few questions, especially if they keep coming up. And then if not, okay, go to a human or call or something. So, that is an interesting area. All right, Robin. Well, thanks for joining the show today. Where can people find out more about you and Ring?Robin:Yeah, so you can look me up on LinkedIn. You can go to our website, ring.com.Stephanie:All right. Awesome. Thanks so much, and we'll see you next time.Robin:Thank you.
Some brands are lucky enough to have a built-in audience of millions, while others need to develop an audience from scratch. Chris Mainenti has been on both sides of the coin and he knows that in either situation, once you have a base of potential customers paying attention to you, the next challenge is converting those browsers to buyers. Chris is the Director of Commerce Strategy at Discovery, Inc. where he is helping turn the millions of viewers who tune into Discovery’s channels such as HGTV, TLC, Food Network and more, into customers who buy across various platforms. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Chris explains how he put his history of building audiences at previous companies to work at Discovery — including some tips for young companies on how to utilize newsletters. And he discusses how to use the data you collect as a starting point for creating a more personalized, one-to-one relationship with your audience on various platforms. Plus, he looks into the future to predict how shoppable experiences will be made possible with universal add-to-cart and buy-now options. Main Takeaways:Developing Your Audience: Audience development goes beyond marketing. When you are building your audience, you have to know who you are as a brand and understand the audience you have and want to bring in, and what they want and need. In the early days of a brand, certain audience development strategies work better than others, including tapping into the power of newsletters.Lights, Camera, Take Action: Every company is collecting immeasurable amounts of data, which then needs to be sorted, analyzed and acted on. But the actions you take should be nuanced and applicable to the specific needs of specific audiences. For example, it would be wrong to lump together all of the women in your audience because a woman who is exploring your dot-com presence is likely looking for something different than a woman that is scanning a QR code on their TV. Those segments of women shop differently, and therefore should be approached in unique ways after the data tells you what they each want.Dreams of a Universal Cart Experience: Many believe the future of ecommerce revolves around the development of a universal cart experience. Every business wants to create shoppable moments and engage with customers across many different platforms. But getting to this nirvana means you also have to remove all the friction points.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles co-founder of mission.org. Our guest today is Chris Mainenti, the director of commerce strategy at Discovery Inc. Chris, welcome to the show.Chris:Thank you, Stephanie. I appreciate you having me on and talking all things commerce here in the current climate that we're in.Stephanie:Yeah. I am very excited to have you guys on. I was just thinking about how long Discovery channel, and all the other channels, HGTV, and Food Network and Travel Channel have been in my life and with that, I want to hear a little bit about your role at Discovery. I mean, it seems like there's so much going on, so many digital portfolios that you guys have over there, and I think just a lot behind the scenes that an average consumer wouldn't even know. So, I'd love to hear what you're up to at Discovery. What is your day-to-day look like?Chris:Sure. So, I would say, first and foremost, for commerce specifically in the digital media space, we're probably slightly different than a lot of others. We're really multifaceted in terms of how we work, and who we work with across the org. Obviously, like you said, Discovery is huge, has a ton of major, major worldwide brands. So, we actually sit on the portfolio wide level with our lifestyle brands, and we're really in the weeds with them on the day-to-day basis. And, that really starts with, obviously, our editorial teams. That's our bread and butter, that's our voice and our authority in this space. So again, that's really where we begin, and that's obviously where we're doing our content output, and producing all of this great shopping content for our different audiences, and again pulling our experts from all of these different brands to come together.Chris:So again, folks are really getting the full spectrum of expertise in all of these different categories. And from there, it just really starts branching out into other groups. So, we work heavily with our ad sales and branded content teams, where we work on much larger partnerships and deeper integrations which we can talk about today as well. We have a licensing team, where we work on licensed products, and we take our learnings that we're seeing on our shopping content on a day-to-day basis, and analyze that, and then speak with licensing to see where there may be some room to actually create a new line with one of our partners.Chris:We also, believe it or not, and I know you don't know this, we have a video games team at Discovery, and we work closely with them as well on trying to find those shoppable moments, and again bringing our brand and our voice into those games when they're being built. So again, we're always serving the reader no matter who or where they are, and again pivoting as necessary. So, those are just a few groups, and obviously our marketing and ops, and audience development teams were heavily embedded with as well when it comes to promotion.Chris:So again, there are just, I would say, a lot of areas that we focus on. I know in the beginning it was always all about, commerce is part of diversifying your revenue streams at a digital club. But, we see it more as now, we're trying to diversify our commerce stream into all of these other areas. So again, a lot of exciting stuff has already happened, and we're working on some cool stuff too as we head into next year. So, a lot of exciting stuff in an area that's obviously blowing up for a variety of reasons.Stephanie:That's a lot going on there. It's actually really interesting because you just mentioned video games, and I just did a recap episode with one of my coworkers for the first 50 episodes of this show, and the one thing I was bringing up was like, "I think there's a big opportunity in having shoppable moments in these worlds or video games." And, we were mentioning Unreal and Epic Games specifically, that I hadn't really seen that yet. So, it's interesting that you guys are starting to explore that arena, because it feels like that's something of the future, but it's needed, and that's where everything's headed.Chris:Yeah. And again, I can't stress enough. I mean, our portfolio is just so suited for so many of these different, avenues that we could always find something where, again, we're not being gimmicky just to say we're there. This is our bread and butter, and we're making sure that we stick to our tried and blue, into who we are, and not shy off too much, and again just try to say, "We did something here or there." Really making sure we're always serving our audiences and giving them what they want on the platforms they want.Stephanie:Yeah. Which I think that's a really good jumping off point, then because that was actually my one biggest question I had of how do you strategically think about what an audience wants without disrupting the content? I mean, it seems so tricky, because you see a lot of shows, and whatever it may be where you might have product placement in a show or a movie, but it might not actually uplift sales, because it wasn't done correctly. Where I was also just talking about the Netflix original, the organizing show where they partnered with the container store, and how they had an instant, I think was a 17% uplift in sales after that show aired. That worked, and many others don't. So, how do you guys think about making those shoppable moments, and actually having it work?Chris:Sure. First and foremost, I think, you have to be honest and say, "Look, not everything is going to hit." And honestly, it's not always meant to always hit. So, I think we go into that, first being real with the current situation, and understanding not everyone is going to want every single thing. We're always talking about integrating, promoting, so on and so forth. So, I would say that's first. Secondly, again, we start with, what's our expertise? What do we believe in? And, what do we want to showcase to our various audiences across all of these different platforms? And then, from there is when we start to really start getting down to the nuances.Chris:And look, we have created what we dub internally as the commerce hub, where we're bringing in data feeds from all different platforms, our affiliate networks, our in-house reporting platforms, social, so on and so forth, bringing that all together. And again, understanding, what are people consuming? And, what is their mindset when they're on social, versus linear, versus a DTC, or our dot-coms. And, really starting to look and pull out trends from that. I always like to say I prefer the term data influenced versus data driven, because you can't just take a dashboard of data, and sort in descending or ascending order, and say, "Okay. Whatever is at the top or bottom, do or don't do." And, call it a day.Chris:We focus much more heavily on insights, and use that data as a jumping off point, but then do very, very deep analysis, and pull actionable insights out of that for all of our different brands and teams for when they're creating new content, or when we're optimizing old content. Again, wherever that is. And then, I think lastly with that comes, how do we visualize that to the audience. On digital.com, is it more about, again, really simple to read, simple call to actions to buy items. Again, on linear, what is that? A QR code experience? Is it some type of more deeper integration with a smart TV company on our TV E experiences? Is it more deeply integrated where you can actually tap to purchase within the app? So on and so forth.Chris:So again, there's just a lot of things that we're looking at. We never make it cut and dry, that's probably because personally I don't think anything is ever cut and dry, especially this space and shopping behaviors across, not only brands but the platforms those brands are on, and that's how we look at it. I know that's a lot, and that sounds a bit crazy, but we do really pride ourselves on, again, using these things as a jumping off point and then really diving in deep and making sure that we're serving our audiences, again, where they like to consume this content.Stephanie:Got it. Yeah. It sounds like everything is very custom, and every channel and project you start from scratch where you start figuring out what your audience might like. But, do you have any internal formulas where you're like, "Well, we always follow this in the beginning." and then, it goes crazy after that, because we find other things out. Is there anything that's similar among all the campaigns or projects that you're working on, at least from a starting point?Chris:Yeah. I think, honestly, it's probably not surprising whenever you're talking about items on sale, or whenever we're talking about certain merchants, or price points, or categories, like organizing and cleaning is always up there for us. We know very specific furniture categories that do very well for us. So, we do have our basic what we call playbooks that we start off with, but like you said, we still are always constantly learning and pivoting as necessary. I think a perfect example is in the beginning of the year, I don't think anyone in this world saw what was coming, so we were doing our thing, and then when everything started to unfold, we got together and we had to pivot. And again, the good thing about Discovery's brands is, again, we are so widespread in terms of the categories that we're experts in, that we were able to easily pivot and, again, make sure we're giving our audiences what they need at that moment.Stephanie:Do you see more companies starting to shift? Like media companies turning into ecommerce companies, and ecommerce companies turning into media companies. I've heard that saying quite a bit, especially over the past six months, but it feels like you guys have been there for a while. Do you see other companies looking to you for maybe best practices of like, "How do I make this shift?" Or, "Should I make this shift?"Chris:100%. I think, the beauty in that is that we can coexist and really do things that benefit each of us. I don't think this is an either, we succeed or they succeeded. This is, I think a space where we can coexist. The way I always like to frame this when I'm talking to our merchant partners, and talking internally, is we're really here to humanize the star review. When you come to us, you're not just going to see, again, this is a four out of five, or this is a five star, item, and that's it from the random ecosystem of the internet. We are heavily focused on saying, "Look, here are the things we recommend, and why." And, I think that's where our partners can really leverage us, and where you're really seeing us shine. Again, we don't have to just throw a bunch of random stuff out there and hope for the best.Chris:Again, given our brands and our standing in this space, we can really leverage our expertise and authority there when growing this portfolio with all of our partners. To be honest with you the thing that drove me to Discovery the most was, "Wow, these are huge brands, with huge audiences, and huge respect. Now, we just got to tie all of that together, and go from the moment of inspiration to action." And then again, that's what we've been working on.Stephanie:That's really cool. With all the data that you were mentioning earlier, since you joined have you seen any changes in consumer shopping behavior?Chris:So, yes. Obviously, the biggest one occurring this year, and that was with online grocery. I think it's no surprise that it's been building up now for a year or two in terms of mainstream, but it never really caught on. It's only a five to 10% of folks are really engaging and entertaining the online grocery space. But then again, obviously, earlier in the year when things started to shut down, and people were uneasy about going out, we did see huge spikes in that space, obviously, on our FoodNetwork.com site. And, I would say that continued for a bit, and did peter out a bit recent months which, again, is obviously expected. So, I think that's probably one of the big ones.Chris:The other thing that we have seen, not so much in terms of major shifts in shopping behaviors, just more increased sales in categories that we already know are performing. So, organizing and cleaning is always been a winner for us, and then as the months went on, we've just seen it doing better for us. I think we do a lot of buying guides where we talk about the best cast iron skillets on Food Network, or the best humidifiers on HGTV. We started to see those things gain more and more traction as we went, and we're attributing some of that to us really getting our audience to trust us, and now know that they can come to us as a trusted resource to really be a personal shopper for them.Chris:And again, we've seen that across the board in all of our main categories. The only other thing I'll say in terms of, not only, I wouldn't say shifts in behaviors, but just something else we've pulled out from the data is that, everyone loves a good deal and good price points, but our audience is willing to spend more, especially when those items are either offered at a discounted rate for a holiday or something, or if we've worked with the merchant to get an exclusive discount for our audience, so we have also seen uptakes in that as well. But again, holistically, we haven't seen any huge shifts outside of, like I said, the online grocery, which again is expected given the situation we've been in.Stephanie:Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. I saw for the Food Network, I think you had a subscription platform and you partnered with Amazon. Was that something that was already in the works, or did that get sped up once everything was happening with COVID?Chris:Yeah. So, that was already in the works with our DTC group, and for folks who don't know that's our subscription platform on the Food Network side that we call internally FNK, because it's just easier. And yes, that was in the works, and again we're working more and more in getting that to more and more folks who are really looking to get more classes, get more recipes, just be more intimate with our brand. Stephanie:Yeah. It looked very cool. I was on there looking around at, "Oh, you can follow these chefs and have cooking classes with them, and then you can tell your Amazon Echo to order it for you the exact things you need." And, it looked like it would be really fun to engage with that.Chris:Exactly. It goes back to that 360 approach that we have really been focused on, when it comes to our shopping portfolio.Stephanie:Yeah, that's very fun. So, you've talked a lot about partnerships where you've touched on a bit. But, tell me a little about what does a partnership look like from beginning to end? What does that process look like when you're finding a partner, figuring out how to actually strategically partner with them in a way that benefits both parties? What does it look like behind the scenes?Chris:Sure. So, I think there's really two paths there, there's the partnership stuff that we handle directly with merchants through affiliate networks, and so on and so forth. And, for that we do a lot of research on our end, again we already know what type of product hits, what type of merchants hit. So, one thing we do is take that and then say, "Okay. What are similar merchants in this space?" And then, we'll reach out and discuss the opportunity of working together on that front. And then I would say, on the other side, bigger picture stuff is, again, we're heavily embedded with our ad sales team on much larger partnerships.Chris:And, I think a great example of that is our shop the look campaign with Wayfair, which is a deep integration that spans across linear and digital that, again, was really spearheaded by our sales team that we then came in and assisted with. But, for folks who don't know, basically what this is, when you go to any of our photo inspo on hgtv.com, you'll see a little flyout of all the products within the image that are shoppable on Wayfair.com. And obviously, that's not just a basic integration that you just wake up one day and do. So for that, we came together and we've said, again, "What can we do that is going to benefit both of us, that's going to serve our audiences for the long run, and really make a successful integration here?" So again, that's what turned into shop the look.Chris:It's one of our best partnerships that we have across our dot-coms right now, and it's super successful, our audience loves it. And again, I think It's always starting with, "Well, what is the goal? And, what do we want to achieve from this?" I think sometimes people get too focused on, "What looks cool?" And like, "Let's just do that." We wanted to really focus on, "Well, what's the goal here?" And, what do we think we can create that's actually going, again, to help our audiences that come to hgtv.com be inspired and feel comfortable, making purchases based off of what they're seeing.Chris:So, that's really how we approach these, we're super particular about who we work with, and what that looks like. You mentioned the Amazon partnership, we have a really strong relationship with them as well. And for us, again, it's always looking at the brand and our audiences first and saying, "What makes the most sense for them?" And then, that's when we start peeling the layers here, and figuring out what are those experiences that we could bring to them on different platforms.Stephanie:Yeah. I think that's really smart. Like you said, not to just do something because it looks cool or seems cool, but actually do something that you know the audience will like, and will convert into sales to also help the partner. What are some of the success metrics for the shop the look campaign for example? What did you go into hoping to achieve when you set up that partnership? Is it affiliate based, or what do you guys look for and be like, "Oh, this is a successful campaign versus the previous ones that were maybe okay, or good."?Chris:Yep. So, I think just simply put it, consumption and sales are the big ones. Consumption being, are we seeing more and more folks coming to these different integrations across our platform, and then again how are they translating into sales? Looking at things like, "Okay, so we are getting them to Wayfair.com, but once they're on Wayfair.com what are they doing?" So obviously again, looking at conversions, average order value, so on and so forth. Again, just to really gauge what these audiences are looking like, as the days, weeks, and months go by. I would say, one of the things that we were looking for, especially as COVID first hit was, "Are we seeing an increase, a decrease? What are we seeing in terms of shopping behaviors across our platform?" And again, the metrics we looked at for that was, obviously, click through rates, conversion rates, average order value. Because we even saw in some instances where experiences weren't driving as many views or clicks, but the average order value was much higher.Chris:And again, just goes to show that our audience is a very qualified audience that trusts us, and is willing to spend with us. So, we try to pull out all of these different metrics. I think one of the things with commerce that is either for better or worse, is that you can't just look at one metric and just live and die by that number. So again, that's why we have a handful. And look, we also pivot based on what that platform is, what the experience is, who the partner is, so on and so forth. So, we don't have a one size fits all solution, again, that was done by design. And, that's how we approach these things. And again, just making sure that we stay true to who we are, and we're benefiting everyone involved.Stephanie:Got it. How do you keep track of, if there's a TV viewer who's watching HGTV, and then you're trying to send them to maybe Wayfair to shop that look like, what are the best practices with converting those people, but also keeping track of them in a way that's not maybe creates friction? Are you telling them, "Go visit this URL."? Or how do you go about that?Chris:Yeah. So, totally right. I think, obviously, the most common ways of driving from linear to digital is the QR code experience. And, we're actually working on some of those solutions as we speak and trying to understand, again, what will it take to bring more linear folks from TV down to digital, and like you said, make this a frictionless seamless experience? So again, is that as simple as a QR code, or again is this more about a stronger deeper integration that's a bit more sophisticated and partnering up with folks who can actually understand what is on screen at any moment, and then surface that product on screen.Chris:Again, if you have a smart TV and allowing folks to enjoy that experience, or again, when it comes to TV E we have our go apps that you could log into with your cable subscription. And again, obviously, it could be more sophisticated on your mobile device. So, what does that look like? Is it again, while you're watching it at minute three or whatever, five minutes in, do you surface what is currently being seen in the screen and saying, "Look, shop this room?" And, what do you do from that point down to the device. Can it be as simple as just a tap to buy, or do you have to tap and then open up a new browser window? What do those integrations look like? Again, ultimately trying to find the most frictionless experience. So, I think we're still experimenting with that. I don't think anyone in this space has really nailed that down in terms of what is shoppable TV, or just shoppable video in general? And again, how do we go beyond what just looks cool and turn that into actionable?Stephanie:Yep. Yeah, I think creating a frictionless experience is key, and there's a lot of room for innovation in that area. I'm even thinking about just Instagram, where I'll find a blogger I like and I really like her outfit, and then it's like, "Okay. Well, now go to the link in my bio." And then, that's going to open a LIKEtoKNOW.it app, and then maybe you'll be able to find the outfit. But at that point, it's probably just on the home screen if that new app. And, it just feels like there's so many places for a customer to drop. I guess I was just really eager to look at that outfit, so I stuck with it. But any other time, I probably would been like, "Oh, that's too much work." It seems like there's just a lot of room for innovation around this shoppable moments, whether it's TV, social, video, audio, anything.Chris:Yeah. I mean, I think you nailed it right there. I think Instagram is a perfect example, and that's a platform we're looking at as we speak, and we have some ideas around that as well. Because like you said, our goal here is to, how do we cut out all of these extra steps that are unnatural? Normally, when you see a product you like, you want to be able to say, "Okay. Great. Let me buy that." Not let me go to a bio, let me click this link, let me wait for this page to load, let me do that checkout experience is completely different from the platform I was just on. And then obviously, you're playing around with browser settings and everything else.Chris:So, I think you're spot on, and again that's something we're heavily focused on, again, literally as we speak. And, what does a more integrated Instagram shopping experience look like for Discovery and our partners? So, there's going to be more to come on that soon. But, we are thinking about that, and trying to find, again, these ways to make it as frictionless and seamless as possible. Again, no matter where our audience is consuming our content.Stephanie:Yeah. Well, it seems like if anyone can figure it out, it would be all because it's not like you're trying to put your products on someone else's show, or having to utilize someone else's platform. You have your own platform, you have your own shows, you can build new shows, and try out different ways to influence. There's shopping behaviors. That seems like there's just a ton of opportunity for you to experiment with everything that you all have.Chris:Yeah. No. A 100%, and those are these ad conversations we're having with a lot of our partners as well, and understanding from their world how they see it, and then bringing our world into that, and marrying that together, again, so we can coexist here, and at the end of the day just create a better experience for our viewers.Stephanie:Yep. Love that. So, what are some of your favorite platforms that you guys are experimenting with right now? You said, you were looking into Instagram, but what's really performing for you, and what are some of the more moonshot platforms that you're trying out, and you think it will be good, but you're not so sure?Chris:Sure. Yeah. I mean, obviously, the bread and butter is our shopping content on our dot-coms, those are our top performers. But, I will say some of the more areas of interest, again we already spoke about Instagram. But, another one where we are seeing some really good traction, believe or not, is in the Apple News space, most notably on Food Network. We're getting a lot of traction on that platform, and seeing what our audiences are resonating with the most on Apple News, which I again I know it maybe a shock to some folks, but I think-Stephanie:Yeah. So, tell you more about that. I mean, I have an Apple phone, but I have not opened up Apple News probably since I got the phone, so tell me more about, what are you guys doing there?Chris:Sure. Yep.Stephanie:Because you're the first person who said this.Chris:Okay. All right. Again, understood I know that's not always the first thing that jumps into someone's mind when you're talking about commerce, and lifestyle brands, especially because they name Apple News. But again, I know you don't really use it, but again this is just the basic free version that's included with your device when you get it. And again, we're syndicating our day-to-day content onto that platform. And, we've built really strong audiences across Apple News. And again, it's a similar experience to our dot-coms, just slightly different because it has to fit obviously the specs of the Apple News platform. But again, we just have seen some really strong successes in different areas, again most notably in the buying guide space, or sales events that are happening, and dabbling with pushing notifications for that.Chris:Obviously, with some of the recent shopping events that occurred, we built a push notification strategy around that as well, and it did really well for us. So again, I think that's one of those ones that is also intriguing to us. But I think, again, the high level, we really are trying to be everywhere it makes sense, but also really tailoring our content and strategy based on what that platform is. So, for some of the stuff that's working on Apple News may not make sense for Instagram or vice versa, so on and so forth. So I think, again, those are two areas. And I would say, the last thing that we're really, or me personally is really intrigued by, is this universal cart experience/straight to cart experience that more and more folks are dabbling with. There's a handful of platforms out there that can help publishers do this.Chris:And for folks who aren't familiar with this, it's basically saying, if someone comes to HGTV, or FoodNetwork.com, or tlc.com, and they see an item they like on there, instead of saying, "Buy now on X merchant site." And getting thrown off to that merchant, you could hit buy now, or add to cart, and you could actually check out within our platform, which I think is definitely going to be a big piece of the puzzle for the future of commerce on digital publishers. I think the big question will just be adoption, and then what does that look like. I think, again, Discovery is in a perfect position for this, because folks are already coming to us for this expertise, and know and love our brands already. So, there won't be a lot of convincing in terms of like, "It's okay to check out with us as well."Chris:But again, we're anticipating some shopping behavior adoptions that are going to occur during that process. But again, I think that's an area where you really start to open up a lot of new doors here when it comes to shopping for digital media sites. And, I think that's when it gets even more exciting for deeper integrations with Instagram shopping for example.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah, I love that. I mean, I'm excited to look into the Apple News more. And, I was just intrigued by that, because I like hearing things that others have not said yet. Because I'm like, "Oh, that means there could be opportunity there if you know how to work with the platform." Especially, if you can set up a push notifications. That's huge to make it in front of Apple users. And then yeah, I completely agree about the being able to shop instantly from a page. We just had the CEO of Fast on, Domm. And, I thought it was really interesting how he was talking about how every website should have buy now buttons under every single individual products, and he went into the whole thing of, "You actually will have higher conversions." Because of course, I was like, "Well, then you have to get past the minimum shipping amounts, and maybe higher order values, if you let me add stuff to a cart." And he said, "Based on everything they've seen, people will buy more if they can buy it instantly." And, it'll batch it in the background and ship it out after the fact, all together. So-Chris:Yeah.Stephanie:... I think you said it.Chris:Yeah. Convenience is key. I mean, everyone likes convenience, and again that's our hypothesis as well here, that we do plan to see increased conversions by building a more intimate shopping experience across our dot-coms with a lot of our partners.Stephanie:Yeah, that's great. So, the one big topic I also want to touch on was about audience development. So, when you guys, you have these huge audiences that you can tap into, but for especially a smaller brand, I want to hear how you all think about building that audience to then eventually being able to sell some products to them as well. What does that process look like? And, how can a new brand do that?Chris:Sure. So, I think first and foremost, I think it's important to understand what is audience development as it relates to your brand and organization. I think the biggest misconception with the term audience development is, "Oh, yeah, it's just another word for marketing." But it's not, and this has been written about it as well. And, I think the easiest way to think about this just in a very basic form is, marketing is more about how you want to look to the world as you bring those audiences in initially. More on the branding side of things, whereas dev is now like, "Okay. So, who are we to the world?" And, really drilling down on understanding those audiences that were brought in and who they are, and then building those audiences through different engagement tactics and community tactics.Chris:So, I think that's always a good place to start, to understand how those two worlds kind of then meet. And then once that happens, to answer your specific question, again start with understanding who your audiences are, and where they are. I think sometimes and probably not so much now, but in the past when I was first getting into this space, I think a lot of people just thought that, "Well, content is content. It could be put anywhere, and it's going to work the same way everywhere. Obviously not the case, even more so for shopping content, and behaviors. So, it's really, again, drilling down and pulling out insights based on, "Okay. Who is my Facebook audience? Who is my newsletter audience? Who is my Apple News audience?Chris:And, really starting there, and once you understand high level who they are, what they like, what they're consuming. More specifically when you talk about newsletters, what type of keywords are working to increase open rates, and so on and so forth, then you could start drilling down on the specifics. Saying like, "Okay. High level, here are the different topics and content archetypes that are working, now how do we build out an editorial calendar with that in mind." Again, with the understanding that we're not just going to set this and forget this across the board. What this looks like in newsletters is going to be slightly different than how we're positioning it on Facebook for example, and so on and so forth. So, I really think that's the key right there, and using data to your advantage and saying, "Okay. Well, here's all the different metrics that we're currently compiling, which ones can we look at, and pull from to better understand what these audiences are coming to us for." And again, working with your editorial teams, and the branding teams to bring that all together and say, "Okay. Now here's the plan for output."Stephanie:Yep. Got it. So, if you don't have an audience, and you're starting really from scratch, where would you start? Because I read quite a few articles, maybe from your past life at other companies about you increasing conversion rates by 60%, through maybe newsletters or increasing newsletter subscriptions? Is that maybe a place that you would start? Or where would you recommend someone brand new, who's like, "I don't really have an audience. I have five followers on Instagram."? What's the best way to acquire an audience and then keep them around to build it?Chris:Yeah. So I would say, if we're talking about limited resources and funding, I do think newsletters are a great place to start. And that's really because, it gives you an opportunity to have this one-on-one intimate relationship with the folks on the other side that for the most part you're not having to be held against what the algorithm is going to decide to show at any given day. Obviously, you have to worry about, spam and junk mail and things like that. But for the most part, if you're running a really clean newsletter list or lists, you don't have to worry about that so much. So, I do think, starting in the newsletter space is a really low budget, friendly way to start growing audiences, and it's really great to use as a gut check to see what is resonating. You could look at your open rates, you could look at your click to open rates.Chris:Again, you can monitor what the churn is and stop to see if what you're producing is causing people to drop off for good, so on and so forth. So I do think, for publishers where it makes sense that is a great place to start. You can obviously acquire new users through a bunch of different audience development tactics, whether it's on site widgets or modals, or do some small paid spend to try to bring folks in, and do the sweepstake partnerships as well. Again, obviously I'm a little biased, just because that is part of my background. But again, over the years, newsletters, again, I know they're not the sexiest platform to talk about, but they have been the most consistent in terms of performance and really bringing your most loyal and engaged users from that platform.Stephanie:Yeah, I completely agree. And, you also get access to quite a bit of data that you don't on other platforms, and if you can figure out how to properly engage with them, you could have newsletter subscribers for years to come, which is everyone's goal.Chris:100%. Yeah. And, I think even to take that one step further, you could even start to get more and more personalized where you get to a point where you're launching a newsletter to half a million people, and no two newsletters are alike because it's all based on past user behaviors that you were seeing within email and the dot-com, and again adjusting that based on different predictive intelligence tools. So again, I think 100% there's a lot there, and if done correctly, and go a long way. I mean look, this has been tried and true in the space. We see a lot of folks who start there, we're even seeing in the news media space a lot of journalists, and editors, and things like that backing off from the larger brands, and going this newsletter route to get their word and opinion out. So yeah, I think email is here to stay, and it's going to be a huge piece of the puzzle moving forward.Stephanie:Yep. I agree. So, you've been in the media world for a while, I think I saw at least back to 2012, maybe even before then.Chris:Yeah.Stephanie:I went as far as I could on your LinkedIn, I think it cut off.Chris:No, you got it. Yeah. I have been in media basically since the day I got out of college. So-Stephanie:Okay. Well, this is the perfect question for you then. What do you think the future of online commerce in media look like? Maybe in 2025 or 2030, what does that world look like?Chris:Yeah. So, I think it's going to be an extension of what we talked about a little earlier about this universal cart experience, and turning digital publishers into this space where audiences can come and also feel comfortable making those purchases. And again, not being bounced off to third party sites, and really being able to start building an even stronger shopping relationship with your audiences, because again with a universal cart experience, also comes a lot more first party data where you could, again, focus on more one-to-one relationships with your audiences, again, specifically in the shopping space, which I think is key.Chris:And, I don't foresee a place where merchants are going to have a huge problem with this, because, again, you're just helping to legitimize their product. Like your previous guest said about increased conversions. I think that's another huge piece of this puzzle. So again, it's really just now, again, bringing this all together, this whole 360 approach and saying, "Look, you're not just coming to us for flat inspirational content, you're now coming to us for the inspiration, and the ability to take action immediately." Again, versus being bounced off to one, two, three other platforms depending on which platform you're on, like your experience with Instagram.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah, I love that answer. Really good. So, now that we're talking a little bit about the future, what do you not understand today that you wish you did?Chris:What do I not understand today that I wish I did? That's a that's a good question. So, as it relates to commerce?Stephanie:Yep. Or the world, where you're like, "I really just wish I knew more about this." But yeah, it could be a commerce one, that would be cool too.Chris:Sure. I would say, I think not so much about not understanding this, but more not understanding why it's not better. And, that goes back to, I would probably say, affiliate data, and what that data looks like, and what partners have access to, or don't have access to. Obviously, being a part of many different networks, and merchants being on all different networks and so on and so forth, it becomes, quite difficult to manage all of that data coming in, and really having a platform that can easily bring this all together in a unified way. We do have a really strong partner that we work with to aggregate a lot of this data. Again obviously, it's never going to be perfect, because you're pulling it from all different places, and you have to understand, "Well, how does this platform leverage conversion rates and click through rates, versus this platform?" And again, just like, "What do those measurements look like?" And, the methodology behind them.Chris:So, that becomes challenging. But, I do think that's probably one of the biggest things that I just wish. And, I know it's not easy, hence the reason why it hasn't really been done yet. But, finding a more universal way to bring all this data into one data warehouse. Again, we were working on some stuff along those lines, but just high level, just generally speaking in this space, I do think that's one of the more challenging situations that a lot of digital media folks are in when it comes to with the shopping space.Stephanie:Yeah. That's a great answer. It does feel like a lot of technologies in general started out in that way. Very chaotic, things are everywhere, data is everywhere, and then things eventually end up in a dashboard, or it starts coming together in a more useful way. So, I hope that world comes to be in the future as well.Chris:Yeah. I mean, look, at the end of the day, that's only going to help all parties. It's going to help the audience, it's going to help the media company, it's going to help the merchant, so there's definitely reason to really get this right. But again, then, to do a bit of a 180, I think that's why you're going to start seeing these universal cart experiences take off more and more, because it does make that a bit cleaner in terms of what you're going to have access to and when.Stephanie:Yep. Very cool. All right. So, we have a couple minutes left, and I want to jump into the lightning round, brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. They're the best. This is where I'm going to throw a question in your way and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready?Chris:Let's do it.Stephanie:All right. What's Up next on your... Well, do you have Netflix? I would say Netflix, and I'm like, "He's going to be like, "No.""Chris:I do.Stephanie:Okay. What's up on your queue? And then, you can also tell me what's up on your Discovery queue?Chris:Fair. So, I'll start with us first.Stephanie:All right. Go ahead.Chris:And, I think this is so obvious, but huge 90 Day Fiancé fans. And, I will say my wife actually started that. I wasn't always, but she was like, "Come on, we got to watch it." And, this was a couple years ago. And, once I started, we have been heavily invested ever since. So, from a brand standpoint, we're 90 Day through and through. So, I think again-Stephanie:I like it.Chris:Yeah. Probably obvious to a lot of folks just because of the success of it, but that is our thing there. And then, she's also actually a huge fan of Discovery ID, it's her favorite channel by far. So, we got both ends of the spectrum there, right?Stephanie:Yep.Chris:Discovery ID, the DLC. But again, that just goes to show the strength of our portfolio. And then, on a personal front, I would say, what we're actually currently watching is the Borgias on Showtime. If you haven't watched it, I highly recommend it. But, it's three seasons, so that's good for me. I'm not a huge binger, but I can get through a three season watch, so we're currently in the middle of that.Stephanie:Cool. I have to check that out. Yeah. 90 Day Fiancé, so I have a twin sister, and she's obsessed with that show, and she's been telling me I need to watch it. And, I've been like, "No, I'm not watching that." So, now that you say you also enjoy it, maybe I'll have to want to check that out.Chris:Yeah. Come on. It's only fitting now. You got to at least give it a shot.Stephanie:Yeah. I think I will after this. That'll be the rest of my day.Chris:Perfect. So, I've succeeded tonight.Stephanie:You did-Chris:I converted someone.Stephanie:You can tell everyone, "I got a conversion."Chris:Exactly.Stephanie:What's Up next on your reading list?Chris:On my reading list. So, this is also probably slightly depressing, but I'm actually currently reading the Plague.Stephanie:That's [inaudible 00:49:47]. I mean, I don't even know what that is, but I'm like, "No." I mean, is it good?Chris:Yeah. I mean, so far, I'm only maybe a quarter of the way in. it's just eerily similar to the situation we're currently in, and obviously this was not written recently. This is old Camus. But yes, so that that's what I'm currently reading. So, not exactly an uplifting read, but I do think interesting to say the least in seeing some of these parallels that, again, just six, seven months ago we thought were just crazy things you would read or watch on Netflix.Stephanie:Yeah. Well, if you enjoy the full read, let me know, maybe I'll check that out.Chris:Will do.Stephanie:Next up, if you were to have a podcast, what would it be about, and who would your first guest be?Chris:That is interesting. If I had a podcast. For me, I think I probably wouldn't fall into the current podcasting world that pulls a lot of talent from different areas, and makes that the centerpiece of their podcast. I would much rather try to get in the weeds with folks who are making a difference on a local level. I think especially in this political climate, I think that sometimes gets lost that we think it's only the top that matters, and nothing lower does, which I think is completely false. I think everything starts at the local level. So, I would love to give more exposure and light to those folks who are doing the dirty work on the ground which, again, sometimes gets lost in the standard media cycles, or across social media for example.Stephanie:Yes, I love that. It's also something we're exploring here at Mission is local level podcasts, because I think that's what people are leaning into now. They have lost that also a sense of community with everything that's been going on, and you might want to know what your neighbors or community is up to, and also what they're doing, like you said, on the ground level. The next one-Chris:100%. I think it's super important. Go ahead.Stephanie:Yeah. What does the best day in the office look like for you?Chris:The best day. So, when that was a thing-Stephanie:When you went to the office, and you weren't just in your house in New York.Chris:Exactly. Honestly, the best part about that is, being able to... And, now I feel it even more, is having that change of scenery, and being able to have those face-to-face interactions with folks. I recently read a study where, I think it came out that people were actually working longer hours, and having more meetings, while working from home, because they don't have those passerby conversations in the hall, or going in and out of the restroom, and so on and so forth. Which, again, I don't think people appreciate until it's gone. And for me, that's been a huge piece of the puzzle that's been missing during these times is that, human interaction. I think everyone wants to think that working from home is the future, I'm just not sold on that yet.Stephanie:Yeah. I think the flexibility, maybe, but I think a lot of people are eager to get back and see their coworkers, and have coffee together and whatnot. So, there'll be pent up demand, as economists would say.Chris:Exactly.Stephanie:All right, Chris. Well, this has been such a great interview, where can people find out more about you and all the fun work you're doing at Discovery?Chris:Sure. So personally, you can find me, Chris Mainenti on LinkedIn, and we can connect there if you'd like to chat further. But more importantly, if you love our brands, you know where to catch us on TV. And then, similar to dot-com, HGTV, Food Network, TLC, Travel Channel. We're everywhere and we look forward to continuing to serve our audiences wherever they are, and really helping them through these trying times that we're all in.Stephanie:Yep. And most of all, go watch 90 Day Fiancé, everyone. I mean, I feel like you need that fun.Chris:Exactly. For the handful who haven't yet, including you, obviously.Stephanie:Yeah. I know. Such a veil. All right. Thanks so much, Chris. It's been fun.Chris:Likewise. Thanks so much again. Bye-bye.
Entrepreneurs are, by nature, risk-takers. But most would still think it’s crazy to invest your entire life savings on 300 gallons of rosé. Nevertheless, that’s the true story of how Alix Peabody started her company, Bev. Sold online and in-store, Bev is a made-by-chick alcohol company famous for its canned rosé. Alix says that Bev’s secret to success is built on some key pillars, the most important of which might surprise you: customer service. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Alix explains why ecommerce brands should be investing heavily into their customer service operations. Plus, she reveals how she is capitalizing on the huge percentage of buyers that come from mobile. Main Takeaways:Integrate Customer Service into the Company Culture From the Start: Too many companies gloss over the importance of having a good customer service operation that is integrated into the company as a whole. There is a real importance to this team, and it is critical to understand how influential and impactful they are when it comes to new product development or flagging recurring issues that could turn into beasts down the road.The Influence on Mobile: A staggering percentage of ecommerce orders are taking place on mobile (I bet you can’t guess exactly how high this percentage is for Bev!), which makes investing in a frictionless mobile experience a must-do for brands.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Welcome to Up Next In Commerce. This is your host Stephanie Postles, Co-Founder at Mission.org. Today on the show, we have Alix Peabody, the Founder and CEO at Bev. Alix, welcome.alix:Thank you so much for having me.Stephanie:I'm excited to have you on. It feels like the perfect environment to talk about beverages with everything that's going on.alix:Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I mean, so much consumption in my world for sure. It's been a little bit of a crazy time.Stephanie:These days, I have to limit myself. Wait, did I just have wine yesterday, the day before, and the day before? I need to chill. I have to pull myself [crosstalk 00:00:39].alix:Yeah, 100%. I mean, it's funny too, because we've got moms with kids working from home and people trying to separate their days and all that kind of stuff. So, I feel for them, but glad we can be here to help.Stephanie:Yes, me too. So, I have read your backstory a little bit of it. You have a crazy backstory of why you started this. I was hoping you could start there where you go through, "What led you to starting it?"alix:So, it's a crazy story. When I first moved to San Francisco, I was 24. I'd been working in finance for a couple of years. I moved out there thinking I wanted to learn a little bit more about the whole startup world and all that stuff. I took a job as an Executive Headhunter helping startups place C-suite level employees essentially. Right when I moved there, I got pretty sick. So, I had a whole bunch of issues with my reproductive health system. I was totally drowning in medical bills. I was trying to figure out, how I was going to pay for all this stuff. I had to freeze my eggs. It was a total nightmare. I started throwing these parties. I was charging tickets for these parties, which people didn't realize I was using to pay down a whole bunch of medical care.alix:I went to a school that was very frat centric. I worked in finance, and I was in tech. I've always cared a lot about gender dynamics and drinking culture and how we interact with one another when our guards are down. I started to notice that there was just a really different energy when you're in a female-owned social space. At that point, I realized that I wanted to do something that addressed that in a way that was positive and fun and approachable. So, I started looking around, realized that I was going to really need a product to sell if I wanted to have a brand and a mission. Alcohol seems like the lowest common denominator. So, I weirdly ended up in wine.Stephanie:At the perfect spot to land. I mean, so tell me a little bit about you come on to this decision that you want to start in the alcohol industry. What happened next?alix:Yeah. So, I knew nothing about booze, I knew nothing about the industry. I really wanted to make a voice for women, and we say, good dudes, in a space where there just really hasn't been much out there. So, I tried to figure out, "How was I going to sell this product?" There's so much legal stuff that goes into the industry in general. It's so hard to get on a shelf, because you have to go through all of these different loopholes. So, I realized that there was a loophole to the system, specifically in wine.alix:The reason for that is basically that if you're a California vineyard, you can have a tasting room and a wine club. So, I realized pretty quickly that I was going to need to have a wine-based product if I wanted to be able to sell online. So, that I could have a proof of concept before trying to get onto the shelf. That's how I ended up with rosé in can as our first product.Stephanie:And beautiful can.alix:Thank you. Thank you so much. It's funny. My cousin's handwriting is actually what's on the side of the can, once our origin logo.Stephanie:That's good handwriting. I would not have known that's handwriting.alix:Yeah, yeah, we had to make our own font. It's funny, but anyways, yeah. Basically, at that point, I realized I had a 401k from my first job, but I'd forgotten about. I cashed the whole thing, bought 300 gallons of rosé. We were off to the races.Stephanie:That's amazing. Where did you even send these 300 gallons of rosé?alix:Yeah. Actually, I wasn't even... Don't tell anyone I said this, just kidding to anyone who's listening, but I wasn't even licensed at the time when I made our first proof of concept. So, I wasn't allowed to sell it. I technically purchased it from a winery under their license as a direct to consumer sale. So, I used the product to go seed investors basically. I would bring it to all of these different parties. And then a couple days later, I asked for an introduction from a friend to a potential angel investor. They'd be like, "Oh, my gosh. That stuff was everywhere." But I actually put it there. So, it was just the hustle is starting together original around the funding.Stephanie:So, since you bought that 300 gallons of rosé for $20,000, have you changed the product? Is it a new different wine now? From where it started, where is it today?alix:Honestly, we hit it pretty well in the beginning. Wine is so interesting, because there's so much chemistry that goes into the profile of making it. So, we basically done a whole bunch of blind taste tests of a bunch of different types of rosé and just went to our winemakers. We're, like, "Build us this backwards." So, there's definitely been some fine tuning and making sure it's as delicious as possible and sugar free and all that stuff. But it's pretty similar to what it was at the beginning. Now we have additional products as well that all have a similar profile but are different varietals.Stephanie:Okay, cool. What's the strategy behind putting it in the can?alix:Yeah, at the beginning, people ask me this a lot, because they're like, "Oh, cans are exploding. This is such a new category." When I did it, it was not normal. It was super hard to find somebody who would even can it. We're talking three years ago before you really saw any canned wine on the shelf. The reason I did it was pretty practical. I had no money, right? So, I was like, "How am I going to make something that is branded, and that people recognize if you pour it into a glass and you don't know what it is?" Right?alix:So, in my mind, I was like, "Well, if I make it almost like Red Bull-esque, where it's a really identifiable can, it's cute, it's Instagram friendly, the product will start to market itself." That's how it ended up in a can't honestly. It was no real strategy at first, but I also wanted to really be able to play against the beer culture, which that seemed to make sense at the time.Stephanie:Yeah, I mean, that seems like such a great way to get that word of mouth marketing working for you, just like it worked in the beginning with investors, but also, having something that people share where it's different. I mean, even thinking about the amount of bottles of wine, I wouldn't think to share one of them or even remember half the time where it came from or the brand that's behind it. So, it seems like a really unique way to get people to share for you.alix:100%. If it's cute enough and fun looking enough and whatever, people want to take pictures with it. They want to be seen holding it. I think, beverage is such an interesting category, because people don't realize how emotional it is. But brands really drive a lot of the purchasing power in terms of what people choose to consume, because it says a lot about who you are. Think about Monster versus Red Bull, Fiji or whatever it's called versus smartwater. It's more emotional than people realize off the bat.Stephanie:Yeah, I love that. So, how are you going about garnering that emotion and developing that community, which seems like a very important part of why you even started this company? How do you do that day-to-day now?alix:Absolutely. I mean, there are so many different ways. I think we really are digitally native brands, which is such an overused term, but we've really been able to build out a community online and get our message across through our social platforms and all those types of things, where people really know what we're about and who we are and why we exist.alix:Originally like last year, there was a lot of event-based marketing that we did, where we had actual events that people could really get to know the brand and obviously that all came to a quick halt in early 2020. But now we have brand ambassador programs that actually have community ways that they communicate with each other. They find people to go out with together, even like housing. It's really become more than just a brand ambassador in the traditional way, but a real community where they are communicating with each other as well as with the company.Stephanie:That's great. Have you seen any success with virtual things? I mean, you mentioned that brand ambassador and building a community online, but are there other things that you took your event budget and moved it over to something new to try out virtually?alix:Yeah, I mean, we've done a few virtual events. I think people got a little tired from them a little early on. I think, where we've seen a lot of word of mouth growth and that kind of thing is actually because of the form factor, it's so easy for social distancing, right? You don't have to split a bottle of wine and use glasses. It's sanitary, stuff like that. We've seen a lot of word of mouth coming from people ordering cans and being able to sit outside far apart and enjoying the same thing, which has been pretty interesting and not something that I would have thought of originally when COVID hit. But that's definitely been something that's worked in our favor.Stephanie:Oh, that's really interesting. Are you leaning into that trend once you started seeing it pop up, starting to create conversations around that and showing, "Hey, look at what our other customers are doing"?alix:Oh, for sure, for sure. In addition to that, in what we call on premise, like bars and restaurants and stuff like that, it's so much easier for takeaway, right? Ordering something, being able to throw a can in a bag and go do your thing has been something that's been helping the category all around.Stephanie:So, when you were building out your ecommerce platform and thinking about building out a shopping experience to sell alcohol online, especially one that caters to women, how did you think about setting up your website in a way that someone would go there and be like, "Oh, I want to order this right now," or "I really feel a connection with this brand"? What things did you implement or personalization did you implement on the website? What things did you build out that really worked?alix:Yeah, I think it's funny, because when we first built the website and my Head of Marketing, who also happens to be my husband... He's awesome. Well, that actually happened second. He was recruited once after we got married. He was telling me, "We have to invest in the website. We have to invest in the website." At the time, honestly, I didn't get it, right? I was like, "Our website looks fine. It's cute. It's whatever." I'm so glad that he did, because it's made frictionless buying... I've started to realize just how important that is. Things like Apple Pay and making sure that the website's easy to navigate has really converted for us.alix:I think the other thing, from an emotional perspective, it's been important for us to really makes sure that who we are and why we are is front and center and easily accessible. That's something that, I think, people start to poke around the website. They start to really get, I mean, I hope so anyway, who we are, and that brings them into the family more. We've seen that our repeat purchase rates are really strong, because people become such advocates of not just the product but the brand.Stephanie:That's great. Because we've talked about this quite a bit, on-the-shelf brands like Bombas or Yellow Leaf Hammocks. There's always this tricky balance between selling the brand and everything you're doing around the brand, maybe the social good aspects or things like that, but then also selling the product and making sure people know the products very good. How do you think about that balance, especially on a website where someone could quickly just come on there, look at something, and then hop off?alix:For sure. My favorite compliment is, "Wow, it's actually delicious," because that means that... We get that all the time, where it's like, "Oh, this is actually really good." I'm like, "Well, yeah. I mean, duh. I'm not going to sell you something that I wouldn't want to drink." But I love that, because it means people don't expect it to taste how it does out of the can. It's great. But I think focus is so important when it comes to that. I think the way that we really try to attack marketing is making sure that the messages that we're sending aren't too many. They're very focused on what we want to do, right. So, for us, it's really Made by Chicks, zero sugar product. Our mission is break the glass, right? That's what we really try to hone in on.alix:I think there's a lot of A/B testing that goes into, "Okay, what consumers are really looking at the products and are buying for the first time, because of the product versus buying for the first time because of the brand and the mission?" I think a lot of the times people are going to buy a product that they're excited about or that they've heard about or that they want to try. If they if they like it, that's just straight table stakes. That's when you start to see repeat and people really start to become evangelists. So, it is a fine line and one that I think is constantly evolving, but something I think the team has done a pretty good job of navigating and just making sure that it's focused.Stephanie:Yeah, that makes sense. The brand can draw people in or the purpose can draw them in, but then you have to have a good product. That's how you get your repeat buyers.alix:Oh, for sure. Yeah. It's table stakes, right? If it's not delicious, it's not actually delicious.Stephanie:Yeah, actually good.alix:Yeah. If it's not actually good, then you're not going to get what you want.Stephanie:Yup. So, earlier, you're mentioning about investing the website. What were some of the biggest changes that you all made? You mentioned frictionless buying, but what other things did you update where you were surprised by increases in the metrics you're watching or performance or buying rates?alix:Yeah, well, everything. I mean, we had to redo the entire thing. For us specifically, there was a lot of programming that had to go to the back end to make sure that everything was compliant, because we are alcohol. There's a lot of legislation rather. There was a lot of build out that had to go into that. alix:And then I think the other things that helps are having things like a chat on the site, where you can reach out to customer service and these types of simple things. We're continuing to expand on that and stuff like loyalty programs, because the repeats are so strong. People want to recommend it to their friends. There's been a lot of different things of that nature. Also, just making sure that the tech stack on the back end is strong, so that we're learning right and evolving as we see customer behavior.Stephanie:So, you built out this new platform. You're trying out chat bots and everything. What kind of metrics are you monitoring to see if things are going well? What do you look at every day or week?alix:For sure, I mean, obviously, top line, we're looking at AOV, average order value. Lifetime repeat rates are huge. We have a subscription service on our website as well, because people really love their wine. So, making sure we're keeping an eye on churn. Things of that nature are pretty straightforward, but I think all of that is really important in understanding the health of the online business and the brand.Stephanie:How do you keep customers engaged? Whether they're in a subscription or they just bought for the first time, what kind of methods are you using to engage with them and keep them coming back and keep them subscribed?alix:Well, we have a fair amount of email marketing that we do that we found works really well. We try to make sure that we have content that's interactive. I think one of the things that really surprised me at the very beginning of takeoff is customer service and how critical that is, right? You can turn somebody from a "Karen," if you will, into an evangelist with a strong customer service team. I think people underestimate how revenue generating that can be. So, that's definitely been a big thing for us.alix:And then in addition, we've been doing SMS and a lot of things that keep us top of mind without oversaturating people's inboxes and having them unsubscribe or anything like that. The other thing that I think is important is just... My husband always says this, "Say what you do and do what you say," right? So, make sure that we are delivering orders on time. If we go out of stock, people will drop their subscriptions, because they got their most recent one later than they thought they would. Now they have too much wine or stuff like that. So, really making sure that the execution behind the marketing is there is so critical.Stephanie:So, I want to dive a bit deeper into that, building out a good customer service team, because I think that's something that's really important that I don't see enough brands investing in. I want to hear how do you go about building a team like that, who can, like you said, turn a Karen into a loyal customer? What kind of training are you giving them? How do you think about building up that team?alix:Yeah, so that team is really at the end of the day, the heart and soul of the organization. I think a lot of places make mistakes and not treating it as such. They're the voice of the brand. They're the literal person that people are communicating with. So, we actually have a policy where anyone who starts especially on the marketing team has to do two weeks of customer service, they have to understand who our customers are, how we talk to them, how we interact. It's critically important. I think that team has to be so well-trained on culture and brand voice and mission and making sure that they're constantly getting better and getting better, right?alix:So, implementing new systems, pulling insights from our customers, seeing what they're asking for, which helps us decide what new products to develop, all of those kinds of things. So, I think a lot of the time, those positions can be undervalued. At the end of the day, that's where you're going to get so much information and so much communication with your customer and so much insight into what you should be building.Stephanie:I can see there being a lot of value too with, like you're mentioning, gathering that feedback and seeing what customers are asking for, seeing what the conversations are, and then doing a full circle back to the team. So, then they know, "Okay, here's what other team members keep having to respond to. You probably will, too," and just using it as a training method as you ingest that data and getting it back to them.alix:Yeah, exactly.Stephanie:So, with that customer servicing, when you're getting all the feedback and all the data, how do you go about organizing it in a way that you can make decisions off of?alix:So that is really the team lead, right? She pulls together reports for us on a weekly basis that are major insights. The team under her flag certain things in different categories, whether it's major complaints that we're seeing or major requests or what some of the positive feedback might look like. Obviously, to me, the negative feedback is more important, because that's where the real learnings are going to be. But we have a system of tagging in various categories to make sure that we're pulling those insights into the metrics that we find important. If people are choosing to cancel, why are they choosing to cancel thing, things like that. So, that's reported up. We have consumer insights meeting at least every other week.Stephanie:Yup, that's cool. What are some of the most surprising insights or complaints that you've gotten that you were like, "Oh, I wouldn't have expected that"?alix:Unfortunately, some of the ones that I've found to be the most upsetting are people who like the product but don't agree with how we communicate about the social issues we care about.Stephanie:Oh, I see.alix:Yeah. That's been a tough line, because we're here with a very specific mission and purpose. We are about women and women and men treating each other right and addressing toxic masculinity in a happy way. We're very clear about our communication around things like sexual assault in our industry and date rape culture and all that stuff. I've had moments where people... They're like, "Keep your views to yourself, I would have kept drinking your product otherwise," or whatever it is.Stephanie:Oh, my gosh.Stephanie:Well, I am happy that you guys stood up to those people, because I think there's going to be room for more brands to start speaking up against crazies, because right now, I do feel like a lot of brands actually sometimes get bullied by whoever's loudest on the internet.Stephanie:I think there's a lot of room for more brands to speak up like that behind the decisions that they're making, instead of just conceding to the loudest person on the internet, which might not even present the majority.alix:100%. I mean, the loudest people are the ones that drive conversation a lot of the time. I think brands fail when they try to be everything to everyone. That's not a brand. That's just a thing. We are who we are. We care about what we care about. That's where you're going to be the difference between a product and a brand that has real lasting power.Stephanie:Yeah, I love that. That's a good quote. So, with everything's going on with a pandemic, have you seen buying behaviors change? Earlier, when you were mentioning about reasons people are canceling, have you seen new reasons pop up for why they're canceling that we're different than months ago or why they're buying that's very different than six months ago?alix:Yeah, I mean, six months ago, it was harder to get people to buy alcohol online, right? It's generally you're going from one place to another. It's oftentimes an impulse purchase. You're on your way to a friend's house or on your way to a party. I would say we've seen an uptick in the way people are purchasing our products more than we've seen some of the difficulties that other brands are seeing during the pandemic, because they don't want to go out. This is not something that historically people buy in a forward looking predetermine fashion, if that makes sense. That's changed. They want things at home. They don't want to have to really think about it. They're not going out as much. So, that's been huge for us, where we've actually seen a huge lift in online purchasing and online subscription.Stephanie:That's good. How are you guys leveraging mobile? I know earlier, you had mentioned SMS. How do you think about that, especially when it comes to mobile ordering?alix:We definitely do SMS marketing. Like I said before, making sure that the mobile experience at our website. Honestly, I believe it's about 70 to 80% of purchases are made on mobile.Stephanie:Oh, wow.alix:Which is crazy.Stephanie:On your website?alix:Yeah, on our website on mobile, which is pretty nuts. Yeah. I was really surprised by that that people are buying on their phones, because they're seeing it on Instagram and TikTok and all of these different outlets, where they're sitting on their phone and they're clicking through. So, making sure that process is seamless has been really important.Stephanie:That's huge. That's a very big number. I wouldn't expect it to be that high on your website. So, where are these customers coming from? What are your best channels right now, where you're getting the most customers from?alix:We're really trying to diversify away from just Facebook and Instagram. Though obviously, that's a big funnel for many brands, but it becomes addictive. It can be fickle and expensive. So, we're really trying to diversify different ways that we acquire customers that are more organic, whether again, that's our brand ambassador program, influencer programs. We've actually seen a lot of success on TikTok. That's not paid, because we're alcohol. So, we can't actually advertise on TikTok. So, all of that has to be organic and influencer driven. Funnily enough, I was pretty surprised, but we've seen a fair amount of return on podcast advertising as well.Stephanie:Oh, that makes sense, because podcast listening is up as we know. So, yeah, that makes sense for that to work out well.alix:Yeah. Our email marketing is pretty strong. So, once people are in the funnel, we do see a fair amount of lift with emails. Just making sure that all of it is on brand and the brand voice is really consistent and makes people feel like we're not just a bot, but we're real people that are reaching out to them, we've found to be something that consumers get excited about.Stephanie:That's cool. So, earlier, you just mentioned about influencers and TikTok, how are you going about partnering with influencers? Who do you find to be the best influencer? How do you find those people? How do you work with them? Because we've got a lot of listeners ask about working with influencers and that people don't really understand, "How do you start those relationships? Do they actually have a good ROI? How do you find good ones?" So, let's start with that.alix:Yeah, I mean, it's tough, right? I think we're in a very lucky position, because nobody is going to say no to free product.Stephanie:Okay, that's how you get them in. You offer them free products.alix:For the most part. Do you want to try this out? Here's what we're all about. Here's who we are. Making sure that those interactions are direct and actually a real person, not templating things. Doing your research on what these people are about, who their following is rather, how engage they are. Really doing your homework and being thoughtful in the way that you partner. I'm a huge advocate of quality over quantity. So, I would rather have a longer term partnership with a fewer number of people, where they're repeating rather than just one huge post from a large scale influencer. We've seen bigger ROIs on the smaller people with the higher engagement.Stephanie:Yeah, yeah, I've heard that same theme. Is there a certain level where you're like, "Up until this point, if they have this many followers or less, free product will win them over. And then after this point, then they're just going to be looking for money or something else"? Is there a certain barrier maybe?alix:It varies. It really varies, because I think, for us, people get excited about us for different reasons. As I mentioned before, whether it's product, whether it's the mission and they just want to get behind it, whether it's just being part of the community, right? So, we've seen people want to post and engage for all sorts of different reasons. There isn't really a fine math to it. I would say, the more macro the influencer is, we found the more that they want to get paid. But also, it really depends on who it is. But by and large, I would say that the returns are not as good.Stephanie:Yeah. Yeah, that's good to know. So, what is a favorite piece of content that either you've created, or an influencer has created, where you're like, "This is really fun or funny," or drove a lot of purchases, anything come to mind?alix:So, we have a small silly thing that we do. We have this weird sub cult of grandma's drinking Bev.Stephanie:Oh, my gosh. That's great.alix:Which is funny. So, there's this one influencer we've worked with called Ms. PattyCake. She's done the funniest content for us, where she's just this fab grandma. She'll like dress up in full extra clothes and be drinking our cans of wine and stuff like that. So, I mean, that's one of my personal favorites. Whether-Stephanie:That's greatalix:... it's going to drive the most traffic, I couldn't tell you. I mean, another partnership that we did that's been really great is Serena Kerrigan and her Instagram show, I don't know if you're familiar with that.Stephanie:I'm not. Tell me about it.alix:Yeah. Yeah, totally. So, during quarantine, she basically created like the first reality television show on Instagram. She started going on live dates on Instagram Live with random guys from her house. It became such a funny cult following thing, where people were just login. It's actually on Wednesdays at 8:30 most the time just to watch her go on a date, whether she goes on the second date or whatever. So, we sponsored her for her second season. I think that's one of the big things too. The bigger the influencer is, the more brands they're working with. We really like to find people who are fun and own themselves and very mission aligned and empowered that are earlier and up and coming. We found that to just be way more effective.Stephanie:That's great. I need to go and watch that. That sounds really funny. How did you find her? How do you find these smaller people? Because that always seems like the hardest part for me anyways. Think about like, "Oh, go find an influencer, who has a good following. These people will actually want what she has or he has, but they're not too big where they don't ask for crazy things." How do you find those people?alix:That is a great question. The team is really good at that. I'm not necessarily doing this all myself these days, but I would say that it's especially tough for younger brands, because there is such a capacity constraint in terms of time. It really, really is a full time job keeping your finger on the pulse on what's going on social, right? I think it changes so quickly. What people are doing online changes so quickly. I mean, they can change in the day, right?alix:Making sure that you're that you're responding without losing your authenticity, and also, just being engaged with your consumers and who are they following and what are they excited about and seeing if those audiences are like-minded people. It's a lot of keeping your finger on the pulse. Frankly, it's a lot. It's a lot of time.Stephanie:What are you seeing when you sponsor a series on Instagram like that, where it's more product placement, where it might not be something that that person is referencing but she's in the scene; versus the ROI on a platform, maybe like TikTok, where they're probably putting it more front and center? That's what their post is about. What kind of ROI should someone expect when utilizing these two different methods?alix:I mean, honestly, it varies, because a lot of the time in TikTok, it's not necessarily just about what the product is. A lot of the time, it is something that they just happen to be drinking while they're saying something funny. And then they might like off the cuff mention it. Whereas on Instagram, you're looking at more of a hard post. You can track the ROIs with specific codes that you're giving influencers and stuff like that.alix:So, it's something that I think we're really trying to fine tune in terms of, "How do you track those ROIs in an effective way?" But for us, we've seen that TikTok engagement in particular is really interesting, because it's still newer and the algorithms aren't as tightly figured out as Instagram is from what we've started to see. So, the ROIs can be much higher. But again, it totally varies, and it really depends on the content of the person.Stephanie:Got it. That makes sense. Are you working on any new crazy things like crazy marketing campaigns or channels that you're trying out or anything where you're like, "I have no idea if this will work, but we're going to try it"?alix:Absolutely. I mean, we're really trying to build out our own content marketing platforms. We launched a podcast that did quite well, that I was actually the host of.Stephanie:Nice.alix:It's called Made By Chicks. Yeah. So, figuring out we're trying to build out more of, "What does our newsletter look like? How are we bringing value-add content to people? How are we doing it in a way that's not necessarily just sales emails, but really addressing who we are and giving people value outside of our product alone?" Right? So that's one of the big challenges that I think we're going to see in 2021, is "How do we build that in a way that has a strong ROI? What do those ROIs look like? What kind of partnerships can we get involved with?" These types of things is something that we're really going to focus on for next year to get away from the Instagram addiction, if you will.Stephanie:Yup. Yeah, I think it's good to start exploring new things like that. Yeah, we work with companies all the time, who are thinking about building podcast or sponsoring podcasts. It's definitely a good avenue to explore, because it's only increasing. At least podcasting is only increasing, not people listening.alix:For sure, for sure.Stephanie:All right, so let's move over to the lightning round. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Alix?alix:I am so ready.Stephanie:Alright. First, we'll start with the hard one, what one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?alix:What one thing was the biggest impact on ecommerce? I think the biggest thing that will have an impact on ecommerce is the social climate.Stephanie:Tell me a bit more.alix:I think it really depends on what happens with COVID and civil unrest and all those types of things, because that's what really starts to clog up people's feeds. They're seeing a lot of that. So, that's where we see tax increase dramatically is when there's a lot going on in the world around [inaudible 00:44:21].Stephanie:Got it. Makes sense. That's a good one. What's next on your reading list?alix:My reading list?Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative).alix:Never Split the Difference, which is a negotiation book from I believe it's a CIA interrogator.Stephanie:Yeah, we just had someone else recommend that. I think it was just a couple of episodes ago.alix:Oh, really?Stephanie:Yeah, that's popular book. Definitely check it out now. What's up next on your Netflix queue?alix:Oh, I mean, obviously, The Crown, definitely watching that. The Queen's Gambit was amazing too.Stephanie:Yes, I'm watching The Queen's Gambit right now. It's so good.alix:It's amazing.Stephanie:I have to check out The Crown. I haven't seen that one yet though. I always just take recommendations from our guests. That's what guides my Netflix queue from all you guys, so.alix:Well, yeah, I would love any recommendations, because I feel like the whole world has just straight up run out of Netflix.Stephanie:I know. Yeah, we got to make more content. We need it.alix:Exactly, exactly. Give the people what they want, Netflix and Bev.Stephanie:What one thing do you not understand today that you wish you did?alix:Can it be about anything?Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative).alix:I wish I had a better grasp on American history. I went to high school abroad. So, I actually missed my junior year when you're supposed to take American history. I was taking history abroad. So, I actually don't have a great background in that. I really wish I did, especially right now.Stephanie:Oh, that's a good one. I always say history repeats itself. Yeah, it's something I have to-alix:It does.Stephanie:... dive into deeper as well.alix:It does indeed. I wish I were better at reading biographies and historical books, but I'm not.Stephanie:Yeah. Well, hey, there's so much going on right now, but that's a good thing to lean into. The last one, what piece of tech is making you most efficient right now?alix:Superhuman with email.Stephanie:Oh, do you like it?alix:Yeah, I love it. It's definitely helped with my efficiency dramatically. Yeah, I wish I could say Asana. My team uses it very well. I'm a little bit of the slow adopter, but Superhuman has been really awesome.Stephanie:Cool. I have to check that out. Yeah, I've heard so much about it. Maybe something you can check out next. All right, Alix. It's been awesome having you come on the show. Where can people find out more about you and Bev?alix:Absolutely. So, you can check us out at drinkbev.com and follow us on Instagram, @drinkbev. Subscribe to our newsletters.Stephanie:Awesome. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for joining us.alix:Thanks so much.
Rachel Drori has come a long way from the days of filling a shopping cart at Trader Joe's and packing up healthy, frozen meals for delivery to customers all around New York — all while being nine-months pregnant. As the Founder and CEO of Daily Harvest, Rachel bootstrapped her company from the very beginning, and eventually had a few big names reach out to invest, including folks like Serena Williams and Gwyneth Paltrow. In 2019, Daily Harvest generated more than $125M in revenue and the company is growing. So what makes her meal-delivery service different from the others? The heavy focus on customer-centricity.When Rachel founded Daily Harvest, her goal was to build a customer-driven company that connected people with food that was designed specifically for them. But what did that look like from a practical standpoint and what can others learn from Rachel’s journey? On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, we’ll give you the answers to just that, so stay tuned!Main Takeaways:Nimble and Agile: In marketing and customer acquisition, it’s a mistake to be reliant on any one channel. Having the ability to understand and follow the trends, and then meet potential customers where they are at the moment they are online will allow you to actually bring in new customers reliably.Call and Response: Customers are less interested in having a place to share their thoughts than they are in having their feedback responded to by the brand they are interacting with. In every channel, there should be a way to engage in two-way conversations with your customers and then a method to follow through on those customers’ needs in a way that everyone can see.High On Your Own Supply: Having control of your supply chain is one of the best ways to create agility within your organization. But sometimes it takes some technology investment to bring all your suppliers on board.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is Stephanie Postles, your host and co-founder of mission.org. Today on the show, we have Rachel Drori, the founder and CEO of Daily Harvest. Rachel, welcome, welcome.Rachel:Hi, thanks for having me.Stephanie:Thanks for coming on. So yesterday in the mail, I got an amazing box of Daily Harvest. And it was the perfect way for me to understand exactly what it was and enjoyed this morning. But to kick it off, maybe I'll let you explain what Daily Harvest is.Rachel:First of all, I need to know what you tried first, and then....Stephanie:I tried a smoothie, and today I'm going to be trying one of the soups in there. I think there was a lentil soup that you just add water to. I'm like, "This is what I need in my life, something that you just add water to or just add coconut water to make a smoothie and it's done."Rachel:I love it. Yes. So I started Daily Harvest about five years ago. And the mission is simple. It's really to take care of food so that food can take care of all of us. And we do this by starting at the root with our farmers. And we grow the best fruits and vegetables in the best way possible. And then we make incredible food, which I'm glad you got to try. [inaudible] smoothies and flatbreads, ice cream, alongside with people who eat it, our customers. And the idea is that you can then stock your home with convenient, but also clean and delicious food that's built on real fruits and vegetables. And part of our magic is really connecting people with food that was designed specifically for them so that you're really always stocked with a whole food kitchen of clean food when you want it and it's ready in minutes.Stephanie:I love that. I think on my Twitter, I posted a picture of my freezer and what it looks like. And it was kind of sad because there was like waffles next to one of them. I'm like, "What?" This is my life. I have waffles and then now a new experience that I don't think I'll be able to step away from after this.Rachel:Well, that's what I like to hear. But it's interesting, people buying additional freezers in the last few months. And I'm like, "I support this message. I support this very much."Stephanie:That is awesome. So tell me a little bit about the early days of when you were starting it. I mean, I'm thinking about all the different logistics and the supply chain and working with farmers. And I want to kind of hear how it all got started.Rachel:So as I started pulling on the strings really trying to figure out why the food that I wanted didn't exist, what I realized is that it was because food is not customer driven. The way food is created is actually really far from that. And the reason food is not customer driven is actually a true systemic problem. So as I set out to start Daily Harvest, part of what I wanted to do was really solve some of the systemic challenges with food. Not only the convenience and the health factor, but also why do we have to choose between preserving ourselves and preserving the planet all of the time with packaging and sustainability and regenerative farming practices and all the stuff that makes our food systems so broken? So back in those early days, I had these really grand ambitions, still have the grand ambitions, but less power to actually make them happen in those days. And what I did was I faked it all until I was actually able to do them.Rachel:So I was buying our ingredients at Trader Joe's. I wasn't telling stories of things that were going to happen in future but buying ingredients at Trader Joe's, got a commercial kitchen in Long Island City. And my right hand and my left hand were my first team members, bagging all those ingredients up into food that I knew solved all of the customer problems that I had surfaced to myself but also in friends and family, and started delivering across New York City and really trying to see if I was solving problems for people other than myself. And it turned out I was. And I'd quit my job and dove in head first.Stephanie:That is amazing. So were you personally delivering a lot of this items in the beginning?Rachel:I was delivering everything.Stephanie:Oh gosh. Any crazy stories of the delivery days?Rachel:Yeah. So I was nine months pregnant towards the end of the bootstrap MVP period. And I could no longer get behind the wheel of my car. But I had a 16-year-old nephew who could drive with an adult.Stephanie:Oh my gosh, getting his permit hours with you?Rachel:Yes, yes. It was ridiculous. So I would pick him up. I would pay him like $15 an hour to drive around and hop in and out. And I would sit in the car like a beached whale. And he would run these boxes up to people's apartments. And I would be like, "Nope, can't give us a ticket. I'm in here."Stephanie:And I'm pregnant. So even more of a reason. Don't try. That's awesome. So then around that time, it looks like you were also... Was that when you were also raising money?Rachel:So I did raise money... well, so I'd raised a few rounds at this point. I actually tried to raise money for a Series C at that phase and it didn't go very well to be honest. People didn't really understand how I had this grandiose vision and I was delivering smoothies. They just couldn't connect the dots. And I guess it was too much of a leap for people. So I decided to bootstrap for as long as I possibly could. And when I say bootstrap, I think people assume you have money to burn. When I say scrappy, literally doing things like having my nephew deliver the food, and I created the website entirely by myself and the packaging and printed everything. There was no money spent to be clear.Rachel:And raised money officially right after I had my first child and decided I needed... I was kind of choking off growth and needed to take it from the MVP stage to something much bigger. And we launched nationally in 2016, which was almost like a year after that period, and then raised our Series A actually when I was pregnant with my second child, which was super fun.Stephanie:What kind of experience did you have being pregnant and raising money or trying to raise money? What happened during that? Because I know I have some personal experiences that maybe weren't always the most positive of people just being like, "How do you plan on running a business and you're pregnant?" Even now, knowing I have three kids, people saying, "How do you plan on running a business with three kids?" And what kind of stories do you have around that? Hopefully, I'll get one. So I'm interested to hear.Rachel:Yeah. I mean, the positive and the negative. The positive was that I had no time to worry about being pregnant. I was just like, "Oh, yeah, this is just happening and I'm going to keep moving." And I think a lot of people in that moment of life and in that phase kind of stew in the moment. And it was great. Nine months later or 10 months later, a baby popped out and I was like, "Moving on." And the negative is it's funny exactly as you just phrased it. The question that came up not actually as frequently as I thought it might, but once or twice, I definitely got the question, how do you plan to be a good mother and run a business? And I'm like, "Interesting question that I'm not going to justify with an answer. But if what you're trying to ask is if I'm 100% committed to making Daily Harvest successful, the answer is yes."Stephanie:Yep. That's great. That's a good way to do it like, "I'm not even going to answer that."Rachel:What a ridiculous question?Stephanie:Yeah. I always say like I could never imagine someone asking like, "Oh, man, how do you plan on still working if your kids are on the way?" I can do that.Rachel:Totally.Stephanie:So I saw you have some really impressive names as investors like Serena Williams, Gwyneth Paltrow. Tell me a little bit about how you got these investors on board.Rachel:Yes. So each one is kind of its own story, but Serena is my favorite because I got a random email from Alexis Ohanian who's now her husband, at the time was Serena's boyfriend. And he was like, "My girlfriend and I eat Daily Harvest every day. We would love to talk to you." I had no idea who his girlfriend was. And the next thing I knew, I was on the phone with Serena Williams like, "Wait, what?"Stephanie:Oh my gosh. That is actually insane. I mean, I wouldn't have known that either because I don't really know names and stuff like that. So how did the conversation go?Rachel:I had no idea. I mean, it was amazing. She's so cool and was incredibly down to earth. And she was just saying how Daily Harvest really helped her eat the way that she wanted to eat, the way that she needed to eat in a pinch. And she loved the idea. And this was super early on. And I was like, "First of all, how do you even know about us? But amazing." And she asked if she could invest. And I was like, "Let me think about this for a second. Yes, absolutely."Stephanie:Oh, that's great. Stephanie:So after you landed Serena, did other investors come along when you could kind of point to like, "I've got Serena Williams. You win her out." How did the other ones go?Rachel:I mean, it's funny. We weren't really public with it until much later. So we had other investors reach out to us with interest, but it had nothing to do with Serena. It really was people finding us in pretty organic ways. And people just getting excited about the idea and the concept and seeing the problem that I stated earlier in their own life and seeing that we don't have to compromise, we can have it all, at least with our food. So each story, as I said, is pretty unique. But they really all were people who found us, which was pretty remarkable.Stephanie:Yeah, that's great. I mean, that's a testament to the product. Very, very cool. So when thinking about new customers finding you in organic or non-organic ways, how are you getting in front of people right now? And I'm asking this question because I went on your guys's Pinterest, and I saw you have like 4 million views a month. And I was like, "What? How are they getting 4 million views on Pinterest?" So I want to hear a little bit about your customer acquisition and how you're getting in front of people.Rachel:Yes. So we have a really robust marketing mix. My background is marketing. So we always started with the goal of, how are we not beholden to any one channel? Right? Because I think that that's just asking for trouble. And we built it in a really nimble and agile way so that as trends and algorithms and all sorts of things change, that we can then be nimble as a result. And we're lucky that we have a really high amount of our customers come in through word of mouth. But we've also done a lot of things to make that easier, to remove the friction of people sharing when they have a positive Daily Harvest experience.Rachel:But there are other things that I think have made us stand out on... I mean, literally, you name a marketing channel, we are on it. There's nothing that's like secret saucy there. But I really think it comes down to our differentiated messaging and our differentiated photography and really focusing on connecting with universal human truths where people are just like, "Oh, you get me. Yep, I understand. I'm going to learn more."Stephanie:Oh, that's great. So tell me a little bit about that differentiated messaging that you're talking about? How do you go about figuring out what you want to message and how do you know what will connect and what won't? Because what you might think is going to be a universal truth, I might be like, "Oh, that's not my truth." How do you guys go about making sure you're speaking to your customer?Rachel:Absolutely. It definitely is trial and error to understand what works, but we obviously have a mission. So we're looking for customers with whom our mission resonates. And there's just a lot of different ways where when you remove your marketing hat and you're like, "How would a normal human say this?" Or, "What is the way of saying something that gets somebody to stop their scroll or perk their ears while listening to something that they might otherwise fast forward past?" And then it's the same thing on the visual side, really focusing on photography and imagery that's visually arresting and beautiful. And also stuff that looks delicious. You can't underestimate the salivation factor of... I don't know if that's a real thing.Stephanie:I like that. Now it needs to be.Rachel:It totally does. How much of a photograph actually makes you salivate? Because that's tied to how hungry it makes you and how much it makes you want something.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, pictures are everything. Even on your packaging and things like that, I mean, that's what makes me want to buy something, even when I'm on DoorDash or something, if an item doesn't have a picture on it, I'm like, "No, I'm not so sure if I want it," even if it sounds amazing. I want to see what it actually looks like. So it seems like you have very, very smart to have pictures on everything, especially Pinterest.Rachel:Yep. And because people have such short attention spans these days, and because there's so much media being thrown at you constantly, we also really focus on simplicity with it. So not only is it beautiful and drool-worthy, but it's also simplistic.Stephanie:That's great. So earlier, you mentioned also removing friction of having customers share their stories. How did you go about ensuring that a new customer or existing customer would share their stories and keep doing them?Rachel:Yeah. So what we have found is it's not so much about giving the customers places to share their thoughts and feelings. It's more about showing that you respond to them. So one of the things that we did really early on is we built a quite agile supply chain. And the goal of that was really to be able to respond to customer needs. We wanted to create a customer driven company. We had to be able to respond to customer needs. And it's one thing to have these amazing insights and to be innovative. And a lot of companies have the ability to do that. But if you can't respond in a timely manner, does it really matter? I'm not so sure.Rachel:So by showing customers, not just telling them, that we are actually listening to them and creating the food that they want to eat with them, and then connecting people with the food that was created for them, it sounds pretty simplistic. But there are really few companies that actually do it. So we're able to bring something to market in six to eight weeks from the time our customers tell us what they want. And I think that that is why customers love to share with us. And that is why we continue to be able to build these connections with our customers, those relationships.Stephanie:That's such a good point actually to show someone like you're not just submitting something into a black box and nothing's ever happening. What does the process look like? Where are they submitting their feedback? And then how do you interact with them in a way that is one on one, but then also shows your entire customer or new customer base, "Here's what we did for this one customer?" What does that process look like from start to finish?Rachel:Yeah. I mean, literally any channel that you can think of, we've built a way to interact. So whether it is through our app, whether it is through text message, whether it is through social media, you name it, we've made the conversation two ways. And what's interesting about it is if you think back to the story I told you earlier where kind of faking it till you make it, I'm air quoting, which you obviously can't see, but you're faking it but kind of faking it.Rachel:In the early days, our way of talking to our customers was every single team member at Daily Harvest would follow the Daily Harvest hashtag and every single day, it was the expectation that they would scroll through. And when somebody wrote something about Daily Harvest, the team engaged. Every single person on the team was asked to engage. So everyone from an engineer who might not under normal circumstances have any interaction with a customer directly to somebody on our culinary team. And it depends on what the customer put out there. But if it was something like your app is X, Y, Z, then an engineer would jump in and say, "Hey, can you tell me more about that?" And really just empowering the team to forge those relationships and to have those conversations I think is really what started it from a team culture perspective.Rachel:And then as we've grown, we've built tools in this way that allow it to happen. [inaudible 00:20:08], obviously, not everybody is scrolling through every single Daily Harvest hashtag these days, but we've empowered everybody to really think about how we maintain our vision of being truly customer driven.Stephanie:I love that. I mean, that's such a good experience. It's so different than, of course, corporate culture where you're probably told you are not allowed to engage with someone who tweets at us, and it has to be approved by PR. And there's so many rules and stuff. A lot of us had been taught in the past like, "Just don't say anything." And I can imagine how great of a culture you build by saying, "Everyone get on there. Respond to these people. It's on you to actually keep our customers happy." That seems like a transformative environment.Rachel:Absolutely. And then you have it scaled too. People really are thinking customer first at all times.Stephanie:Yeah, that's really cool. So when it comes to product request, I mean, it seems like there'd be an area that could be like a leaderboard where people can vote on the next products they want and actually determine that. Is there anything like that that you have going on to kind of create more social engagement and also people having an input in the product that maybe they wouldn't have just tweeted at you and said like, I want to have more figs?" They might not have that idea on their own, but they would like to maybe vote on it?Rachel:Totally. Yeah. I mean, we have all sorts of engagement opportunities for customers. But the important thing to know is that none of our skews or collections at Daily Harvest are created to be generally accepted. So we really focus on what people want from the perspective of their taste affinities, which is really differentiated.Rachel:So if you think about traditional product cycles and product development tools, people will look at things like demographics, psychographics, household income, credit card swipe data, and all of these things that when you kind of zoom out really never made sense to me because I can tell you, my husband and I live in the same house. We have the same household income. We share credit cards. We have the same credit card swipe data, same education, we met in school. But when it comes down to it, he orders from a very different restaurant than where I order from at night when we order in. So we really try to focus on what taste preferences are. And we try to create food for specific groups of people that have similar taste preferences, so nothing that we create is meant for general consumption. And that's where it gets really nuanced and really differentiated.Rachel:So yes, we will say to people, "We're thinking about creating X, Y, Z, and we would love your input." We take that into consideration, but we also take into consideration that, "Who is actually answering that question and where they're coming from and what their taste preferences are." Because I might like something that is, let's say, filled with greens, and you might like something that has no garlic in it or whatever it is because you might be allergic to garlic. And we're not going to like the same thing. So why should we try to make food for both of us?Stephanie:I love that idea of making sure that you actually focus on your customers because I think it's very easy, especially with all these new B2C companies that are launching right now to get distracted and not remember like, "Who did you actually build this for? What is your customer base? And what are you trying to do in this world?" Instead of being like, "Oh, and this person wants more sugar added to the matcha. Okay, I didn't really want to add a bunch of sugar to it, but this person wants it." It's a good reminder to not get distracted.Rachel:Right. But if we do have a group of customers that tell us that they want that same matcha that's a bit sweeter, we can accommodate that. It's just we would never target the same food to... We would know who we're targeting what to.Stephanie:Yep, very cool. So I'm very interested in the partnerships that you have with farmers and what your supply chain looks like behind the scenes that you can make these really quick product pivots or new products coming out in like six-day weeks. So can you speak a little about, what did that look like forming those partnerships? And any hiccups that you experienced in the early days of trying to get that worked out?Rachel:Yeah. I mean, as I said, it started with Trader Joe's because every time we reached out to a farm, they were like, "Who are you? Can you guarantee this entire crop?" And I was like, "I don't know."Stephanie:They were asking you to guarantee whole crops for them?Rachel:I mean, sometimes you have to if you want to be in control of how sweet it is, what the nutrition level is, you really have to be. And that was the vision because the way that I always envisioned taking care of food was really at the systemic level. So really to make change, you have to go to that level of scale in your purchasing. And we're incredibly meticulous about the ingredients that we use and how we source them. We actually have an entire team that's dedicated to finding the best farms. And we have over 400 farms that we work with directly. So we set incredibly rigorous standards that ensure not only are our partners using regenerative practices in their farming, things like increasing biodiversity, improving the water cycle, using organic farming practices, strengthening the health and vitality of our farm soil, using fair labor practices.Rachel:But we also are really particular about when we harvest our food. We want to make sure that the fig or the blueberry that you're eating is unparalleled not only from a nutrition perspective, but also from a taste perspective. So that means that we have to let every single ingredient reach its full nutritional and flavor potential on the vine or on the tree. And then we freeze everything within 24 hours of it being picked, which is really differentiated. And because of that rigor, our food is actually more nutritious than the stuff that you buy in the grocery store, which is something that a lot of people are surprised to hear. I think a lot of people see frozen as not as nutritious or inferior, when in fact, unless you are picking something straight from the farm and consuming it within three days, that's just not the case.Rachel:And we work with these farmers to also create entirely new supply chains, which is amazing. Our customers told us that they really wanted something with celery root last fall. And we worked with the farmer to create an entire supply chain of frozen celery root that had never existed before. And what's cool about a frozen supply chain is there's actually 50% less food waste and there's just so many benefits to the system overall. But we really think a lot about how we create the most nourishing, best tasting food and it really all comes back to those farm relationships.Stephanie:Wow, that's really cool. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people like you said don't understand the frozen aspect of why it's better because I know a while back, I heard that about fish too. But it's better to have frozen fish that's frozen right away when it's caught than getting something fresh. Fresh feels like it's healthier but actually it's more nutritional if you get the frozen one that was frozen right on the ship or boat or whatever it is.Rachel:When you think about the frozen aisle in the grocery store, most people associate it with like dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets.Stephanie:Yes, which may or may not be in my freezer right now.Rachel:I don't judge. When you ask most people what's in their freezer, it's like ice cream and vodka and ice cubes. I'm like, "These are not bad things, but it just shows you how the food system has evolved." And the microwave dinner was created not because it was healthy. It was because it was convenient and it was because it was created during this Industrial Revolution when food and science melded together in ways that is just so unnatural and we kind of just stayed there. So I think there's been a lot of... not I think. There's been a lot of education for customers to help them understand the benefits of frozen not only for themselves, not only for their taste buds, but also for the food system as a whole.Stephanie:Got it, that's great. So the one thing I'm thinking about too is working with farms, I can see them being on older tech stacks I'll call them or no tech stacks.Rachel:What tech stacks?Stephanie:Yeah. I'll just say non-existent tech stacks maybe unless they're like the very advanced farm with the drones going on.Rachel:No, [crosstalk 00:29:55].Stephanie:You're working with 400 farms. How are you placing these orders and getting things to happen quickly and making sure that it's up to your standards and that nothing's going to get backed up? How do you do that with farms that don't have a tech stack?Rachel:I mean, we built the technology for it.Stephanie:Tell me a bit about that. What did that process look like?Rachel:Yeah. So in the beginning, we only had a few farms, and it was easier to manage. But obviously, once you hit a certain scale, it becomes a little unwieldy and it's not just 400 farms. There's four crops a year and different ingredients. One farm might have six ingredients that they're growing for us. So it can get really complicated. But as I said, we have a large team that really focuses on this, and they're incredibly passionate. So what we did is we thought about how technology could make their job easier, how we can leverage technology to remove some of the friction in managing the quality of our food and the supply chain in general. And we really built a verification system that... I would say a trust but verify system where we set certain quality standards. Because we can't [inaudible] people who are on site at every farm with every harvest, and then there's like a verification system where they're sending us samples constantly to make sure that that everything is as we say it needs to be. And we're verifying nutrition after something is frozen to make sure that it's as it's supposed to be. And through every step, we are trusting and verifying. And all of that is rigorously notated in our technology stack.Stephanie:That's really cool. So it seems like you're bringing a lot of farmers online. Have they asked to reuse the technology with other partners too? They could be a whole separate business like, "Here's technology that you can now have with anyone else ordering from you."Rachel:Totally. I mean, we work with a lot of small farmers. So a lot of farmers don't have a lot of other business. We've really grown to a scale where most of our farmers are Daily Harvest farmers.Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative). Oh, cool.Rachel:Really cool when you think about it. But yeah. I mean, we've definitely had people ask, but we've got to focus on our core competencies and what we're trying to achieve.Stephanie:Yep. That's great. So everyone's obviously looking into subscription businesses right now. It's always top of mind like, "Should this business be a subscription or not?" Everyone wants one. How do you think about retaining your customers and enticing them to stay with you for the long haul?Rachel:Yeah. So one thing that's interesting about Daily Harvest is on the outside, we kind of look like a subscription, but we're actually not a subscription. We're really what we call a replenishment business because once you sign up for Daily Harvest, our goal is to make sure that your freezer is always stocked. And it's not because that's good for us, it's because that's how we make sure that you have the food that you want when you want it. At that moment when you're hangry, when you're reaching for that bar, you need to have the right food in your freezer. Otherwise, you're going to make a different choice, right?Rachel:So we think a lot about what that replenishment looks like. And we also never want you to get an order of Daily Harvest that you don't want. Right? So we actually communicate with our customers ad nauseum to make sure that we're never sending them anything that they don't want, and they're only getting food when they do want it. And that's what makes us different from a subscription business where you have to consume your food or use your razor or whatever it is within a specific period of time and it's only good for that period of time. Because we're frozen, we're really not perishable, which is a huge benefit and allows us to be even more customer centric, but really thinking about maintaining our customer base.Rachel:Removing friction for our customers and making things as easy as possible for them, making their account as easy as possible to manage making sure that they're getting the food that they want when they want it. And we found that there's a direct correlation between removing that friction, being customer driven. We don't even think about about retention. We think about how can we be more customer driven? How can we get our customers exactly what they want? And what we found is that those things correlate really nicely.Stephanie:Yeah, I completely agree. So what does that back end account management look like for your customers? And one thing that's coming to mind is like the past couple interviews I've done, we've touched on one click ordering and how that's a big thing that a lot of people are expecting now. And I could see that maybe coming into play for you guys too where you're more about replenishing items. If I'm out of my matcha, or smoothie, or whatever it was that I really just enjoyed, going on to my account and just ordering that, and not having to have minimums or anything. Just being like, "That's what I want," and just doing it one off. How do you guys have the back end working?Rachel:Yeah. So we don't do that. And the reason why is because we really think of ourselves, as I said, as replenishment. So our customer behavior is much more going to shop at Costco, let's say. You don't go to Costco to buy one thing. It's never worth a shot.Stephanie:I need 10 pounds of butter when I go there.Rachel:Totally. But you have certain things that you go and you buy a lot of. So our customer really thinks about, how can Daily Harvest fill my entire freezer? When your inventory at home starts to dwindle, that's when you make your next purchase. So for us, one click ordering is not a thing. And we find that actually there's tension between how much cognitive load you reduce and how much customer friction you reduce, and people really getting the food that they want. So there's definitely a balance there. But what we do instead is we have an app and our app is incredibly customer driven. And it's about communication with our customers and making sure that, as I said, they're getting the food that they want when they want it. But it's definitely as easy as humanly possible, but not so easy that you're going to get something that you don't want.Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative). That's great. Yeah. And I think that's a really good reminder, too, that everyone might be obsessed with a subscription model because that is good for businesses to lock people in. But that might actually leave a bad taste in a customer's mouth. And your model is completely different, which is like focus on what they want and what they need and make it easy for them to order and refill quickly without having to come back a thousand times.Rachel:Yep. And make it as easy as possible honestly for them to pause and cancel and do all the things they want to do because when you do that, they come back.Stephanie:Yep. I love that. Low friction, it's worth it. So to go to little more general commerce questions, what kind of disruptions do you see coming to commerce right now maybe in the next couple years?Rachel:I mean, look, I think COVID has been... it's been an interesting few months. But what it has done is it's really accelerated a bunch of trends that we've seen. And we've seen this huge adoption of ecommerce and people's willingness to stick around once they've tried it. So as you had early adopters previously who were signing up for food delivery or whatever it may be delivered to their home, what we're seeing now is people who are not early adopters, so more of the mainstream signing up. And there are different needs, and there's a different level of education, and there's all sorts of nuance to take into account with that trend. So we're thinking a lot about that, how we continue to remove friction for this different type of customer.Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative). That's really great. So we have a couple minutes left and I want to jump over to the lightning round brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Rachel?Rachel:No.Stephanie:Prepare yourself to get some deep breaths. Get in the game. All right. We'll start with the easier ones first. What's Up next on your Netflix queue?Rachel:Oh, wait. I can't remember what it was called. It's The Man and the Company Castle. Hold on.Stephanie:Oh, that Amazon? The Man in the High Castle?Rachel:Yes. Not Netflix.Stephanie:That's okay. Yeah. Have you started it yet or?Rachel:I haven't but I am such a history nerd. And I don't know how I missed that this show existed, but I cannot tell you how excited I am to watch it.Stephanie:Yeah, it's very good.Rachel:Yeah. And I also feel like there's something about current state of affairs and dystopian society is that it really resonates. So let's see what it's got for us.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, I like that one a lot. I think it's a good reminder I'm always very biased and ask about Netflix but Amazon, they've got some good stuff. I mean, I've binge-watched I think it was like Marvelous Mrs. Maisel if you knew to balance yourself out of it from dystopian to fun and cute. Also a very good series that I loved.Rachel:That show is amazing.Stephanie:Oh, you like it too? Yeah. It always leaves me with the happy feeling like, "Oh, this is cute. I love this."Rachel:All the time that I remind them of Rachel Brosnahan, and I'm like, "That is a huge compliment. Thank you."Stephanie:That is. She's awesome. Good. What's up next on your reading list? And it can be business or personal.Rachel:So it's Never Split the Difference which I've actually read before, but I like to read it every few years because I think it's the best negotiator out there and I'm not a natural negotiator. But it's obviously a huge part of my job. So it's coming up on time to read it once more.Stephanie:That's great. What is one thing that comes to mind when you think about that book? One lesson or principle where you're like, "Yeah, I'm not going to split the difference?" Anything high level other than what I just said which is just jacking the title.Rachel:So my favorite takeaway from the book, and it's just a reminder, it's really about listening. It's funny. I think a lot about toddler psychology these days because I have a three-year-old and a five-year-old. And there's a lot in common with the tactics in this book and toddler psychology, but it's really about validating people's emotions and feelings and creating trust and safety to be able to negotiate better.Stephanie:Oh, that's good. I like that. It shows that so many things are similar in life. Dealing with toddlers is the same thing as negotiating for your salary or investment money. Same thing.Rachel:It really is. It's crazy.Stephanie:I have to check that one out. What app or a piece of tech are you using right now that's making you more efficient in your life?Rachel:Okay. So this is such a weird one, but my husband just introduced me to the app for my cable provider. And I had no idea that this existed. I never watched TV ever. But given that we're in day three of the sit and wait for the results of our election, I've been able to just pop it up and have the news on live stream behind me. And it's been incredible because previously, I was refreshing my Twitter feed every 20 minutes or whatever it was. But just kind of having it in live feed behind me has been a huge unlock for my efficiency in this crazy time.Stephanie:That's great. I haven't even thought about apps from cable providers. So it's a good reminder for everyone. I like that.Rachel:It never occurred to me that one would even exist, and I'm very happy with it.Stephanie:That's great. What's one thing that you wish you knew more about? It could be a topic, a trend, a theme, anything.Rachel:Let's see. I really wish I knew more about human psychology. I feel like every time I read something or learn more, I get really excited and I want to dive in more but I really never have time to. And it's something that I feel would make me better at what I do every day if I really understood the psychology behind it.Stephanie:That's a good one. Yeah, I completely agree about that. Something I always want to dive into more and haven't had the time yet. So Rachel, this has been such a fun interview. Where can people find out more about you and Daily Harvest?Rachel:At dailyharvest.com.Stephanie:Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on the show.Rachel:Thanks for having me.
In this episode, Holy Cross professor Stephanie Yuhl reconnects with friend and former student Meg Griffiths '04. They reminisce about Meg's days on campus, and reflect upon the many ways that the Holy Cross Mission and its pursuit of social justice is evident throughout Meg's life and career. Interview originally recorded on July 31, 2020. Due to the ongoing effects of the pandemic, all interviews in season 2 are recorded remotely. --- Meg: I think people who come to the dialogue table… they come because they’re in touch with something that means a lot to them, and they care enough to show up and listen and try to muddle through with people who they know occupy different positions. And to me, that’s a sign of hope in and of itself: that people are willing to come to the table. And that they have a shared commitment to making some kind of change, making their community better, making space for more voices and rehumanizing the “other.” Maura: Welcome to Mission-Driven, where we speak with alumni who are leveraging their Holy Cross education to make a meaningful difference in the world around them. I’m your host, Maura Sweeney ‘07, Director of Alumni Career Development at Holy Cross. I’m delighted to welcome you to today’s show. Maura: In this episode we hear from Meg Griffiths from the class of 2004. Meg can be described as an educator, space maker, practitioner of dialogue, crafter of questions, and human can opener. Ever since graduating from Holy Cross, Meg has pursued mission-focused work. After starting her career with the Jesuit Volunteers Corps in New Orleans, her journey has evolved to include work in the nonprofit sector and higher education. Today, she works for Essential Partners, an organization who partners with communities and organizations around the globe, equipping them to navigate the values, beliefs and identities that are essential to them. Her work showcases the importance of dialogue and connection in order to build trust and support mutual understanding among diverse groups of people. Stephanie Yuhl, Professor of History, Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies, and Peace and Conflict Studies, reconnects with Meg to speak about her life and career. Their conversation is filled with mutual admiration and respect, stemming from Meg’s time as a student at Holy Cross. The importance of living the Holy Cross Mission is interwoven throughout the conversation. Despite coming to Holy Cross not knowing what a Jesuit was, Meg has lived a life devoted to the Jesuit values of social justice ever since. Stephanie: Hi, Megan, it's Stephanie. Meg: Hi, Stephanie. It's Meg. Stephanie: How are you doing Meg? I'm so excited that we get this chance to spend some time together and to talk about interesting things related to you and Holy Cross. I have to say, whenever I think of students that to me, have really lived out the mission, you see the T-shirts at Holy Cross that say Live the Mission, and I think that certain people actually really do that and you're always at the top of the list of that, so thanks for sharing your time with us today. Meg: Thank you, Stephanie. When I think about my Holy Cross experience, you are one of the people that regularly comes to mind. So, this is a pure joy to have some Zoom time with you these days in this weird, strange time we're in. Stephanie: It is and hopefully the listeners won't be bored with our mutual admiration society that we're having. Let's get started and let's talk about Holy Cross and you and then, we'll move into your life and career. Tell me why did you choose Holy Cross? What was it about the school that attracted you and how did you move through Holy Cross during your time there? Meg: Yeah. So, I was looking at colleges in the late '90s but before I actually stumbled into Holy Cross, this glossy, beautiful materials that came my way in the old school snail mail, my sister was looking at colleges and she's a couple years older than me. We are very different people in all kinds of ways. My parents had taken my sister to do a New England college tour and Julie came home, very uninterested in Holy Cross and my mom said to me, "Megan, I found the perfect college for you, because your sister is not interested." So, it was sort of planted in the back of my head, before I actively started looking at colleges and I just loved it when I stepped on campus. Meg: I think a lot of Holy Cross students say this, they have this experience of sort of feeling something when they come to campus. My mom said she could read it all over my face, but it really sort of met a lot of what I was looking for in a school at the time, which is a small liberal arts Catholic school. I didn't know what a Jesuit was yet but I was Catholic educated my whole life and that felt familiar in a good way and in a challenging way. Yeah, I landed here in 2000 as a wee freshman, and took me a little while to find my sort of academic home and you, Stephanie, were a big part of that. I meandered through all of my distribution requirements and learned that I wasn't a disciplinary thinker but a multi-disciplinary thinker. Meg: Got a chance to design my own American Studies major before that was a thing on campus, and you Stephanie, were wise enough really, to say yes to being my advisor for that- Stephanie: It was wise because then we got to be friends, and you did your senior thesis on Child's Play, which I think is really interesting and I think it reveals a lot about you and the way that your brain works. Can you talk about that a little bit, explain what that thesis was about, if you can recall? Meg: Yes, I can recall. I can recall sitting in the library at a giant table every Friday writing it, my senior year. I was really interested in gender. I was also a women's studies concentrator before it was women and gender studies and then, material culture, and so, I studied how doll play and child rearing manuals sort of told a story about gender and the role of women in early America and how girls were socialized to grow up to be mothers and caretakers, through the use of dolls and doll play. So, it's really interesting, kind of nerdy but lovely research. It was sort of the bringing together of all of the disciplines of my American Studies major and my interest in sort of gender, and culture. Stephanie: Yeah, and also, I think creativity, right? The idea of looking at something and you see something extensible in that, a doll but then, being able to read and interpret more deeply into it and try to think about what are the influences and impacts that this artifact could have? I think that that is in a lot of ways really connected to some of the work that you do about seeing things one way and then trying to shift one's angle of vision to see it another way to unpack its power. So, it might look like doll play, but I think it was really indicative of future trajectories, perhaps. Meg: I love that. Stephanie: So you mentioned that you didn't even know what a Jesuit was and then, your biography really kind of spent a lot of time in that Jesuit social justice space. So, can you talk a little bit about ... and that's what we would stay around mission, right, around how you're formation at Holy Cross, what are the sort of the things that you think are part of your Jesuit education at Holy Cross, and then we can talk about how you then put those into action after graduation? Meg: Yeah, I love that you brought up the Live the Mission T-shirts, because I was an orientation leader who wore that T-shirt many summer and I'm a little bit of a mission statement nerd, because I just love the way that institutions and communities and even people can take an opportunity to name explicitly what they're about and what they aspire to be. So, I think they're both aspirational and descriptive. The Holy Cross mission, I stepped into it in a variety of ways. I mean, my experience as a student is that you can't go to Holy Cross and not be steeped in mission, but I understand other people have different experiences of that. Meg: For me, I saw it everywhere I looked, and I sought it out also. So, I got involved in the chaplains office, pretty early on in retreats, and in singing in liturgical choir, and sort of embracing the social justice mission of Jesuit education and formation through Pax Christi, and going to the School of the Americas protest and participating in the Mexico Immersion Program and SPUD. Really, seeing the ways that a faith doing justice was a huge part of the college's larger mission and I also just ... I think, part of what I loved about specifically, the Holy Cross mission statement was that it was full of questions and when we talk about what I do now, this might become even more clear to people but I'm sort of all about questions. Meg: I love the ways in which a question can invite us into, again, aspiration and also possibility, and deep personal reflection at an institutional level, sort of organizational reflection on again, who we want to be and how we want to be in the world. The Holy Cross mission statement asks these super powerful questions like what is the moral character of teaching and learning and what are our obligations to one another? What's our special responsibility to the world's poor and powerless? How do we find meaning in life and history? Meg: These are what I have always called the big important questions and I love the way that my academic experience sort of mirrored that more spiritual formation in wading into those big questions and finding the nuance and complexity that comes through sustained engagement with those kinds of questions. There's no simple answers to be found here and I love that. Even though I'm someone who really likes clarity and planning and a clear path, there's a big part of me that also knows, we need to wrestle with the complexity and the gray areas of what it means to be human. So, those are the parts of the mission statement and the way that the mission was lived in my experience that really captivated my imagination. Stephanie: That's awesome and that notion of patience and ambiguity, which is also in the mission is a wonderful thing and it's hard for type A organizers, like yourself and myself, sometimes to sit in that space but I think that that's really probably where we're most human, right? Particularly today in our really Balkanized political discourse, it's important to try to find these spaces of more nuanced. So, let's talk about that a little bit, so you come to the college, you find your way, you figure, you learn what a Jesuit might be, you live the mission, wear a T-shirt and then you graduate, right? With this thesis in Child's Play where everyone is banging on your door to hire you to do something with Child's Play because they don't know that Child's Play is not a play, it's very serious. Meg: I think that was the subtitle of my thesis. Stephanie: It was. This is no joke. I think it's serious- Meg: Something about seriousness of ... Yeah, anyways, yes. Stephanie: Exactly. So, tell me a little bit about ... I know right after college, you joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, right? Meg: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Stephanie: And went to New Orleans. Meg: Yeah. Stephanie: Tell me a little bit about that decision and how this question driven impulse that you have, played out in that space. The kind of work you did there, and how maybe your sense of your own personal mission started to shift a little bit in that time. Meg: Yeah, so I served in New Orleans in 2004 to 2005. I served at a domestic violence shelter. We had a transitional shelter and an emergency shelter. My work there involved being a part of the life of the shelter, of the residential life of our clients and guests. I dropped into a culture that could not have been more different than my suburban New Jersey Catholic upbringing, although New Orleans is very Catholic, but sort of my sheltered, very white suburban, middle class upbringing. For me, that was a transformative year in terms of coming to see the lived realities of some of the things that I had studied at Holy Cross. So, I took great courses, like social ethics with Professor Mary Hobgood, and liberation theology with Jim Nickoloff. Meg: I had studied ... and also in my local volunteering over the four years that I was in Worcester, obviously, coming face to face with the realities of injustice and poverty and violence, and sort of had this sort of charity orientation. Definitely, Holy Cross moved me into a conceptualization of justice as a really important aim, more so than charity. They go together but really, that more of my activism sort of bloomed as a Holy Cross student. It was entirely different to move to a city I've never lived in before, worked in a shelter, live in intentional community with six other humans, doing all kinds of work in the city, and tried to live in some shape of solidarity, which is not really possible in some ways, because I was bringing all my privilege and my social network of support with me. Meg: I remember feeling like I saw a different side of the world for the first time, that I really was face to face with three dimensional humans, who were experiencing these things that were really sort of more theoretical in my head at the time, oppression and discrimination, and violence, and classism, and sexism, and heterosexism and all the isms. Yet, New Orleans is this amazing, cultural, rich, historic place that is so much an example of finding joy and having resilience in the face of so many difficulties. Of course, I left New Orleans, three weeks before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and never was that clear, that sense of resilience and hope and richness of community than when I returned to New Orleans, about 10 months after Katrina hit to move back. Stephanie: Let's talk a little bit about that, because that was a really interesting ... an interesting move for you, I think. They joke that JVC graduates are ruined for life, right? That sort of tagline and I think a lot of our students would find it interesting and helpful, frankly, who also choose this path of service as a postgraduate moment. After that, sometimes they feel a little stuck about what next, right? Because you've just had this really intense experience, an experience in which hopefully, you've made some kind of impact but really, mostly it has an impact on the server, as we know, around that quest around justice and charity models, right? Stephanie: You opted to come back to New Orleans, right, to go back to New Orleans and the listeners might not know this, but Megan, Meg Griffiths was a member of the CIA and I think you should explain that, because I think it will surprise people that you are a CIA member. Do you want to explain that Megan and what called you back to New Orleans? Meg: Yeah. Yeah. So, I had moved up to Milwaukee. I was serving at Marquette University, an internship in their university ministry office, so that's where I went when I left and that's where I was when Katrina hit. I didn't have a television in my apartment. I was living in a residence hall. I just come off of a year of simple living. I do not bring a lot with me to Milwaukee. As the news of Katrina was sort of coming up to Milwaukee, I was really not as in tune with what was happening as I would have been if I had a television and sort of made a point to be following the news. Simpler times back then. I quickly started checking in with some people who I knew who were in New Orleans, and it became clear that it was being taken increasingly seriously, as Katrina was approaching. Meg: So, I think that the fact that I had been a resident of that city three weeks before Katrina hit, I mean, I just ... it felt like home still, as much as a place you've lived for 11 months, can feel like home but- Stephanie: Very intense 11 months, so that makes it more home, right? Meg: Yes, and I just ... the only way I could explain it is I felt like I was having the experience that my heart was still in New Orleans and was breaking for this beloved city and its beautiful humans. So, I made my way down several times that year when I was serving at Marquette. I brought students, I went down and met up with other JVs and at the end of my internship, I didn't really have a plan as to what was next. My supervisor at the time, at Marquette who is Jocelyn, she was the liturgist there, she decided she was taking a leave of absence and going to move to post Katrina New Orleans because she felt so called to do so. Meg: I remember so clearly that she asked me straight out, "If I do this, will you come with me?" Without even thinking, I said yes. That is a moment where I felt so deeply certain about the word yes, that I didn't even have time to think before it came out of my mouth. Then, I was like, "Oh, no, I just said, Yes. I think I have to do this." Stephanie: Wait a minute the overthinker didn't overthink this. She just responded. That's great. Meg: Yeah. Stephanie: That's a pure yes. Meg: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it felt like a call. I mean, it was a direct invitation- Stephanie: It was an invitation, literally. Yeah. Meg: So I said yes, not knowing what it meant or how we would pay for anything or what we would do. Another person joined us, a recent alum of Marquette, my dear friend, Stacy now. So, the three of us moved to New Orleans, rented a house started calling ourselves contemplatives in action, i.e. CIA. Stephanie: I love it. Meg: So, we built this fledgling nonprofit to help people ... to help receive short term volunteers into the city. So, our Jesuit high schools and colleges and parishes, and so many others but in particular, we had a connection to this larger Jesuit family, and people wanted to come to New Orleans and help rebuild and stand with the people of New Orleans and accompany people in their moment of pain, and hear their stories and bear witness. So, we created an opportunity that made it easier for people to find their way to do that work by helping place volunteers and connect them with local nonprofits and local community leaders and with the spiritual and religious and cultural history of the city of New Orleans. Meg: It was really hard work. I mean, physically hard labor but also emotionally hard work. I remember, Stacy, my colleague and co-conspirator in the CIA, say, "I came to New Orleans, to lighten other people's burdens and what I didn't realize was that I would wind up carrying them, with them." That's how we help lighten other people's burdens. Stephanie: Right, accompany them. Meg: Yeah, and that weight of living in what was, for many years after I was there, still a city in distress and in disarray, is emotionally difficult to show up every day and be present to that and to be able to leave was a huge privilege. That wasn't my life. It wasn't my community. It wasn't my home. It wasn't my school, that was destroyed and yet it felt like a part of me. I also knew that there was a limit to how much capacity I had to continue to show up. So, I made a commitment of a year of doing that work in community and then, stepped out of that work and into the next thing. Stephanie: Right, and that's, I think, really ... I just want to thank you for sharing that. I think it's really important for people to know that, you can step up and step in and accompany and do your very best and sometimes it feels like failure to step away, but stepping away is also stepping towards something else. It's not always stepping away from. This notion of sharing the suffering and sharing the stress, and sharing the work is something that very few single people can do, right? It's something that many people need to step in and come in and go. So, I think that idea that you were there, you went away and you came back, I mean, that's that kind of push, pull relationship. Stephanie: I think it's important for people, particularly younger folks who might be listening, to recognize that one, you make a commitment to something and you follow through on your commitment and then, it's okay to also make a different commitment. That's also part of the development and you're not abandoning people, you're not quitting. Meg: I mean, for me, it was about how can I find a different way to support this work. So, I think, also like, especially right now, in our world, when there's so much work needed, and so many people joining in the long struggle for racial justice, for the first time, finding your place in the work can be really hard and I think we sometimes ... I'll speak for myself, I think I sometimes think that there's only one way to show up, to be part of the work and the truth is, there are many ways and we are as different, in terms of our gifts and our assets, and our limitations, as you can get in humans. So, noticing what you can do, what serves the work, what sustains you and the work. Meg: Then, being okay with pivoting, when you realize that that's no longer the role that you can play or want to play or is helpful to play. So for me, I moved to Providence, which is where I live now after New Orleans and I took a job in higher ed setting and one of the first things I did was asked if I could start a program to bring students to New Orleans. So, I continued my relationship and my work and in some ways, built a much more sustainable way. My advocacy continues like super- Stephanie: Particularly you singularly doing the work. Meg: Yeah. Stephanie: Something that amplifies and continues. Yeah, the sustainability question. Meg: Yeah. So, I mean, not right now because nobody's going anywhere but up until last January, students were still going on the NOLA immersion trip from my previous institution. I built that program in 2009. It ran for 10 years, and it will come back I hope, when travel is a thing again, because the work in New Orleans also continues. The immediate response and rebuilding was ongoing for many, many years and yet, there's still ongoing work that we can do. Stephanie: Yeah, and I think that's really interesting, Meg to hear you talk about how you can best serve because sometimes we do have these default notions that it needs to look a certain way. I would connect this with the spiritual exercises, right? That idea of you have to find your way, right? Discern your way, not the way that the culture might tell you is the way or what does service look like, what does a simple life have to look like? We bring a lot of baggage to that and the hard work of reflecting on what is my path and being okay with that even if it looks a little counter-cultural, if it looks like someone's leading something or pivoting. Stephanie: I think that has a lot to do with letting go of ego. Did you think that had to do at all with ego, the idea of who you thought you were in that moment and then, recognizing there's another way of using your skills and gifts toward a larger end? Meg: Yeah, I don't know that I would put that language around it at the time but certainly looking back ... I mean, I did have a lot of moments of asking myself, like what am I here for? Am I here for the right reasons? Am I the right person to be doing this work? I mean, the answer wound up always being yes or enough of a not no, to stay. I think there are moments where in my own development and sort of self-actualization we might say in the fancy words, where I would look at people that I admired and try to be more like them. I think it was actually another of my Holy Cross mentors, Kristine Goodwin, who at one point, used this frame of sort of holy envy. Meg: That when we see people who live out values that we share in a particular way, we can have some jealousy around it almost, that like, we want to be as good, quote, unquote, as they are. I think there have been a lot of people in my life that have served as beacons or sort of examples. The challenge is to always stay rooted and figuring out how I can live out my own values in my own way. One of the things that I care really deeply about and how I show up in the world, is with a sense of integrity. For me, that means living in alignment with my values and who I am and who I've been called to be. So that there's an integrated self in that way of the word integrity, that what I say I'm about, I'm about or at least I'm trying real hard to be about it. Meg: The same with the mission statements being both descriptive and aspirational. I think my values are things that I hold dear, and I want to live out and I also have to aspire to because I won't do it perfectly, and I won't always get it right. Stephanie: Well, of course and I love that phrase holy envy, I have to say the reason I went to graduate school was because of holy envy. One of my professors at Georgetown, I wanted his life. I thought it was just remarkable what he was able to do and the impact he had on me as a young person. We're very, very different. Went to really different fields and different personalities. We're still friends and that's right, you find your ... you might have the catalyst, the inspiration. Then, as you emerge and you grow, you find your way, hopefully in it. That back and forth between achieved ... hitting the mark on values and aspiring to living that, I think that's really interesting. Stephanie: Tell me then about how in your life, if you can ... and you have a really rich professional biography, educational biography, activist biography, and we don't have time to go into all of them. So, I want to give you the opportunity to highlight if you can, either a moment or a choice or a career path, that for you, really puts this values in action, where that integrated self has found firm ground, and what kind of ... and how you manifest that in your work. Meg: I'll leave it to you, Stephanie, to ask the big old questions. Stephanie: Sorry, but you got to give me a good one example. I'm just wondering, is it your current work now? Is it navigating higher ed? Is it your work, which I'd love to talk about at one point with the LGBTQ alumni network at Holy Cross, which to me has been so important, so we can get to that unless you want to talk about it now. So, it's really up to you. I mean, I think ... like I said, the beginning of our conversation, you are a person, remarkably. I mean, I admire you so much, Meg. When you talk about being catalyzed by people, and you put me in that list, I need to share with you that one of the great things about teaching at Holy Cross is being catalyzed by your students. I mean, I put you in my list. It's true, though. It is true though and you know that and I would throw your wife Heather in there as well. Stephanie: I mean, you the two of you really live what ... from the outside and someone on the inside feels very real. A real life where you don't run away from the hard stuff and you try to stay true to your moral compass. We need more of that in the world, frankly and so I'm glad you're in it. So, having said that, what's a way that you think that that's succeeded for you? Obviously, never 100% but what do you think what's been a moment where you've been able to make those choices and live the way you seek to live? Meg: Well, thank you for that kind offering. When I think about how I've had to navigate and negotiate what it means to live out my values, I mean, I think what has been the ... one of the pivotal sort of negotiations has been around identity. So, you mentioned my beloved wife, Heather. She's a Holy Cross alum as well. Stephanie: And a former student. Meg: Yes. Although Stephanie can take no credit for the matchmaking directly but- Stephanie: Much to my chagrin. I had each of you in class and yet you didn't even know each other as undergrads, which just breaks my heart. See, fate happens, right? Meg: That's right. Yeah, so I mean, I ... So when I was an undergrad, I didn't believe myself to be anything other than straight. When I started to come to know myself, as at first, not straight, and then later claiming various identities over time, but then, partial to queer, because of its sort of umbrellaness of many things. When I was an undergrad, I imagined myself working in Catholic higher ed for the rest of my life, ideally, Jesuit higher ed. I wanted to ... I'm obsessed with mission and mission statements. I wanted to be the person on a Jesuit campus who helped the community live out their mission, of course. Stephanie: You pointed at it, you'd be fantastic. Meg: I was born and raised Catholic. In many ways, my Catholic faith was nourished in college, which is often, I think, not the case for what happens in terms of spiritual development of many young people but Holy Cross was a place that nourished my spirituality, and gave me an intellectual and theological frame for holding complexity, as I was sort of mentioning earlier. So, I took classes like sexual justice and feminist theology and liberation theology, that helped me make sense of a world in which multiple things can be true at the same time, both in the world and inside of a human. So, when I came to know myself as a queer Catholic, that was a lot to take in. Meg: Also, I felt really prepared in some ways to hold those identities at the same time. There is internal tension there, that is never going to be resolved and it's taught me a lot about embracing paradox or seeming paradox. I think that that process of negotiating my identity and trying to live out my values as a faithful person, and my identity as someone who falls outside of the church's teachings about what is right, quote, unquote, I think is what was part of the path of getting me into the work that I do now, which is the work of helping people hold tensions and manage internal conflict, and sit across from someone else who holds a drastically different opinion, idea, ideology, set of identities, and see them as human still, not in spite of but because of what they bring in terms of their humanity. Stephanie: We're listening to them and taking seriously in. Meg: Yeah, absolutely. Stephanie: This seems to me a good segue to talk about the kind of ... what it is that you do? Sometimes people talk about the language of bringing people to the table and having people, and it is sounds wonderful, but it's hard to understand what that actually looks like and I think about my own struggle right now, given our current climate and as an American historian, and the ways in which history is being bandied about and weaponized, frankly, and I feel like I know certain things. I know certain things to be true and you're telling me correctly, that multiple things can be true at the same time. Talking about how does a community respond to what's going on right now and to me, let's just use the example of Black Lives Matter, to me, this seems like it's not an ambiguous at all, right? Stephanie: You're either stand with Martin Luther King Jr. or you stand with Bull Connor and his dogs and hoses. To me, it feels like that kind of choice. How in the work you do, which I think is so important, because I feel myself getting more and more entrenched and frustrated, how would you bring someone like that to the table with someone who had a different feeling? What are some of the things ... this is very much mission. I mean, how do you do that and I want to ask you another question, what do you call yourself? I mean, I know your title is associate, but are you a teacher? Are you a mentor? Are you a space maker? What do you go? So, those would be ... I want to know more about how this actually works, largely, because I feel like this is a free consultation. Stephanie: I don't need to pay you for your expertise because I feel like I need this. I need this in family conversations, Twitter ... my goodness, the text threads, I need Meg Griffiths and your skillset. So, how do you do that work and what do you call yourself? Meg: Well, first of all, we all need a little Meg Griffiths. I mean- Stephanie: True and we need Meg Griffin's baked goods. The whole other story of your community making baking space but we do need a lot of Meg Griffiths, not just a little. So, how do you do that when we're in this moment, it's hard enough anyways, particularly, this reactive moment we're in right now. Meg: Well, let me start with, who I work with and for and what we do, and then, I'd love to talk about what I call myself and how we're responding to this moment. So, I work with an organization called Essential Partners. We were founded over 30 years ago by family therapists in Cambridge, Massachusetts. These were a group of mostly women who looked at the public debates around, say, abortion that were happening in the 90s and could clearly see patterns of dysfunction in these quote, unquote, conversations on public television between the pro life and pro choice sides of the issue. They said to themselves, "You know, these are patterns we see in family therapy sessions. We are familiar with this dysfunction and what these systems produce. These communication systems. These power dynamics, et cetera." Meg: So, they went to work and started playing around with an approach to dialogue that would begin to bring their tools to the public conversation. So we were founded as Public Conversations Project, about 30 years ago. We had a name change about five years ago to Essential Partners. So, what we've done over the last 30 years is fine tune, adapt, iterate, and evolve an approach to conversation around polarizing issues. So, what we do is we come into communities, organizations, schools, faith communities, nonprofits, anyone who wants us, and they usually call because they're stuck. They're stuck or they've gotten bad news because they got a climate study back that said, things aren't looking so hot or because they've had some sort of acute conflict come up in their community. Meg: They say, we need help. We don't know what to do. We don't know how to get out of these stuck patterns that were in. Stephanie: Even where to start, right? That kind of news is just so shattering if it's not your experience of the institution, but you know that some of your colleagues it is their experience. Meg: Right, right. Stephanie: Even that moment of recognition is huge. Meg: Yeah, that cognitive dissonance of, well, I love this place and this place feels like home and community and family to me, what are you telling the other people don't feel that way? Yeah, and other people are like, "Thank you for putting the data in front of people, because we've been telling you this for a really long time or we haven't been able to say it out loud because of fear of consequences, of naming our experience. So, I mean, we do a lot of different things but we usually start by listening and trying to get a sense of what the real ... what hasn't worked in the past. What people's hopes and concerns are. If they can imagine a preferred future, what would it look like for them and their community? Meg: Then, we do all kinds of things. So, yes, my title is associate. I talk about my work as being a practitioner of dialogue and of facilitation. I am a trainer, I am an educator, I am in accompanier. This work feels like the Venn diagram of everything I've done. It feels like the middle of ministry, which I have a history in working in ministry, education, I've done teaching of various kinds, and still work for justice because I think this is about helping everyone in the community feel heard, valued, understood and understand that they have dignity, and that their community sees them as having the same dignity as everyone else. Meg: So, we work with people to build skills, to try on new ways of speaking and listening and structuring conversation. We build people's capacity to lead and participate in dialogue and we also work with faculty to help them bring dialogue in their classrooms. We bring coaching and consulting support to organizations and leaders. We just try to ... I mean, when it comes down to it, what I think this work is about is helping people see what's possible, because when we're stuck and all we have are bad examples of destructive communication about hard topics, we have lost our sense that anything else is possible. We can't even imagine that I could sit across the table from someone who disagrees with me, and feel heard and understood by that person. Meg: Be able to hear and understand what their experience and how they've come to their beliefs has been. That's what we do. Stephanie: It's such important work. I mean, it is a real crisis, I have to tell you and I feel like in a differently trained way than you, I tried to do that in my classroom and yet, in personal life, things get more complicated and it's really easy to fight or flight, that you either fight the fight and sometimes it doesn't always have to be a fight. It can be a combination but everything feels like a fight these days or flight, which is just shut down. I'm just not going to deal with you. I'm not going to engage and there's a certain amount of ... there's a lot of disservice and violence in that, of negating someone entirely and yet, engaging when another person doesn't have the same skill set, and where my skill set might be really out of training, because of the world we're living in, can be a really, really hard thing. Stephanie: It also seems like it's a hard thing for someone like me, I would say, who's very outcome oriented, right? When I directed Montserrat, one of my colleagues said, "Okay, we need to process these program goals and outcomes all around assessment," right? I said, "Well, we did that, didn't we." She said, "No, we need to have more meetings and more conversation." I'm like, " Ugh, process." So, I discovered, I'm kind of a closet autocrat, that I ... the illusion of democracy but I really just, let's get it done, right? So, I've learned as an adult to slow down and listen and embrace process more. My teenage children might not agree with that but at least in the professionals space, I tried to do that. Stephanie: It's been a challenge for me, and I know that you also are a person who's outcome oriented, action oriented, but you're also a process person. So, what advice would you give us today, who are all having these conversations in our lives, professionally or personally, around this idea of process itself being worthwhile and not just thinking about the win or the outcome? Meg: Yeah. That is- Stephanie: Consultation, free consultation, but it's true and this is mission, right? This is exactly ... when you talk about your Venn diagram, again, I think you're very lucky and I think you've also been really intentional about creating that diagram. Some of it might be luck, but a lot of it is choices and most of us don't necessarily have as integrated of a Venn diagrams as I think you've been able to construct. So, what do you think? How can we do this better? What would you say to folks that want the outcome that weight with the process. Meg: So I mean, my thing is ... I often say this to clients who are like, we got to get to the business. We got, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, "Y'all, this is the work. The process is the work because if we're stuck in destructive patterns, we got to rebuild a different kind of pattern. We have to examine the processes that are getting us stuck and every process is designed to get exactly what it gets." So, if you're going to try and like, be different together, you have to have a different process. For me, I think about naming that with people up front, because we are so outcomes focused, right? People call us because there's a problem, an acute problems. Sometimes a very public problem, sometimes a lawsuit kind of problem. Stephanie: Right. Meg: They want to fix things and I think- Stephanie: Make it go away. Make it go away. Fix it and move on. Meg: Yes and hopefully, people when they call us, they're not trying to just check a box, they're actually trying to change the culture of their organization or their campus and build some new skills so that they don't need to keep bringing us in all the time if they can start to build their capacity to change and shift things themselves. Stephanie: I was thinking that it sounds like the kind of work people and organizations should do before the acute crisis. In other words, you should build your skill set before the crisis, because what I talked to you about was this idea of how do you bring people who are so outcome oriented, think of the process is the work because ... And also how do you do it when it's asymmetrical? Let's say you have the skills of process, but the person on the other end doesn't have the skills? How do you leapfrog them? Meg: Yeah, and so, one of the things that we do organizationally is we have a couple of certain organizational norms and principles. One is, we say, connect before content. So every time we're doing anything, a client call, a workshop, a dialogue, we build the time in to connect as humans before we get down to business. We do that really simply, we might ask a question like, what are you bringing with you into this conversation that it would be helpful for other people to know about as we prepare to like land in this conversation, or tell me about how your morning has been, right? It doesn't have to be so fancy and what we do in every engagement is we try to model a different kind of process. Meg: Bring people into that so that they can see what shifts. So, I'll say, I actually have done some work at Holy Cross, I worked with the chaplains' office with Marybeth Kearns-Barrett, who was trained by us when we were still Public Conversations Project back in the late '90s, as an early adopter of dialogue and we were able to work together to re-imagine the freshmen retreat and I trained a bunch of Holy Cross faculty and students and staff in our facilitation model to prepare to lead that retreat last fall. Marybeth, she took this idea of a connecting question into other work that she was doing on campus, and that she heard from someone who participated in that conversation, that it was the most seen and understood, that community member has ever felt on this campus. Meg: Because they were able to show up and tell a different side of who they are in that space. Because in our work lives, we're often put in boxes of ... and we introduce ourselves, name, rank and serial number, how long we've been here where, all these things that can actually serve to disconnect us rather than connect us because it can highlight our differences or different levels of power and status. When we ask a connecting question that actually invites story or experience, a little bit more of our humanity into the room, and we suddenly see each other in a new way, in a more three dimensional way. The same is true in a deeply divisive polarizing dialogue. Meg: That what we do is we invite people to share a story about something that would help other people understand how they came to their position on an issue. We don't ask people to state their positions. That's a destructive pattern of communication. We know what that looks like when it plays out when all you do is bring a position to the conversation. When you can bring a story, a piece of who you are and then when you can share the values that are underneath that story, you start to get a more complex picture and then, you ask people actually, where have you experienced internal tension on this issue? That is a completely different conversation. Meg: There are infinite, more possibilities for how that conversation can unfold and if we stick to our typical pro and con, or and against position conversations, Stephanie: That's really, really helpful to think about, and it makes me ... I don't think I did this in the class I taught with you but I do this political autobiography assignment that actually, Margaret Post back when she was directing the CBL and Donelan Center really helped me shape and she also does a lot of this kind of service work and scholarship. It's the same thing, I asked my first years to write a political autobiography without any guidance, just like who are you? What do you believe? It's very much a position statement, pro, con and then, through a series of interviews with peers and different reflective exercises and the readings and of course, over the course of the semester or year, if I'm teaching at Montserrat, they rewrite various points of it. Stephanie: It's so interesting, because slowly as trust is built and confidence, and a sense of community, they feel able to share, exactly what we're saying, when you said a piece of themselves. It makes that position so much more legible, and it makes it legible to the peer and the various peers that are reading those autobiographies or having the interviews. I always try to put people that I've ... have a sense of might be oppositional in the conversation, because it's easy to be oppositional on paper but when you're sitting at Cool Beans with a cup of coffee, and I say go to breakfast, have coffee, sit on the hovel, suddenly, I understand Meg, even if I might disagree with her. Stephanie: Suddenly she's going to understand me differently and 201, the students that comment, they love the assignment and again, it's built on the shoulders of other people and their help to me. They comment that, that experience of being with a peer talking about serious value driven questions, and needing to listen because they have to reproduce the conversation, each of them and then reflect on it, as part of the assignment, was the high point, right? That's just like a teeny little bit of what sounds like what you're doing though, that adults need to do that, right? So, these are these young people information and it's underneath this academic umbrella. Stephanie: Then, it's like, okay, your credential, if you've got your BS or your BA go out into the world, you're fully formed now and clearly, we still need that. I need that reminder, in my own life. It's funny, I feel like I can facilitate that a little bit with my students because of my position as professor and they have to do what I say, but am I doing it in my own life in the spaces that that needs doing? Meg: Well, I love that and that is so beautiful, Stephanie because I mean, when we talk about how to bring this work into the classroom, we have a particular approach. It's highly structured and it's structured because we know that that helps people feel safe enough to contribute. There's a sense of certainty about what to expect. They know that there's a container for the conversation to happen inside of and it can hold a lot. The container can hold a lot of emotion, a lot of disagreement, all of those things but you don't have to bring a 90-minute structured dialogue into your classroom, to create the kind of dialogic spirit that you have clearly demonstrated, right? Meg: It can be as simple as helping students, and then also to your point, bringing this out into the world, in our families, in whatever, right? Helping them to ask questions that will invite that deeper experience, that is behind their belief. It's about following our curiosity instead of listening to debate or persuade, right? The intentionality that we bring to our listening and to our asking of questions, we know has a powerful impact on what we hear and how a person responds. So, we come with a genuine curious question. We're going to get a really different response from our interlocutor or conversation partner than if we come with a question that's actually just a suggestion with an inflection point at the end of the sentence, don't you think it would be better if you just did this? Stephanie: Do you mean my mom voice? Yes, I know that, I've heard that once or twice. I always say I'm a better professor than I am a parent. I'm so much more generous and open ended with my students than with my own children. Meg: My God, please. Heather is like, that doesn't sound like a curious question. Stephanie: There's no fun in it. Yeah, I'm not talking ... That is great, I love that she says that. Look, bring your work to home. Usually, it's like your work at the work place and you're like, "Okay, bring it into this conversation." That is too funny. Well, I would like to write my congressional representative, Jim McGovern and suggest that he bring essential partners to Congress, because I think exactly what you're talking about is what we need and we need it frankly on local and state government levels, as well as institutionally what you're talking about, because I really think we are in a crisis and unfortunately, I don't believe that playing to just ... I mean, leadership matters and the tone is set from above in many ways, I believe in a ground up model too. Stephanie: I don't think that necessarily just notions of who's in charge is going to magically change how we have trained ourselves over decades frankly, really, it's not over a few years as a country but over decades to not listen and to not understand because people are angry and frustrated and then shut down. So, it sounds like if you were to describe yourself beyond, you need a new title. The associate does not encapsulate it. It's teacher, it's curiosity generator, it's ... you're a human can opener. You're a maker of space for these things to happen. We need a more- Meg: Crafter of questions and- Stephanie: Crafter of questions, that sounds like Hogwarts. The Crafter of questions and potions. Well, this is such a pleasure and I have to say I'm so glad you do this work, Meg, because we really so desperately need it. It must feel wonderful to do work that you really believe and see, as needed and effective. That's really awesome, so thank you for that. I'm going to shift gears and do you want to say one more thing? Go ahead. Meg: I just want to add, I think sometimes dialogue gets a bad rep because there are so many urgent issues that need action and attention. So, I just want to say that dialogue is a tool, and our approach has, at its heart, a purpose of building and supporting mutual understanding, and it is not going to solve all the world's problems but what it is really good at is building trust, building understanding and building social cohesion in communities that have been sort of torn or harmed in terms of their sense of community, and it can lay a really strong foundation for action, for a community coming to know and understand where its shared values and shared hopes are and then, moving toward that. Stephanie: Again, this is a ... it's a really helpful precondition. A really necessary precondition but I appreciate you saying that because I think, again, as historian of the ... and I think about Martin Luther King Jr. in Alabama, Birmingham and the City Council saying, "Just wait, don't do this now, wait. This isn't the time," and he wrote his piece why we can't wait and the letter from the Birmingham Jail. So, there does come a time when dialogue shuts down, because it's not really dialogue. It's not dialogue of ... sort of you're talking about, which is people on various positions and I'm saying sides because we don't want to be binary, occupying various spaces in the conversation, who are equally equipped to have a true dialogue, as opposed to not equipped. Stephanie: If people refuse to be equipped, and they insist on being equipped or failed to be equipped, then, of course, I understand why it breaks down and people have to act, because you're right, action toward justice is what the process is hopefully leading toward. Meg: Yeah and people have to ... I think people who come to the dialogue table, they come because they're in touch with something that means a lot to them, and they care enough to show up and listen and try to muddle through with people who they know, occupy different positions and to me, that's a sign of hope in and of itself, if people are willing to come to the table and that they have a shared commitment to making some kind of change, making their community better, making space for more voices and re-humanizing the quote, unquote, other and that ... again, process is an outcome. Stephanie: It were, you say, yeah. Meg: The outcome of that is increased trust, increase connection, increased resilience of listening and social cohesion that, as you said, can be a precondition for greater change in terms of structural change or organizational change, or societal- Stephanie: Yeah, absolutely and even an opportunity for decreasing certain kinds of behaviors, right, is also ... plus its increasing capacity, but not just dismissing a person because you think you know their whole bio or of course, that's how they're going to react and I'm sure that in your work, you come up against certain parties in various institutions, when they hear your plan, say, "Well, I'm not going to do that, right. That's not for me." That must be really frustrating because the idea is to build that trust so that, people who need it, who's all of us, that's the other piece, it's not just certain parties need to hear all, all the parties need to hear. Stephanie: I think that that's a really inclusive model. Awesome. That's great work. It's so needed, I want you to come to my house in my next Thanksgiving dinner, Meg and we'll have a consultation. All right, so let's shift gears, because we don't have too much time left, although I could do this all day long. I wish I could. I'm going to do something called speed round for fun. Meg: Okay. Stephanie: My gosh, what is it? Okay, and I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I just want you to answer in whatever way you want. Okay? They're really, really heavy questions. These are heavy questions that are going to shape the future of the world, ready? Favorite vacation spot? Meg: Wellfleet. The Cape. Stephanie: Beautiful. Favorite baked good that you make yourself? Meg: Homemade no knead bread. Stephanie: Favorite dessert that's a dessert, baked good. Of course. It's so funny that I say baked good, I'm immediately thinking chocolate and you say bread. So, favorite dessert, dessert not just bread. Meg: It's the Italian in me. Stephanie: I know. Right. Meg: I don't actually make a lot of desserts but I buy the most delicious brownie from The Vegan. I know, it sounds unbelievable. The Vegan bakery down the street has amazing fudgy chocolatey brownies. Stephanie: Delicious. All right, then that sounds perfect. I like that. My mother was a baker like that. She was like, I don't really bake, but I go to Paris Pastry Bakery and I buy the best stuff in pink boxes. What is one of your favorite places in Worcester, because you also lived here for a while after graduation, what's one of your favorite places in Worcester? Meg: Can I say your house? Stephanie: Yes, you're so sweet. Thank you. More importantly, what's your favorite restaurant in Providence, your current home? Meg: We have a weekly standing Friday night dinner at the Vegetarian Place down the street. It's Garden Grill and we miss them terribly while they were shut down and now, we get takeout usually on Friday night. Stephanie: Nice. Garden Grill in Providence. Excellent. Do you make New Year's resolutions or is it every day resolutions? Meg: I don't usually make a New Year's resolution. I try to reflect on the previous year, around that time of year. I don't really make resolutions. Stephanie: That's good. I think you live resolutions every day. Resolutions are outcome oriented. They're not process oriented anyway, right? Meg: Yeah. Yeah. Stephanie: Maybe what we should make are New Year's process commitments. We need to change that to ... change your title and change that tradition. All right, what about ... real quick back to Holy Cross, what was your favorite dorm that you lived in? Meg: I was the first class to move into what was simply called the apartments, my senior year, now Williams Hall. I was the senior resident director. The first ever in the senior apartments. Stephanie: Did you get a room with a good view of downtown? Meg: I was in the basement, so not the perfect view, but close to the nice balcony- Stephanie: They do. Meg: Yeah. Stephanie: That overlooked Worcester. What about if it's possible back in the early 2000s, your favorite food at Kimball? Meg: Gosh. Stephanie: It's gotten so good. Meg: Probably, froyo with cereal on top. Stephanie: Yeah, I think that's probably still, because that constant open machine of the froyo, yeah. What kind of cereal? Meg: Cinnamon toast crunch or something with sugar- Stephanie: There you go. Excellent and then, what's the best part about being a Holy Cross graduate? What's the best part about being part of this community and I'm going to add, what is something you would like to see more in this community of people? Meg: Well, one of the best things about being an alum is that I got to build the LGBTQ alumni network and meet a bunch of really fabulous and I mean fabulous in all the ways, LGBTQ alums and be part of creating a space where some of our alums who had never stepped foot on campus since they graduated, and had felt really disconnected from the college could reconnect. So, we have a network of hundreds of alums from across many decades and more than a handful of people have made it known to us that they have not had a relationship with the college until this group was founded and recognized and the college was so supportive when we approached them a number of years ago. Meg: Really, the request and encouragement of students at the time from the Abigail Allies now Pride group who wanted to see alums be recognized and organized so that they could see themselves in the alumni community, and that they could have support from alums. So that work has been really meaningful and my colleague, Phil Dardeno, from the class of 2002, has really held that work and steered the ship for the last few years. Stephanie: Wonderfully so and I can attest how important that group is for students. This model of, of being able to move through this place and be true to oneself and have a community that matters, that's wonderful. What would you like to see more from your alum group or from ... what do you what do you hope Holy Cross graduates can bring to the world right now? Meg: Gosh. Stephanie: It's a diverse group of people, so it's so hard. Meg: I know. Stephanie: A hard ask. Meg: Holy Cross alums are doing amazing things in the world and I love how we have Dr. Anthony Fauci out there representing some of what it means to be a Holy Cross alum right now and I'd love to see more storytelling and more ways to bring alums back together. I think the affinity spaces is the future of alumni development and alumni community because I imagine I'm not alone in this. My relationships and connection as a student spanned all four ... well, more than four, graduating classes because I was involved in so much. The idea of coming back for reunion is like, lovely and also, those are not all my people. I missed the people that I saw and had relationships with, that were years ahead and below me. Meg: I would love more opportunities for alumni to gather and now, that must be virtual. Also, for the college to tell the story of more alumni who might be not as famous as Dr. Fauci is and doing really amazing and important work in the world and that's why I love this podcast, but also, I think to amplify and elevate voices of alums who are doing ... who are living their mission and the colleges and then, have opportunities to like hang out together and learn from each other and like rub off on one another a little bit. Stephanie: Exactly, and then, that's that sustainability thing, right, that it fires in sustainable and relationships. That's awesome, Meg. I am so grateful for you, taking the time today to share your story with us and also to share your wisdom around process and relational exchange and hope. Whenever I speak with you, I always leave with a great sense of admiration, love but also such a sense of hope. You're a person who makes things possible and I thank you for that because sometimes this world feels like that ... possibilities feel, they're shutting down. They're literally shut down with isolation, right? It's just really revivifying to spend time with you and I appreciate how well you live the mission. Do you still have your T-shirt, we should have had you wear it. Stephanie: Maybe you have to find an old picture of you in the T-shirt to send ... to post with the podcast, of moving people into the apartments, right? Meg: I'll have to ask Brenda Hounsell-Sullivan, if she has an old orientation photo of me with the Live the Mission. Stephanie: I'm sure she does. I'm so grateful. Thank you so much. I will hopefully come down to Providence and grab some Garden Grill with you and Heather, and my husband Tony soon and keep up all the wonderful work you do. Thank you for being part of the Holy Cross story, Meg. Meg: Thank you for being one of my beacons along the way, Stephanie. Maura: That’s our show! I hope you enjoyed hearing about just one of the many ways that Holy Cross alumni have been inspired by the mission to be people for and with others. A special thanks to today’s guests, and everyone at Holy Cross who has contributed to making this podcast a reality. If you, or someone you know, would like to be featured on this podcast, please send us an email at alumnicareers@holycross.edu. If you like what you hear, then please leave us a review. This podcast is brought to you by the Office of Alumni Relations at The College of the Holy Cross. You can subscribe for future episodes wherever you find your podcasts. I’m you’re host, Maura Sweeney, and this is Mission-Driven. In the words of St. Ignatius of Loyola, now go forth, and set the world on fire. --- Theme music composed by Scott Holmes, courtesy of freemusicarchive.org.
Haven’t had a chance to listen to our first 50 episodes yet? Never fear, you’ve got time and they’re not going anywhere. In the meantime, we’ve created an epic recap episode to keep you up to date with this ever-changing world. Throughout the first 50 episodes of Up Next in Commerce, we’ve chatted with some of the fastest-growing startups - like Thrive Market and Haus - to the more well-known companies like Puma, Rosetta Stone, Bombas, and HP. Our guests have shared everything from their toughest lessons, to their secrets to success, to the must-know advice for every ecomm leader. And while every company is different and every story unique, over the last 50 episodes, several common themes have emerged. On today’s special episode of Up Next in Commerce, host Stephanie Postles is joined by Albert Chou, the VP of Operations at Mission.org, to dive into some of these top trends.The two discuss the supply chain shakeups companies have had to face this year, and they do a deep dive into the world of influencers and how brands can work with them in a way that leads to lasting ROI. Plus, they look into their crystal balls to try to predict how DTC companies will work with and compete against Amazon, debate on how voice search will impact shopping, and discuss what the future of shoppable worlds might look like. Main Takeaways:Supply Chain Shakeups: Everyone is competing against the hard-to-match expectations set by Amazon — but it’s not all about fast shipping. Processing returns effectively and managing every step of the supply chain so you are left with margins that actually allow you to grow are the main areas that all retailers are, and will continue to be, focused on. I’ll Take One Order of Influencers: Because influencer marketing has become so in demand, there are more strategies than ever to try to get the most ROI out of influencers. What is likely to happen in the future is the creation of a marketplace where brands can buy verified influencers, who are themselves driving the demand for more upfront payment. Make It Worth It: Building an omnichannel strategy is about more than just offering a brick and mortar location for people to buy your products. Today’s shoppers are looking for experiences that are memorable and entertaining. But it’s important that while brands create those memorable experiences, they don’t forget that little goal of converting potential customers into real buyers.Turning Virtual Into Reality: Shoppable video and the increased offerings of digital products is going to set the stage for future commerce. The next generation is already using real cash to buy virtual products for their avatars in various games. In years to come, not only will you have the option for your avatar to have that virtual product, the real-life version will be offered in tandem for the user behind the screen.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey everyone, and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Today, it's a new and interesting episode where I have our VP of ops, Albert Chou on the show, where we're going to go through the previous 50 episodes and talk about highlights, and then talk about future trends that maybe no one has talked about on the show so far. Albert, welcome.Albert:Yeah, thanks for having me. But to be clear, we're not going to go by the 50 episodes one by one because-Stephanie:We're doing one by one.Albert:No, that's terrible. We can't do it. Cannot do it.Stephanie:So, Albert, tell our listeners why did I invite you on the show?Albert:Well, I do have my own ecommerce business, www.[inaudible 00:00:41].com, I've also helped out on a couple others. The biggest one got to 10 million a year. And I worked for an ecommerce startup. One of the co-founders was a guest on the show AddShoppers. So, been working in the game of ecommerce probably since 2016 and still operating today, so learned from painful mistakes, as well as seeing other people have great success.Stephanie:Yeah, you always have some really good feedback and comments on our prep docs. Our amazing producer, Hilary, will put together an awesome prep doc for every episode for me, and then you come in along with all your other job responsibilities at mission, with the VP of ops, you do everything here, but you also come in and add some good questions and comments, and that's why I thought it would be fun to bring you on. So, thanks for hopping on here with me.Albert:Yeah, let's do it.Stephanie:So, to start, I thought we could kind of go through just some high level trends, because through all the episodes that I've had and all the guests we've had on the show so far, there's actually quite a bit of similarities that I heard. And starting with the first one, I think talking about supply chains is really interesting, because so many of the guests who've come on have talked about the shake up in supply chains that they've seen and how they're kind of pivoting and what they're experiencing, and I think that might be a good place to start.Albert:Well, when they talk about supply chain, everyone's competing against what Amazon has created, right? Amazon has created this expectation that you can get what you want, when you want it pretty darn fast. And so if you're any direct consumer brand, or any brand out there, if you're a retailer, that's what's becoming the now norm, right? Can you send it to your customer really fast, and can you take it back? That's like probably the most painful part of ecommerce is the fact that you do have a percentage of tolerance for returns. So, the tighter your supply chain is, the more margins you can create in the process, the more able you can take a return without losing everything. So, it makes total sense that every business is trying to figure this out, how to get closer to the consumer, how to make things closer to the customer, how to make sure that they can take back whatever is being sent back. So, it's just matching what the new customer expectation is.Stephanie:Yeah. I think it was also very interesting, talking to the ShipBob guy where he was talking about how you can basically tap into different fulfillment centers by using them, whereas before, everything with COVID, a lot of people actually were shipping all the way across the country and not really looking at maybe location based ordering. Maybe some people were, but I found that kind of a good shake up that now people are starting to think about how to do things more efficiently and how also not just to rely on one supply chain, because a lot of them maybe are going out of business right now, a lot of the warehouses are having issues, there's a lot of inventory issues. So, it's good to have not all your eggs in one basket.Albert:So, it's not just that. So, there's companies out there that are investing into logistics infrastructure specifically for other people to share. So, similar to ShipBob, there's other competitors in that field. But it goes further than that. If you take a look at some of the publicly traded companies, one of the larger ecommerce platforms, they have invested heavily in infrastructure and warehousing. I know that ChannelAdvisor did the same exact thing. They literally bought a warehousing logistics company. And ChannelAdvisor, for the longest time, has been a company that helps you as a merchant, list your products across the different marketplaces. So, if Stephanie's t-shirt company wants to list their product across Amazon, they want to list it across Rakuten, they want to list it across eBay, and maybe some others, she would still have to ship and fulfill from her own store.Albert:Now, why did ChannelAdvisor build that tool so you can list one product and get it plugged in everywhere? So, why did they invest in all these warehousing companies? Now, it hasn't come to full service yet but you can kind of see it down the road like the supply chain is where the innovation is going to occur. And I think you're going to continue to see that, you're going to see more entrance in it, and it's just non stop, that race will never stop. Basically, a customer can never get something fast enough. You know what I mean? There's always going to be this push to get it there faster.Stephanie:Yeah. It's also interesting hearing about certain companies trying to compete with shipping models against Amazon and trying to have one in two day shipping. It feels like such a hard thing to create from scratch now, but if you can figure that out, you're going to win.Albert:So, I don't know if you know this, Steph. I've also sold through FBA Amazon.Stephanie:I think you told me that?Albert:Do you know [crosstalk 00:05:37]?Stephanie:What did you sell, first of all?Albert:It was an adult card game.Stephanie:I don't want to hear anymore. This is a kid friendly show.Albert:It was not kid friendly. But how it worked is, so I got my order in China, and I had 5,000 pieces, literally shipped it to an FBA Center in New Jersey, never touched the product, and then Amazon automatically redistributed it across as its fulfillment network. And I would get updates like, "Oh, we're moving two boxes to Texas." "Why?" Because we predict, in Texas, someone will buy this, and therefore by moving it closer to the customer, we can reduce the shipping with our internal [crosstalk 00:06:20]."Stephanie:Do you have an influence over that prediction model.Albert:No.Stephanie:Because now more than ever, I'm like, how can anyone predict anything? I mean, there was a really good quote about like, should we be preparing for more people to buy Inkjet printers because they're all working from home, or extra freezers to prepare for the worst? It feels like there's no way to predict for that, so how do they even know that there's a couple in Texas who might want that?Albert:So, add to cart. I think add to cart is what they're doing, right? They're looking at how many people are adding to cart and then they're also looking at the percentage of conversion over time of people who do add to cart. So, if you see a bunch of cart adds for this product or a bunch of search volume increasing for a product in a specific area, you can automatically assume that that product is going to be in demand in that area. They've probably gotten it down to a super exact science.Stephanie:Yeah, I'm not going to question them. I'm sure they got it.Albert:Yeah. And since they're always moving products within their own fulfillment network everywhere, they see that there's a probability that this is going to happen, they just move it closer to you so that when they finally rely on last mile logistics, they've got it as close as possible so that they don't have to pay so much.Stephanie:Yeah, that makes sense. All right. So, the next one I want to kind of move into is influencers. So, first, we did a survey of our audience and a lot of people wanted to hear about influencers. How do I use influencers? What's a good way to actually get a good ROI on it? And a lot of our guests actually mentioned influencers as well. Some people were trying it out and were like, "I don't actually know if this is even working." Other people were having great success but were trying different models. So, I don't know if you've listened to the fancy.com CEO, Greg Spillane episode.Albert:I did.Stephanie:Okay. Well, first of all, that guy's a badass. I mean, making that company his stories. Like did you hear about how he went into a warehouse or a storage locker and found a bunch of credit cards that the founders were giving away with like $1,000 on it, and they were just giving it away to influencers just to try and get them to use fancy.com? Did you hear some of the stories that he was going through about what he experienced when coming into the company to try and turn it around?Albert:I mean, it's the classic, right? It's the classic problem in marketing, right? You're pretty sure some of it is going to work, some people say it's up to half, you just don't know which half, right? And so you're just blowing money trying to get more movement, but I get what they were originally trying to do makes total sense. I mean, you read about the stories of businesses like Gymshark, which built their whole business model off of influencers, and I think they just got a private equity valuation into the billions, so everyone wants to jump on that train.Albert:The problem is influencers themselves have created this marketplace, right? So, if you claim you're an influencer, and you have hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram, now influencers, they don't want to work on commission, they want to work on upfront fees. So, there's this new network which you're now going to see tools come into place of helping merchants buy influence. And so that's the next wave, right? Because I mean, there's a lot of influencers that are frauds or they have no influence on their audience whatsoever, they just have a big Instagram following for whatever reason.Stephanie:Yeah. They just [crosstalk 00:09:30].Albert:That's why the merchants are so frustrated.Stephanie:Oh, yeah. I mean, it's hard to know. You can see someone with a million followers, and something that I saw that was actually a good reminder for anyone with a small business was they're talking about how you can see if those followers have an intent to buy. So, if you have some influencer on there and they're showcasing some purse, or some lipstick, or whatever it might be, and the people in the comments are like, "Oh cute," or, "Pretty" or just liking it, they actually don't have followers who have an intent to buy. Versus you might see more micro influencers, like people that follow from around the area or something, and the people in those comments are like, "Where do I get that jacket from?" Like, "Please link up your shirt."Stephanie:And those are the kind of influences you want to go after because you actually know that if you're in front of their audience, they're ready to buy because they trust that person, which seems like it's kind of shifting, whereas before it was like just get the big name, the big followers, and now it's more like, "Let's make sure we get an ROI. How do we make sure to track this stuff and see some good conversions from it?"Albert:Yeah. I mean, you don't know what you don't know, so all you're looking at is what you assume is a big audience. And so that's the biggest misconception in social media, it doesn't determine their purchasing behaviors. It's just, "I like this person because I think she looks good, or I think he looks good, or I think he's funny. I'm not going to buy anything.Stephanie:Yeah, I can definitely see tools coming out soon, or maybe they're already out in the world, showing like here are kind of the demographics of this person's followers. So, you can sign up with an influencer and also see the income level, the job title, so you know that what you're getting with that influencer is going to have good results because you can see the profile of their followers.Albert:So, interesting, right? Platforms now that are creating marketplaces of influencers. So, I'll name one. We have not had their CEO on the show, but grin.co, you should join the show.Stephanie:[crosstalk] here.Albert:Yeah. GRIN is pretty fascinating, because they've built this marketplace where you as a merchant can then log in and you can see all the influencers, you can search by category. Let's say I want surfing, or you want food, or you want outdoor, whatever it is you want, it'll pull up a list of influencers and then it'll show the basic vanity metrics. But it also has ratings of probability of sale, because they've already maybe done a campaign for another brand, so you as a brand kind of see those numbers. Now, the problem always is, as a consumer is, you kind of always get drawn to the big numbers, right? So, you'll see like, let's say, the superstar TikToker, girl Charli D'Amelio. How do you pronounce her last name? D'Amelio?Stephanie:I don't know, and I'm surprised you know anyone on TikTok.Albert:But Charli D'Amelio, you'll see her name and it'll show you significant likelihood to influence dollars, it'll be significant, right? But then as a brand, you have to determine can you afford her, because she doesn't tweet or TikTok for you for nothing, right? It'll be hilarious. It'll say her agency, and of course, she's repped by a huge agency. So, that's where even tools like that, the problem is, let's say, the signal to noise ratio is still overwhelmingly noise and the ones that have tremendous signal, well, the problem is you can't afford it. So, I think the tools have to try to figure out by budget, almost, like how much ROI are you going to get per $1,000 of spend or something like that? That's probably going to be the next wave of measurement.Stephanie:Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think also the platforms are trying to catch up to be able to actually attribute sales to these influencers. I know TikTok is trying to do that right now. Instagram's been trying to do that, but I think they are still implementing a lot of features to actually allow the influencers to get paid. So, I think with that, you'll see a whole new wave of new influencers and micro influencers as well because now they can actually get paid.Stephanie:I mean, I saw someone, they were talking about some... I think it was some coffee mug or, I don't know, a cup or something on TikTok, and it was on Amazon, but didn't have any links or anything, and it sold out on Amazon because this one girl was talking about the functionality of it and how much she liked it, and people were like, "Oh, how do I buy through your link? I want to make sure you get a cut of it." And she was like, "I don't need that. I just review stuff because it's fun." And so it's interesting seeing how you have influencers who really do care about that attribution and won't work without it versus the people who maybe are big influencers but aren't actually looking for that, at least not right off the bat, or maybe because there's friction right now, with setting up that model.Albert:Well, I think the bigger you get as an influencer, the more you could charge for your time than results. So, if you're a superstar, like, let's go with professional athletes, the original influencers, right? If you're LeBron James, you're Michael Jordan and someone wants to buy your name, you just charge them for the name. Like you're like, "I don't know if you'll get $1 of sales, I'm just telling you right now that I'm not repping your product unless you pay me this much money." Right?Albert:So, it's still this push and pull where brands want all this information, they want to know your audience, they want to know all that stuff, and then influencers themselves are getting so big. Like, we're reading about how these people on TikTok, kids, I call them kids, I'm old, but they're making 100 grand a month, and that's considered an average influencer. What are talking about? 100 grand a month to make TikTok dance videos, and yeah. So, I can see a brand wanting to be like, "Well, how much will I get for sales," and I can just see how tough it is when the kid on the other end says, "Well, I won't TikTok dance for you for under 100,000."Stephanie:I just read that the next generation is getting paid more than ever right now, not just for being influencers but just for a lot of things. They're demanding higher payment than any other generation before them. That's good, good intense though.Albert:Yeah. Listen, ask for whatever you want. If you can get it, you might as well ask for it. Why not?Stephanie:Very, very true. So, I think the high level summary for that one then it's just that most brands should be exploring influencers in your market, but also making sure that you're setting up the ROI and tracking it correctly, and maybe looking for those new tools that are coming out or that are already out to make sure that wherever you're devoting your budget to you actually can track it, where in the past maybe it wasn't as required by your company or yourself to have that many metrics behind it, but now you actually can, so I think it's worthwhile.Albert:Yeah. I actually think some of our other guests that really talked about investing significantly into the product and making sure that the customer experience from the moment that they sign up, to buy it, to they receive it, that that experience is airtight, because that's where you're going to find your influencers, right? I think a couple of the men's shaving companies like Supply and Beard Brand talked about how they built a community of people who move these products. Well, that's the ultimate influence right there, right? Constant good reviews of your products. And if you get lucky enough to find a Dogface 208, then you win. Albert:Dogface is the guy that skateboarded while singing Fleetwood Mac and drinking cranberry juice.Albert:Well, cranberry juice sales, all time high. So, this wasn't a paid campaign or paid activation, sales are at an all time high. They're talking about it might see Wisconsin cranberry farming industry. That's how much in demand cranberry juice is right now. So, if you have a great product, your likelihood of catching a wave I think is much greater than if you're just constantly paying influencers.Stephanie:Yeah. And I like that idea of make sure all your other ducks are in a row first before you start going after influencers. I think we've had a couple of guests who talked about you really need to make sure everything from start to finish, to unboxing, to follow up, that needs to be airtight before you start trying a bunch of other things, because then you are at risk of getting distracted and actually not being able to focus on, not only your core product, but also your customer experience.Albert:You got it.Stephanie:All right. So, the other thing that I think was interesting that a lot of people have talked about is, of course, like omnichannel, and one of our guests is talking about the reinvention of brick and mortar stores, and talking about how it's now turning to be more about experiential experiences instead of just going there to buy something, because so many people now are shifting to a place where they're actually very comfortable buying online, even if they never did before, and going into the store is more about having a good experience and something to draw them in there versus actually making a purchase in store. I think it's all about experiences now and people are going to expect something very different going forward than they ever expected before.Albert:Yeah. I mean, that's the magic question, right? People are trying to... I've read articles about re-envisioning the mall of the future. If I think about current present retailers that are doing a pretty good job, I mean, obviously, Apple Store seems to be like one of the leaders where I had not admittedly walked by an apple store recently, but I do remember back when I did, six months ago, there were a lot of people in there, a lot of people in there touching the products, getting a feel of the products, they made it a very hands-on experience. I can think of other businesses that have done a really good job. Like, why does every Bass Pro Shops have a giant aquarium in the middle of the store? Because they want you to go and look at it. You know what I mean? To pull you in. They know you're a hobbyist. So, I don't know how good businesses are going to be at doing that, but I know that they're all trying. I mean, they have to.Stephanie:Yeah, yeah. I mean, when we had little burgundy shoes on, they were talking about how they were actually partnering with other people, other shops or people that are on the same street as them, even if it was a bank they're partnering with, and they were kind of doing giveaways or doing just different social business events or things like that, to make sure to get people in the store because they're like, "We don't really mind if you buy, but just coming in and getting that customer experience that we have, and being able to get in the vibe of the music, and actually experiencing our brand, even if it's only for a moment, is worth so much more than... Buying online is important, but we also want you to know who we are, and if that means partnering with other brands around us to give you an added benefit..." I mean, that's where I can see a lot of other brands doing that partnership strategy to try and get different customers that you would maybe never touch before in the same place.Albert:Yeah. Really, it remains to be seen that it'll work, because I always think, when I hear about the people with the rain experience, I don't question it at all, but I think also to Borders Books or Barnes and Nobles books, I felt like those are really inviting places. They got nice couches, good coffee, it smelled great, there's always baked goods there, you can read whatever magazine you wanted, or check out books, and they never kicked you out or nothing if you're hanging out there, but it didn't work. There weren't enough people buying the books, they were just chilling, I guess. So, I guess that's the real delicate balance, which is how do you educate, entertain and inform but also do it so much in a way that a person purchases the product versus, I don't know, coming in there and staying all day long?Stephanie:Yeah. That makes me wonder just about the business model, though, of like, are you encouraging people to buy, because... I mean, I don't know how the Amazon bookstores are doing now, but when I went in to them when we were in Seattle, it was just a very different experience because what you could get in the store was not what you can get online, not what you would get at any other bookstore, because there was actually, "Here's a review that we picked out," so you can kind of get a feel for this book, or, "Here's some of our top charting books right in front of you."Stephanie:So, it was kind of like it was bringing an online experience offline as well but in a very different way where I wanted to go in there, I wanted to hang out, but then I also found myself buying online afterwards. I was taking pictures of books and then I was just going on Amazon and buying. So, it seems like they figured it out there, and they don't have too much inventory to where they're holding a bunch of books and expecting them to sell, but it seems like it needs to move more to that model instead of thousands of books hoping someone comes in and buys.Albert:I can see that in a more curated... I know Amazon's experimenting with their five star stores where it's only physical products that have earned an average of four and a half, five stars. So, it's more of a curated experience, which is what we're more used to online, instead of looking at your whole catalog of crap, we see exactly what we're looking at what we want to see or the best stuff right up front.Stephanie:Yeah. And that's also something a lot of guests have mentioned, it's about that personalized experience and making sure that what you're showing the new customers, what they want to see. And I think the idea of curation too. I mean, people are trusting, not only these influencers, but also just people that they trust in general, where it's like, "Oh, my friend likes this." So, making sure that you can kind of show that or have that curated experience I think will be important going forward.Albert:Yeah. So, this is interesting, because I think this is actually a self-fulfilling prophecy of what's happening with consumer behavior and curation, which is, the more curated things become, the more likely or the lower the tolerance a person's patience becomes for browsing. Because I've read stats about how the average web browser, or consumer, whatever, spending less time on pages, clicking through less links, because they're constantly being served, let's say, what they want sooner, faster, so then they react that way. So, it's like feeding itself, right?Stephanie:Feeding the beast.Albert:Yeah. The consumer expectations. Like, if you don't know what I want within two clicks, I'm bouncing.Stephanie:You're done.Albert:I don't got time for those three clicks. I'm out.Stephanie:Yeah. That's tricky. I mean, it is kind of like building up a monster in a way where everyone's going to have to keep leveling up their game with how their new customers or current customers experience their shops.Albert:Yeah, it's going to be painful for merchants to do this, I think, it's going to be very painful. Or they can look at it the other way. There's an opportunity for a technology vendor that can do it. You know what I mean?Stephanie:Oh, yeah. Anyone who's got those good recommendations, yeah, they're already ahead of the game if they're implementing that.Stephanie:All right. So, the next trend, which actually no one really talked about, but it's more around partnerships, but I saw a very interesting partnership. I don't know if you have heard of that show on Netflix called Get Organized. Have you? Where they were going into homes, Reese Witherspoon, and they're organizing her house, and it's very popular now. Maybe your wife watched it. Have you heard of that?Albert:I can conceptualize what it is but I have not seen it or heard of it.Stephanie:Okay. So, they partnered with a Container Store, and they did it in a really good organic way where, of course, they're putting everything in containers and organizing it, and it made the container sales jumped by like 17% after this series went out, and I thought that's a really good example of not just product placement, but doing it in a way that wasn't annoying, and having, not only a partnership from the product perspective, but they also partnered with Netflix in the marketing aspect.Stephanie:So, it's like a good, well-rounded approach, but it also didn't make the content suffer. And I haven't seen a lot of companies do it that well. You always can think of other companies... I mean, there's product placement in almost everything, but you don't walk away being like, "Oh, I really need that to complete my experience." And I can just see a lot of more or a lot more unique partnerships forming like that in the future, where people are thinking outside the box and are not just doing the typical like, "Oh, let's just try this and see how it works." I can see more people experimenting with this, maybe not on that large of a level, but I thought that was a really unique partnership, and especially being able to see the sales jump right afterwards, it shows that it paid off.Albert:Do you think that was because they were actively solving a problem? Right? You're disorganized. I'm going to show you how to get organized. So, inherently the audience that watches it is looking to solve that problem, so inherently they then go purchase those products, or source those products.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, they definitely, of course, nailed the perfect person who would have an intent to buy as someone who's also trying to get organized, but I think the way they did it just wasn't like hitting you over the head with it, it was kind of like, "Well, here's what we use." It was like, "No big deal, if you want to use it too, this is what we use."Stephanie:And I think that's actually the perfect strategy of like, "We're not going to push this on you, and we're not going to be annoying about it, this isn't an ad, but this is just exactly what we use to make this look perfect." And I think there's a lot of opportunity for other brands to think about that, like, how do you do it in a way where the content is still good? It's not making you feel pressured, but it's in the back of your mind of like, "Oh, this is what I could use to be like Reese Witherspoon," which she's the best.Albert:It's the classic, like, is this a threat or is this an opportunity, right? Because it just depends on the eye of the beholder. But one of the things, to your point, that makes it a threat to existing brands is if they're not good at it. One of the opportunities influencer see is that it's now easier than ever to make and source their own products under their own brand labels, right? Think of the power that Chip and Joanna Gaines have gained, right?Albert:Now it's to the point where it's like they're going to be almost impossible to buy because Magnolia products is coming, and it's already here, and it's going to keep getting bigger and bigger, where they're going to... You already know they know how to organically insert their products into all their content of you already think their style is the best, you already think their builds are the best, you already think their personalities are the best, now they're not even doing the partnership deal, right? Now it's not like, "Oh, go to Target to get the Magnolia collection?" No, go to Magnolia to get the Magnolia collection, right? They're going to cut the distribution network out and just be like, "We're the distributors of this." And that's always a challenge, I think. I do think that's something that the brands get nervous about is because like, if you sponsor somebody and they do a really great job, well, what stops them from cutting you out of the equation?Stephanie:Yep. Which is also what a lot of brands are scared about with Amazon. I mean, we heard mixed messages about that where some people were very excited about partnering with them, they were getting championed on that platform, Amazon was promoting them, and they weren't really worried too much about it, they're like, "Why wouldn't you be on Amazon, because that's where everyone said you should be selling on there?" And then we heard quite a few other ecommerce leaders who were like, "No way would I get on there. You're not going to make as much money. You can't control the experience. You can't control where it's being seen. And I want to make sure my DTC company is being portrayed how I want it and I don't want it to be knocked off on Amazon." So, the same kind of thing there.Albert:Yeah, that's it, and that's never going to stop. Constant threat market share takeover.Stephanie:Oh, I know. Constant battle, but interesting to watch. I think those people should be on Amazon, though, because I do think that is where so many people are. It seems like, yeah, it's where you need to be.Albert:Yeah. Here's what's interesting. The biggest players have kind of stepped off, but like Nike, Nike has got so much... Nike has enough power, I think, to step off that platform, but if you're trying to be discovered, I mean, it just does seem overwhelmingly hard to do it without that distribution network. I think it's just tough.Stephanie:Yeah. When we were talking about ShoppableTV, I'm also thinking about... I mean, you might know this better since your kids are on some of these gaming type of platforms, but having Shoppable worlds, whatever that may be, seems like something that could be coming in the future but we're not there yet, probably. I mean, I know we are when it comes to virtually shopping for things, that like, "Oh, I want to make sure to get this. Whatever this is in this world, I want to buy it," but it seems like there could be an opportunity as well for implementing your products into those worlds that are being built up right now.Albert:Yeah. Personally, I'm not as bullish on that because I still think people want to... I don't know. I don't really know, maybe because I just don't do it myself, because I definitely see my kids being drawn in when they're playing games, like they recognize products. What's weird is, when kids. To me, it's what's weird. So, for anyone who has kids that play Roblox, my kids see things on Roblox and they want to buy them, and they're digital products.Stephanie:Yeah. What are they? What are they buying?Albert:Like the new sword? They're like, "I want this sword." It's like, "What sword?" It's like, "The digital sword." It's like, "What do you mean digital sword." It's like, "My character can carry this sword if I buy this with real cash." And that makes no sense to me. What are you talking about?Stephanie:Exactly. I think it could be transitioning eventually. I mean, yes, people will always want those digital swords, I heard that people are buying t-shirts in there. I want to make sure my little avatar guy is wearing the coolest t-shirt. I don't really understand that, but then I don't know if you heard about Fortnight had Travis Scott do a virtual concert and was watched by millions of people.Albert:Yep.Stephanie:There's a very big reason why people would be like, "Whatever he was wearing, I want to wear."Albert:Now, did you hear about Travis Scott's McDonald's deal?Stephanie:No. What's that?Albert:It was like the number one selling meal for the last couple months.Stephanie:Just McDonald's in in general or what's his meal?Albert:The Travis Scott meal. I don't know. It's literally his meal. You know what I mean? You can have a number one, you can have a number two, you can have a Travis Scott.Stephanie:It says the Travis Scott meal is a quarter pounder with cheese, lettuce, and bacon.Albert:I'm just saying that's the power of you talking about a digital world. Yeah. There's the power of influence too, but he's already a mega celebrity, right? But I view it as this, it's like, what people are into, and this is why, like I was saying before, I feel like I age out of this stuff very quickly, and we're talking about ever evolving change. I came from a time where if I didn't have a physical product in my hand, I didn't think was real. I remember when mp3s first came out, I was like, "Why would I buy an mp3?" It's like, "It's a digital version of your songs." "What if I lose it?" They would be like, "What if you use your CDs?" "But at least I'm in control of my CD." You know what I mean? Like, that's my CD. I know where it is. I take responsibility for it. I was slow to convert there.Albert:And I feel for me, I'm always slow to convert to digital products, but when I watch my kids, it's just unbelievable. I don't even think they're interested in physical products. They keep wanting digital things. They want more games, they want more currency for their players, they just want this stuff. So, that's why I kind of didn't answer that because I was thinking simultaneously in my head, this is never going to work, but I think I mean this is not going to work on me but this is going to work on my kids, because it's happening right now. I get things all the time on my Google Play app, iTunes account, like, "What is this?"Stephanie:Why don't you buy one more virtual sword?Albert:So, will company start integrating like t-shirt... All right. So, let's take one of our t-shirt clients, right? We've kind of asked our guests on Up Next in Commerce, we've asked this to all of them. How do you convey that your product is soft, silky, whatever their product descriptors are, to someone without them touching it? And so it makes you wonder, in the future, is someone going to see a yellow hammock in their virtual world and be like, "Huh," and it'll pop up a ding like, bing. "Not only can your character have a yellow hammock, you can have one too." It's like, "Oh, okay, cool."Stephanie:Yeah. Especially if you can kind of see it blowing in the wind, or you can see that shirt like, oh, that's form fitting on this person in my virtual world that I really like. If you can kind of see things and details about it that mimic it. I mean, it seems like there's an opportunity there, it might not be here just yet, and you definitely have to figure out the demographics behind it, because, yeah, I mean, like you said, you might not be interested in that.Stephanie:However, I was listening to a pretty good interview with this guy, Matthew Ball, he was the former head of strategy at Amazon Studios, and he had a really good episode talking about how he was the same as you like, "Oh, this just isn't my world, however, I see actually a lot of companies, they will start being able to adapt these same types of technologies to where the older generation will actually start adopting as well, they just are trying to figure that out right now like, what will they feel comfortable with and what are they looking for? Like, what problems can you solve to get them there?"Albert:It's going to be pretty fascinating when someone's upsell customer journey path is actually get the digital avatar to consume this product first and then offer the physical. You know what I mean? When we talk about the hammock, can you imagine that, like, "Oh, my avatar really likes this hammock. He seems great. I think I might get one for myself in real life." What?Stephanie:I mean, I kind of would. I would do it. You need to get in these worlds to really experience it, but I mean, it does just seem like that is where the world is trending right now, around these games. I mean, a company I follow really closely is Epic Games, I think they're-Albert:They're in out neighborhood. [crosstalk 00:35:26].Stephanie:I think their leadership team is brilliant around what they're doing with their platform and how they're essentially giving away almost all the underlying technology that other companies have been charging for for a really long time, and they're kind of building this really big moat to be able to expand in a bunch of different ways. So, I kind of keep tabs on them, and that also, of course, influences my commerce hat when I'm thinking about too like, "Oh, wow, these two worlds could blend together in a really unique way and whoever gets there first..." Usually, the first movers are the ones that can get that arbitrage. So, seems like an interesting spot to watch.Albert:Yes, the Unreal Engine, for our listeners that are not familiar. Epic built a platform called the Unreal Engine of which you can build your gaming world on so that you could use... think of it as less code, you had less code, less character development, it's all built for you, you just add your characters and they can build worlds for you. How they do it is they charge you a royalty fee, I believe it's like 5%, but only if your sales are over a specific number.Stephanie:Yeah, it's very beneficial to creators, and that's why a lot of people are moving to that platform now because they're used to having these apps where certain stores, they're taking like 30 and 40%, and if you move to Unreal, you're essentially keeping the majority of your sales.Albert:Yeah, and you don't have to pay until you reach a certain number. So, by the time you're paying Epic, you've already made it, and then you're fine with it, I guess. The number is tolerable. By the way, if you follow Epic Games founder, Tim Sweeney, on Twitter right now, he's in a constant fight with Apple over [crosstalk 00:36:56].Stephanie:Oh, I know.Albert:He does not like it.Stephanie:I wouldn't either.Albert:It's a fun follow, though. It's a great follow.Stephanie:Go, Tim. I'm going to follow you right now.Stephanie:All right. So, the last one that I want to talk about is... I think this is interesting. You might be like, "That's weird." But I think there's such a big opportunity for optimizing, not only your website for voice searches, but also potentially building out custom Alexa skills to solve a problem. I see people doing that right now, but not really in ecommerce as much, but think about having an Alexa where you're like, "Hey, Alexa, tell me what wine goes best with this kind of recipe." Or, "Hey, Alexa, suggest some outfit for me based on the weather today." And you kind of build a tool that's actually helpful that's also you know, of course, very close to your brand. And so you can become top of mind by building out those skills or just implementing voice search in general. I just think the world is headed in that way because the technology is starting to get better, but I don't see a lot of brands jumping on that right now.Albert:I think the ability for AI to understand intent and meaning isn't quite there yet. I'm trying to think of myself using my own consumer behavior, right? Do I use voice to text right now to enter searches? Yeah, because it's a lot easier than typing it in or swiping it in, right? So, if I want to ask Google a question, I will just click the mic button and talk. Would I do that to solve problems? I don't know, but I think I haven't yet because contextually, it's very difficult, but it won't be far, right. So, right now, I think a lot of people Google best. Do you know what I mean? Like you said, best way to do X for Y, right? And then the next level is going to be can NLP technology, AI technology, whatever it is going to be that understands the nuance and intent and meaning start making it super personalized recommendations?Albert:So, can you imagine if you went to Home Depot, because what you're talking about would be super cool, if you go to Home Depot and say, "Hey, my garbage disposal broke. How do I replace it?" And it just comes up with like, boom, "You're going to need this, this, this, this," and then it gives me a how-to guide of how I buy a garbage disposal, I'm going to need these tools, I'm gonna need the sealants, and getting them-Stephanie:Can you imagine saying that, like, "Here's exactly how you're going to fix it. Let me send you a video to your phone." And like, "You need like Albert's brand of screws." Like, they're literally dropping your own products in there like, "This is how I would fix it, and also, here's a how-to video," and you walk away being like, "Wow, I not only bought that brand stuff, maybe, or I didn't, but they're top of mind now. They actually helped me fix my garbage disposal." How cool would that be?Albert:So, speaking of this, there was a while ago where I believe it was the president of O'Reilly, I'm pretty sure it was. The O'Reilly Auto Parts basically came out and said that Amazon was not a threat because buying car parts is very complicated. I'm not saying he's wrong, right? Right now car parts really aren't bought on Amazon because you have to know what model you have, you have to know the year, the make, the model, you actually have to know something about fixing cars to even begin to find the part. But can you imagine a future where you can ask it a question like, you go to O'Reilly or wherever you go and you say, "My air conditioner is not cold," and it remembers your car models, "Oh, you're going to need X, Y, Z. Would you like me to book you an appointment if you can't do this yourself?" Like, "Yeah, book me one. I don't want to do this?"Stephanie:Yes, please. Yeah. No, I mean, that's where I think the world is headed. And I mean, we did have a good interview, it wasn't our first 50, it was one of our more recent ones, talking about the world of identity and how you should be able to go places and you shouldn't always have to refill in your info, it should know maybe what's your brand of car if you put it somewhere else before. I'm trying to think of what episode that was.Albert:Fast.Stephanie:Oh, yeah, Fast. Yeah, that was such an interesting episode. I mean, now it's coming up right after this one drops, but [inaudible 00:41:10], so interesting where he was going through. Not only are they doing payments and identity, but where the world was headed around you should always have a Buy Now button on every single one of your products and that you shouldn't just make people add stuff to cart and then do the shipping and all that, you should let them buy when they want to buy it. And he was talking about the conversions behind that. But all that gets back to the identity piece, which is what you're talking about, going into an auto part store, you should be able to say, "Here's what I'm looking for," and it should know, "Okay, based on the information I have about you, here's what I'm going to recommend for you," and make it seamless and frictionless.Albert:Yeah, everyone wants that.Stephanie:My future. I don't know what yours is, Albert?Albert:Well, I think it's going to get there. It's not a matter of if, but when, but I still know that NLP... for anyone that's used an AI chat bot yet and been frustrated because you asked a simple question and it's like, "I don't know what you're saying," it's like we're not there yet, but I think it's coming, for sure it's coming. The technology providers, though, are going to be the ones focusing on that the most. I don't know when the merchants can start tapping into that resource.Stephanie:Yeah. That's why it's interesting to kind of keep an eye on these new startups and new tech companies that are launching around this stuff, like Fast, or even like the technologies like GPT-3. When that came out, I was just reading a whole article about how this guy created a program where you essentially can just talk and it'll build a website for you. So, you can say, "Create a red button, have the drop down say this, have the picture do this, grab the picture from here." And it is no code. You are speaking and it is coding for you in the background.Stephanie:I think the world is headed there but you just have to try and stay on top of those trends or the companies and try things out, honestly, experiment with it and see if it could work without bogging things down. I know you have been the first to say that the amount of plugins that you add on your website are just going to bog it down, and website speed is number one, so there is that balance, but I think it's interesting to stay on top of the trends outside of just your current industry.Albert:Yeah. Are we going to get to the part where we all have our own Jarvis? I don't know. But if that happens, it will be cool. Jarvis from Iron Man, for anyone that's not familiar with what I'm talking about, right?Stephanie:I was actually familiar with that one.Albert:Yeah? There you go. Look at you watching movies and stuff.Stephanie:I know. Look at me. I'm so trendy.Albert:It's not trendy. It's definitely very old. I think it's like a decade old now.Stephanie:Yeah. Still great, though.Albert:Yeah.Stephanie:All right. Are there any other forward looking trends that you think are interesting right now. So, we essentially covered the things that were in the 50 episodes, which were awesome and really cool, high level themes, but all the episodes had really good, juicy nuggets in each one. And then we looked at some of the forward thinking themes that maybe weren't covered, but I just think are interesting. But anything else you can think of where you're like, "I think a lot of people aren't thinking about this or aren't paying enough attention to this world that could help an ecommerce store owner"?Albert:Well, we got to do a big shout out to my awesome producer, Hillary, who loves Peloton.Stephanie:She does.Albert:Because Peloton is a very fascinating-Stephanie:[crosstalk 00:44:23].Albert:So, I bought stock in Peloton, and here's the reason why. I've never encountered a brand that I can think of where people so emphatically talk about it. Peloton and maybe CrossFit. Everyone says, "The first rule of CrossFit is you can't stop talking about CrossFit," I think that's also applicable to Peloton, because people who have Peloton love Peloton. So, I think this concept of building community so that your product extends beyond the purchase of the product, meaning like you buy a physical bike but you would stay subscribed to Peloton services. Because I think every brand, or not every brand, because could you do it with a ball? I don't know.Albert:But brands and products companies are probably trying to figure out how do I create a subscription community? I think that is going to be a trend that you can capitalize on now because it doesn't require, I don't think, as much technology that doesn't exist, but it's more like how do you build ongoing services at a price point where customers never want to leave you? So, like, I don't know. Let's use my example of kitchenware. Should fork, and knife, and bowl companies have active cooking communities? I think they should.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, that was our interview with Food52, Amanda Hesser, that's exactly what they did. They built up this huge online community first and then they started reselling other people's products, drop shipping them, and then they created their own brand, and they did it in a way where they're like, "By then we had this huge community that we were doing cooking things together."Albert:Yeah. They could already forecast their sales. They were like, "Oh, we can automatically assume how many people are going to buy this."Stephanie:I know. And that was a long haul for them. I mean, she was the first to say that, however, I'm like, you essentially are launching to an audience that trust you, trust your content, you have this love for just anything that you're doing after you build this community, but trying to figure out how to do that right or figuring out what actually keeps people coming back and how to keep them engaged I think is really difficult without being annoying and without pushing your product too much. When you start in a more content focused way, it seems like it can be a lot more organic to build up those followers to then shift into a product where you have that trust. But it does seem hard when you're launching a new like DTC company and also trying to do content at the same time, it seems hard to figure that piece out.Albert:Yeah. And if we go back in time, right, Michelin figured this out. Michelin figured out that people weren't driving enough, so they created their star review system because they wanted people to drive and experience things all over the world, to the point now where here we are today, people still talk about Michelin star ratings for restaurants. It's still that important. People can't put two together and say, "Why would a tire company create that?"Albert:So, if you have that today, I think that's probably the next biggest trend, and you can already kind of see it happening. I think more products are going to try to create worlds or problems that their products and services solve, or whether it's exploratory or problem solving, I don't know. But when it comes to Peloton, I just think about the community that they've built, the fact that people just rave about the product. We got our buddy Hillary here, she's got a bike, it's not broken. She says, "They launched a new bike. The screen tilts so I can do yoga and then get back on the bike." It had a price point, a really high price point. I mean, Hillary was considering getting a loan to get this thing, which, by the way, they offer, they offer financing.Stephanie:We're going to put Hillary's... her like affiliate code, I don't know if she one. She needs one.Albert:Well, I'm telling you, the brand love that she has... But it's not just her. I say Hillary because, Hillary, we obviously work with her, but people love this product.Stephanie:There you go. Are you looking at our prep doc? She says h_tag24. Peloton all the time.Albert:Okay. If you want to buy, h_tag24. If you want to follow our buddy Hillary on Peloton, not only will she kick your ass in all these calories, or I don't even know what you guys measure.Albert:However you score points, she's scoring all the points.Stephanie:I don't know if that's a thing.Albert:Outputs. I don't know.Stephanie:Okay, outputs got it. This has gone into a bad hole. I'm not sure what we're talking about here.Albert:Well, we were saying like, what's the next thing to be aware of? I mean, I think that is closer than all those voice searches and things like that that you talked about, which I think are coming, I think you're going to see more companies build communities, and I also think you're going to see more companies burning out customers by trying to make everything like SaaS. Because one of my favorite Twitter handle to follow, everyone check it out, it's called the Internet of Shit, it's just non stop products that don't work if you aren't subscribed to their services. So, businesses out there that try to make me subscribe to make my refrigerator work, I'm anti-you. All right? Definitely anti-you, don't want to hear about it. So, follow the Internet of Shit, if you guys are curious.Stephanie:I have follow that one.Albert:But that's the delicate balance, right? How do you build a community of value that you charge for versus, I don't know, putting someone in entrapment where you're forcing funds out of them every month just to use your product?Stephanie:Yeah. I especially think after everything with COVID, people are also going to be dying for that community, even if it has to be online, I think it's going to be bigger now than it ever was before, because people have been cooped up and haven't been able to have that community like they may have been used to or they're actually maybe cherishing it in a different way now and they're trying to look for that. So, I think it'll be a big opportunity.Albert:There you go.Stephanie:All right. Anything else on your mind? If not, I think this was a fun episode. It was a good one.Albert:I hope so. I can never tell.Stephanie:You're really not, yeah. You're almost like, "I'm not sure." But yeah, I think this episode was awesome, it's really fun just kind of reminiscing through all the episodes we did. I can't believe we've already had 50. If you have not given us a review and a rating and subscribed, please do, because that helps spread the word, and we would love to hear how we're doing. We also have some really good interviews coming up, like we were mentioning earlier, the CEO Fast is coming on, we have a really cool company, Handwrytten coming on with [inaudible 00:51:04], Sheets and Giggles, Ring. We've got some big names coming up here, and yeah, I'm excited to do this next recap after the next 50.Albert:Until then.Stephanie:Right. Thanks, Albert.
It is rare that a brand has such reach and such impact that people all over the world can not just recognize it, but have memories of using the product for generations. Crayola is one of those rarities. Of course, Crayola was built around the production of crayons, but throughout its more than 115 years in business, Crayola has vastly expanded its product offerings and worked to build a community of consumers who gather around the idea of creativity. But how do you sell that expanded brand and provide opportunities for customers to find and interact with you in new ways?On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Josh Kroo, the Senior Vice President Brand Marketing and Digital Strategy at Crayola, joined us to discuss some of the strategies he is putting into place to increase brand awareness, expand digitally, and offer experiences for all kinds of audiences. Because whether your company is a century-old or a brand new startup, finding ways to adapt and expand will always be important. Main Takeaways:The YouTube Generation: A recent study reported that 81% of parents with children of children age 11 years and younger use YouTtube to find content for their kids. As more and more children — and parents — find their way onto the platform, brands need to be prepared to invest there if they want to stay relevant, as well in order to achieve relevance. Can I Interest You in Some Apps?: There are a number of ways to use apps, so you have to decide the purpose and KPIs of the app you are building and then deliver the type of experience that will bring the engagement you want. And it’s important to remember that one app doesn’t have to do it all. You can have different apps for different purposes and customers — one to drive discovery and brand awareness, another to drive conversions and sales.Every Kind of Experience Is Available: Physical experiences with brands — whether in store or at an event — have been the bedrock of creating a connection with customers. As the world changes, though, there is more opportunity to connect with customers in a new way – through digital and hybrid experiencesFor an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Today on the show we have Josh Kroo, the senior vice president of brand marketing and digital strategy at Crayola. Josh, welcome.Josh:Hi, good to be here.Stephanie:It's really exciting to have you on. I was actually just playing with some crayons with my two-and-a-half-year-old right before this, trying to get [crosstalk] for the interview.Josh:Excellent, that's good. I like that.Stephanie:Yeah, it's top of mind now, yeah. So, I want to hear a little bit about what led you to Crayola?Josh:Sure. So, I grew up kind of in a traditional brand marketing capacity. I started my career at Kraft and Danon, and had spent a lot of time building businesses there, but when the opportunity came calling to come to Crayola, which is one of the most iconic brands in the world, it's one of those brands where people ... you say that you work at Crayola, and everyone sort of has A, a memory, and then B, their face lights up, and they generally ask you a fun question like, "Oh, who names the colors?"Josh:It's just one of those brands that has touched so many people, and pretty much everybody along the way, and so for me to get the opportunity ... I joined Crayola to lead the marketing communications group. It was an opportunity to be a part of that brand, part of the mission, which I think is really wonderful, which is all about celebrating, and nurturing, and helping to spark the creativity in children, and giving parents and teachers the tools to do that, and then the chance to bring some energy to the brand, and I don't want to say revitalize it, but contemporize it, make it relevant for today's kids and parents, and lead a great team through that process.Stephanie:Yeah, that's great. So, I mean, Crayola's been around since, I think it's the 1880s, right?Josh:Yeah, we are over 115 years old. So, started with eight little crayons. Edward Binney, our founder, his wife wanted kids to be able to color the world as they saw it, and so we launched with eight crayons. That's actually where Crayola comes from, cray meaning chalk, and ola is sort of like oily chalk with the colors. So, a lot has happened over the last 115 plus years in terms of the brand, but what's amazing is that the mission and the purpose of the company has still always really remained the same.Stephanie:Yeah, that's really cool. So, what does your day to day look like at Crayola, because I'm sure you've seen a lot of shifts happening over the many years that you've been there, or throughout the brand as a whole I'm sure you've heard of shifts, what are you doing now that maybe was different than a couple of years ago?Josh:Wow, there's a lot for unpack in that, I think-Stephanie:Yes.Josh:... first of all, my role has certainly evolved, but no, I think you can go ... or I personally can go from a meeting where we're talking about ecommerce marketing strategy, to looking at pieces of creative or creative work that we're building out for holiday, to a meeting where we're looking at what our strategy is going to be going forward from an annual planning perspective. I manage our interactive business right now, so it could be a meeting where we're looking at what are the next updates for the plans for our apps, and how are they performing? So, it really it can touch all different parts of the business, and I think that's part of the joy of working for a brand like this, and in my role. It's everything from all the brand marketing, but now most recently digging deeper into the digital and ecomm side of things, and helping to guide the company in that way. So, you never know what's going to come on any given day, but I think that's what keeps it fun.Stephanie:That's great. So, you were just mentioning apps, and I think that would be fun to kind of dive into Crayola's mobile efforts, because I think when I think of Crayola I, of course, think of the crayons that we have in our living room, but I'd love to hear how you guys think about building out apps, and how do you know what's going to work, or what doesn't? How do you think about what you want to invest in when it comes to that area?Josh:So, that's a great question. I think it's been a really interesting journey for us in the app space. We've actually been making apps for over a decade now-Stephanie:Oh, wow.Josh:... but the way that we've been doing it has really evolved. So, this predates my time even, but we had what we called here physical to digital apps, which was this idea of how do you merge physical creativity and digital creativity, and bringing them together in an app. We were working hard at that, we had the first augmented reality coloring books that were out there, we had augmented reality based animation, we had all these products, and I think ultimately what we figured out was we have to be okay with kids being creative in a digital space.Josh:I think overarching what you recognize is that if you look at kids' free time in a pie, they're spending more and more time with technology, depending on the age of the kid it can be upwards of 30 plus percent of their time with technology, and certainly within that, they're being creative. So, what is the best way for Crayola to play there? And we evolved from this kind of idea that you had to do something physical, or physically creative, which is at the core of what Crayola's been about for well over 100 years, to what does modern creativity look like for a kid? And I think that's really where we set out to build from, from an app perspective.Josh:So, looking at it, and then you start to ask yourself, and we've got a variety of different apps today, we've sort of got a flagship app called Create and Play, which is really the premium Crayola experience, everything that you could want for digital creativity that's sort of targeted to younger kids in that three to five space. And then we've got other apps that are out there that are supporting different brands or IP of products that act as a marketing vehicle. I think for our flagship app, what we really wanted was to create an experience that was if you think about opening a crayon box, what is the magical experience that a kid gets from opening a crayon box? I'm sure your two-and-a-half-year-old can relate to the smell of the crayons-Stephanie:I was going to say, the smell, yes.Josh:... the excitement of the color, so you've got all of that there, and how do you bring that into the app space, and how do you also empower kids to express themselves creatively? And what we wanted to do here was help kids learn through creativity, but without really knowing they were learning, so it's all through play. I think from a parent perspective, so two and a half maybe or maybe not be a little bit young for your kid, but parents want to feel good about what their kids are doing on an app, and so how can we give a wholesome experience as well? So, that was really the approach that we took there, and we built out a variety of different apps, and continue to expand on the content, and it's a really great way to foster digital creativity.Stephanie:Very cool. Do you have any tips or things that you found out along the way when you're trying to make sure that you're staying true to the brand that everyone loves, and like you said, being able to do things in the real world, like actually draw on stuff is an important part of it, while also moving forward in this digital arena?Josh:Yeah, so I think the fun part about being in an app is being okay with the fact that there are fantastical things that you can do to express yourself in the app space. So, for us, it's always about staying true to the essence of the brand, but our brand is really all about creativity. So, you can color with a crayon and make marks on paper, and that's wonderful. How do we exaggerate that in the app space so it's delivering that magical experience for a kid? So, you can color with flames in the app, for example, or you can express yourself in different ways.Josh:So, we have a whole area in the app that's all around pets, and pet play, and pet care, and you can dress them up, color on them, make music with them. It's all creativity in a different way, but I think for us it's really it's all about letting kids express themselves, whether it's physical or digital. I think for us, the other thing that is true about any, whether it's physical or digital creativity is there is no such thing as bad creativity. So, we celebrate everything, whether you made a random circle on a paper, or whether you painted a Picasso, it's all celebrated, it all goes into the gallery, and every kid should be proud of what they create.Stephanie:That's great. How do you stay ahead of what kids are looking for? It seems ... I mean, when I think about my kids I'm like, I have no idea, sometimes they like certain things that I'm very surprised by, or I think they're going to love something, and I buy them this really cool gift, and then it's like a flop. So, how do you guys stay innovating in that area and stay inside the kids' heads of knowing what they're going to enjoy and like?Josh:Well, certainly there's an aspect of just being immersed in the world of kids apps, and playing with other kids apps, and understanding what's out there, but then you're also always looking for what's trending, and making sure that we're staying on top of that from a trends' perspective, and you can sort of pick it up by just the amount of research that we do with kids, and talk to kids in general, you can sort of get a flavor for what they're doing. And then we also do a lot of user testing as well along the way to validate the concepts and the content that we're building out.Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative), very cool. How do you think about like you're building these apps that, I would say, encourage the kids to play around for a long time, are you mostly focused on having someone really engage with these apps, or are you also building apps that are focused on conversions of maybe selling actual products, or is it kind of a little bit of both?Josh:It depends on the app. So, our flagship Create and Play app, that's actually a subscription app, so you can go into that app and you'll be able to play with, call it, a quarter of the app for free, but if you want the full experience we're monetizing it through subscription, and I think if you look at the app space in general in the kid space it's really moving in that direction from premium and freemium, and it has been for a few years since the subscription. The win for us there, certainly I'm happy that we're monetizing it, but we see kids on average playing 25 to 30 minutes a day deeply engaging in your brand, I mean, that's sort of hard experience to replicate.Josh:And then there are other apps where it is just free, so I think the most recent one we launched was probably nine or 10 months ago, it was called Scribble Scrubbie Pets, which is an IP that we have that's actually a toy-based app, and that really is ... it's a totally free experience. Again, we want kids to immerse and connect with the brand, and we'll see them averaging 20 plus minutes a day with it, and there are different things you can do. So, there's, call it, almost 40 different Scrubbie Pets in there, you can unlock them by either buying the product, and that's a shortcut to unlocking pets, or you can just continue to play and engage with the brand and do activities, and unlock the pets that way. So, the conversion will happen more down the line, and it really is about generating that brand awareness, and brand love.Stephanie:Cool. So, when thinking about your ecommerce and your website experience, what are you guys doing on that front right now, and what are you seeing that's working? Well maybe, what step of, or what stage are you guys in with selling online? Whereas I guess I still think of you as I would go to the store maybe to buy some crayons right now.Josh:Yeah, it's really interesting, it's been a total evolution for Crayola. If you go back 10 or 15 years ago, or maybe even shorter, two of our biggest customers were Toys "R" Us, and Kmart, and you know where they are-Stephanie:Yep. Yeah, Kmart.Josh:Exactly [crosstalk 00:11:59]-Stephanie:Forgot about them, yep.Josh:No, so we made a very concerted effort at Crayola probably three or four years ago recognizing that ecommerce and specifically Amazon were going to be a huge factor in how consumers shop, and we really pivoted the business, built out a totally siloed ecommerce team to grow that that was partnered with my team on the marketing side and the content side, and put a huge amount of organizational effort and resources against growing that part of the business. So, I'd say I feel like we're pretty far along from an ecomm perspective, both from just where our sales are coming from, and how consumers are buying our products, but also internally from a talent perspective, from a process perspective, from a knowledge-based perspective in terms of grabbing growth in that platform. But it's been a three, four year evolution in getting there, and now you see how things are playing out and it's even more accelerated when you look at the onset of the COVID pandemic, and I feel really good about the place that we're in right now to be where consumers are. Ultimately, that's kind of what we have to follow, right?Stephanie:Yep. Yeah so, what platforms did you guys move towards, and which ones are you seeing the most success with right now?Josh:So, we've had a DTC business for maybe close to five years right now, but I think we really prioritized growing with our retailer platforms, Amazon being the number one focus, but not far behind that are the Targets and the Walmarts of the world, and I think in the last six months we've seen just every retailer become an omnichannel retailer. But I'd say we put a tremendous focus on probably, if you can think about where our Crayola business goes through, those three players, with Amazon kind of leading the way obviously from a share of an ecommerce perspective, but I think we've taken the lessons from there and really extrapolated them and leveraged them across all the other selling platforms to put our best foot forward, and be everywhere that consumers are from an ecomm perspective.Stephanie:Yeah. So, what kind of lessons did you learn from Amazon that you're applying on the other platforms now?Josh:I think certainly understanding how to leverage search and paid search was a big one, and understanding how that sort of ... and even organizationally, we're a company that's been built on brick and mortar sales for 100 plus years, just adapting the mentality internally of understanding that there's an endless sea of products, and when you're buying search, or when you're buying those placements, you're basically merchandising yourself, and it's all about, call it "physical availability in the digital space". So, we spent a ton of time learning how to optimize that experience and finding the right partners to help us get there, and then have really leveraged those learnings. And then I'd say from a content perspective too, so Crayola ... I think when you're walking down a store you look at a shelf and you experience all sorts of different connections to the brand and triggers based on the products that you're seeing on a shelf.Josh:When you're shopping online it's a little bit harder, and so from a content perspective we've worked really hard, first of all, from a discovery, just written content, and driving traffic, and a lot of effort there in understanding that, but also from a visual content perspective, and now evolving much more into video content, because we want our products to come to life. At the end of the day, we want a parent or a kid who's looking at our product detail pages or seeing any visual content that we put online to have a connection and inspiration to what they can actually create with our products. So, there's been a lot of effort put around visual and video content to bring the product to life, and drive that conversion.Stephanie:Yeah. So, when you're making this video content are there any specific platforms that are working really well, whether it's YouTube, or what are you guys utilizing to get that content out into the world to be found?Josh:We'll typical host on YouTube, but we've spent more time, especially from a parent's perspective, focused around social platforms to drive a lot of the content, but then I think what we've found is that our consumers, when they get onto the product detail pages, are really looking through all of the images and videos, and now you're starting to see it be more prevalent even played up, call it, before you get to a product detail page. So, the use of videos on Amazon is certainly growing. So, we're kind of ... it really depends on where the audience is and what stage of the funnel they are, but we're leveraging video as much as possible everywhere, whether it's in our paid marketing or organic marketing on social platforms, and throughout ecommerce.Josh:I think YouTube is becoming a bigger and bigger focus for us, specifically from a kid perspective, and if you just look at ... I think there is a recent study that came out, 70% of kids are on YouTube. It depends on the age, obviously, but kids are literally spending upwards of 90 minutes a day on YouTube, and if you want to connect with kids it's kind of hard to say, "You shouldn't be there." You've got to be there, and I think we're seeing a tremendous amount of content focused to kids there, and we're no different in terms of how we think about specifically video content.Stephanie:Yeah. What about TikTok? Are you guys trying out the good old TikTok, or not yet?Josh:No, we actually have. So, most of our products are geared towards younger kids, the real sweet spot of Crayola is kind of in that, call it, four to seven, three to seven range, and I mean, some of those kids are on social media, although they shouldn't be, but we do have a few product lines, and certainly I think with the adult coloring phase that happened, if you remember that in 2016?Stephanie:Yes.Josh:I think it really inspired a lot of adults and teens and tweens to get back into the creative space and sort of find their own creativity. So, when TikTok came out we've been certainly dabbling in that space with a variety of our different brands. We have a line of writing tools called Take Note! that's all about expressing yourself through colorful note-taking, and we've played there a little bit. And I think there is a ton of just organic user generated content around Crayola, and it can be everything from the weirdest product we've ever launched like something called Globbles, where someone posts a video, it catches on virally, and all of a sudden it's selling out on Amazon like crazy. So, I think we're-Stephanie:What is a Globble?Josh:A Globble is a small ... I don't even know how to describe it. Think of it like the size of Silly Putty egg, but it's sticky, you can sort of mash them together and throw them at walls, and they'll stick to ceilings, and kind of just be creative in a weird way, but-Stephanie:That sounds very therapeutic.Josh:It is, it is therapeutic, and you can sort of get creative with them in ways to play with them. But it's the power of these different platforms you can see it in something as silly as that where we're still seeing a spike in search on Globbles on our DTC site.Stephanie:That's great.Josh:But for the most part to reach our audience I would imagine that similar to what we've seen with Facebook and Instagram you're already seeing it throughout the last six months that TikTok ... there're older people getting onto TikTok, and parents getting onto TikTok, and there's a place for us to continue to experiment there, for sure.Stephanie:Yeah, that's what was coming to mind. So, I'm on there, but I follow a lot of other moms, and right now a big trend is trying to figure out ways to keep your kids entertained with all the kids who are home and not going to school. I'm like, "Oh, it seems like a good opportunity to connect with fellow moms out there who are like, 'How do I keep my kids occupied?'"Josh:Well no, that's great, going back to your question about video content, I mean, what we're looking at is what social platforms can we get it out there, and for the last six months the team, from a content perspective, has been really focused on appointment programming, so this idea of, "Hey, we are going to have a creative activity for you every day.", and whether that's Crayola filmed or whether we're partnering with a ton of different, call it micro influencers that are out there, it can be in the crafting space, in the calligraphy space, in kids crafts, adult crafting, and so it's a great point that you raise of folks are at home, whether it's themselves or their kids, and looking for creative inspiration, and we're doing our best to be across all platforms to share that. So, I think it's a great point.Stephanie:So, you just mentioned micro influencers, how are you guys parenting with them, and how are you measuring if it's successful or not? Because that seems like a topic that a lot of people are trying, and we've had some guests say, "Oh, that doesn't work.", and then other guests say, "Oh, it's working really well for us." So, I want to hear how as a legacy brand partnering with someone like that, how are you guys tracking if it's successful or not?Josh:Yeah, I guess for me I don't necessarily look at that as performance marketing, for me it's all about generating brand awareness, and connectivity with consumers. I think part of the job that we have in the marketing group at Crayola is most people do think of us as the crayon company, and so even you yourself said at the beginning of the call, "Crayons.", but we have hundreds of other products in the space, and so for me I look at this as more upper funnel activity. So, we're looking at viewer engagement, video completes, and things of that nature, but I'm not necessarily trying to correlate it all the way through to conversion. I think still, throughout much of the year a large part of our conversion is going to happen at retail, and it's just not big enough necessarily to track back to that performance. But ultimately I want as many eyeballs on it, and watching as much of those videos as possible, because that's generating brand awareness for me.Stephanie:Yep. So, are you guys making an active effort to kind of be known as not just crayons but other things, or are you kind of just okay with being like, "We're being out great things, and if people are using it we're okay with not everyone associating us with those products.", like how are you think about that branding?Josh:I think we'll always be known as the crayon company to a degree, but no, not okay with it, I think our job is really to help consumers understand that we have everything from a full range of arts and crafts products to creative toys. I don't view our competitive set as crayons per se, I think our competitive set is really kids free time, and the more that we can help showcase all the different range of options and great products that we have available the more it will fit into kids' lives. I think when I think about what we're really enabling, and what we're about, we're about self-expression, and creativity, and we're a creativity company. So, I wouldn't want to define that by crayons, as we talked about before, we want you to be creative with Crayola in an app, I want you to be able to paint, or I want you to be able to color, and recolor your Scribble Scrubbie Pets, and be creative and express yourself in that way. I'm good with all of it.Stephanie:Great, yeah. That's a good answer. So, for going forward over the next couple years, or before this call you were mentioning that you were in a meeting talking about how to maybe invest around ecommerce, and I wanted to hear your thoughts on where are you guys headed, what are you looking to invest in, what new things are you trying out to meet the market either now or in the future?Josh:Yeah, so that's a great question. I think in the here and now when I think about the ecommerce space ... it was hard in the beginning to figure out what is the right amount to invest, and you heard all sorts of numbers thrown around, is it just whatever you can carve out of your budget and dedicate it there, is a percent of net revenue, a percent of gross revenue? But I think when you think about ecommerce, and it seems kind of silly looking back on it now, it really is a math model. It's the number of eyeballs you get times your conversion rate. So, how many eyeballs can I get to the product pages, and then what am I converting them at, and then what is my average sales price, or what are the products are they selling for?Josh:And that's eventually going to be how you generate your growth and your numbers, and so the way that I've been looking at it and been pushing the team to look at it has been, all right, what is the traffic that we need to drive, and look at every element in this, what's the traffic that we need to drive, and how are we going to get there? So, I think for us on many of the ecommerce platforms, whether you're talking about Amazon, or walmart.com, it's first and foremost, search is the lowest hanging fruit. How do we maximize that as much as possible? And we have enough historical data over the last few years that we can figure out and invest in that model on what it's going to take to get there.Josh:I think beyond that as we look towards the out years, because eventually we haven't reached nearly a point of diminishing returns there, but we're always trying to figure out, "Okay, if it's ecommerce, how do I drive those page views? Is it experimenting with different tools on Amazon's platform? Looking at them as a DSP, so am I looking at AMQ type tools, addressable TV, what else can I do to drive those eyeballs, but it comes back to the math and the return on ad spend, which certainly in the ecomm world we're very focused on.Josh:And then I think it's also about pulling the other levers. So, if I can move my conversion rate on a big business by a half a point, that's pretty significant. So, what are the areas that we're going to invest in from a content perspective as well to try to drive and pull every lever to ensure that we're continuing to drive growth. And I think broadly the mentality that we have as just a marketing team, I won't call it digital marketing, because I just think it's marketing, we embrace the test and learn mentality, and we're always looking out there, whether that's talking to our peers in the industry, partnering with agencies, just generally being consumers ourselves, what are the things that we're seeing that we should be testing? So, a great example now would be shoppable social, right?Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Josh:If you think about our brand, and we're putting out all this inspirational content, how do we try and shorten that funnel and make the content more shoppable? I don't know if it's necessarily huge yet, but I believe it will be, and so how do we start to build our knowledge base and our skillset in that regard, too? So, I think there's different ways to look at different spaces of investment, but that's kind of how we're approaching it.Stephanie:I really like the point about shoppable experiences. I've actually thought that that seems so behind to me, even right now when I'm on Instagram, I mean, I know Pinterest is doing it now, but it seems like this is something that should've been around a long time ago, and it's just starting to pop up, but the experience still isn't there. Any thoughts on why it's been such a slow transition for something that I think should've been here ... well, it feels like a long time ago.Josh:I think it's all ... it's interesting for why maybe it has or has not caught on, certainly everyone's investing behind it, like interest ... sorry, Pinterest and their partnerships, looking at Instagram and where they're trying to go, I think it's got to be all about convenience. So, I'm curious to see what the consumer behavior is. Sometime you might be in a shopping mindset, other times you might just be looking to scroll through and do you really want to leave the platform. So, I'm sure, and we're seeing it, the investment, and how do we just create a more seamless, convenient experience that doesn't disrupt what you're trying to do?Josh:Ultimately, with anything in the digital space, I think kind of comes back to that, what mentality are you in, and how convenient is it going to be? I think we see that with the general ecomm growth that we're seeing, like the pandemic forces you to all of a sudden adopt new buying habits, whether you're on Instacart or wherever else, and then all of a sudden it's convenient, and so those are the types of things that stick. So, I'm just wondering if from a shoppable social perspective, have we truly hit the peak of convenience and ease, but I'm sure it's going to improve YouTube now investing in this space, so I think it's clearly an area of opportunity, but it seems to be that the industry's moving that way.Stephanie:Yeah, it also seems like there's a strategy there of building content that's focused on conversions where someone's going to be watching it, and they're going to want the things that are in that video, versus like you said, maybe someone goes to a video and they're not really in that mindset, but also maybe the content is not focused towards a conversion, or towards you need the products that are in there to be able to even do this.Josh:Yeah, and I think we're going to continue to see those two worlds blend, right?Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Josh:The idea of sort of that kind of performance marketing mixed with content and converting the content into commerce. I know that's an area that we've been talking about for years from a Crayola perspective, because it's hard to look at a box of, making it up, metallic markers and understand what you can do with it, but if I can connect those metallic markers to a beautiful piece of what we call Crayoligraphy, and then I can connect that to a bundle that will teach you how to do it, now we're really starting to merge those things together, it's engaging from a viewing perspective, and there's a practical outlet for you to now go get creative and do it yourself.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah, and I think that also kind of circles back to what you were talking crating daily, in a way, lesson plans, or something to keep someone engaged constantly, but then it opens up a whole thing of like, "Okay, let me get my supplies for this digital lesson plan that I'm going to be following along with.", and it kind of creates a mote where you need to have Crayola's products wield up, go through this lesson plan, and have fun, and enjoy every step with the right products.Josh:Yep, and that's exactly kind of the areas that we've been experimenting in. So, we had a summer craft series with one of our micro influencer partners out there, and we're selling a craft box to get everything you need for that week of crafts along with it. So yeah, I think there's a world where, yeah, those things start to make sense, and the more we can inspire you, that's really winning for us. We want to inspire that creativity and give you the tools to do it.Stephanie:Yep, I love it. So, are there any brands that have been out there for a long time that you guys watch, or that you partner with, to kind of keep tabs on how they're doing things, or how they're going through maybe a digital transformation, or just kind of learning from them and watching where they go?Josh:For me, I think one of the best out there certainly is Lego. I just think they have absolutely mastered it from everything from entertainment, to community building, to best in class content, to leveraging user generated content, and tapping into passion points of consumers. So, I really love what they do, they're probably the number one brand that I would watch out there, and just look at ... I mentioned YouTube before, I think they just eclipsed 10 billion views of their videos on YouTube, I mean-Stephanie:Wow.Josh:... truly doing a lot of things right to grow their business. So, I think they're a really great case study out there of how to build out content, and really surround consumers, both kids and adults, with your brand, and then products to boot to go along with [crosstalk 00:32:44]-Stephanie:Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, even thinking about that Lego movie, which to me is so smart because I mean, it connected with kids, but I think it actually was very sticky with parents as well, I mean, that was the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to content that they were creating. Has Crayola thought about creating something like that, or backing a project like that, that would connect with kids and adults, but then also leave people talking about it?Josh:Yeah, I think it's certainly a place where there's opportunity. We haven't necessarily ventured there yet, but I wouldn't say ... I would say anything's on the table, certainly as, I think, the world of content is constantly evolving. And so, while it maybe is not necessarily entertainment in that sense, we actually have five Crayola Experiences that have opened up around the country, and that's depending on where you are that could be four to five floors of immersive creative experiences where parents and kids are coming in and spending three to four hours there and just delving into the brand. So, there's all sorts of ways from an experiential perspective to connect with consumers, and I think what you'll see from us, certainly in the YouTube spaces, starting to dip our toes into the water of content in that sense. So, I wouldn't say it's anything that is imminent, but certainly, you never know where it's going to go, and I think Crayola's one of those brands that can play in lots of spaces like that.Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative), that's a really good point about creating experiences. I think there's going to be a lot of pent-up demand after staying at home for as long as we have, and having places that you can go to experience the brand and the product and have fun, it seems like a really strong strategy going forward after all this kind of calms down.Josh:Yeah, I think when you look at just general consumer sentiment and what they're saying, and it's been trending this ways for years is that people are looking for experiences. What's interesting is they can be physical, so in a store, or in a location like a Crayola Experience, but I do think there's an opportunity for digital experiences coming to life, too. I think I saw the other day L'Oréal sort of introducing a new way to buy your cosmetics and makeup, and making it more experiential. So, I think experience, and what that consumer experience is, and how they can engage with your brand in deeper and deeper ways once they're sort of at that interest point in the funnel, or at various points of the funnel, is going to continue to be an area of focus.Stephanie:Yep. What about community? How are you guys thinking about curating and building on a community to where I'm sure a lot of parents and kids would all want to talk and hang out, and show projects together, and I could see you guys having a really good angle there. How are you all approaching the community aspect of your brand? And building that up?Josh:It's a good question. I think with kids it's a little bit more challenging in that you've got all sorts of privacy regulations there, and so creating a closed community and getting kids to join that is a pretty tall order I think. From a parent perspective, we've actually really been more focused on that sense of community on social platforms rather than trying to create our own, and pushing out our content there, and engaging with consumers in that sense. So, I think we're trying to be where consumers are, versus necessarily building something big and trying to get them to come to us. I think we have the type of brand that can be relevant in all sorts of ways in peoples lives every day, and so following their lead and where they are, and that can be everything, again, from social platforms to native content that we're developing, et cetera. But I'd say that's kind of how we've approached community versus necessarily building it ourselves.Stephanie:That makes sense. So, I want to think a little bit higher level around just the ecommerce playing field in general, what kind of disruptions do you see coming to ecommerce?Josh:I think the demand of convenience will just continue to set the bar higher and higher for brands, and put more and more challenges on brands, and probably more retailers than brands themselves, but ultimately then it starts to come back to the brands themselves, or the suppliers in that in terms of how we supply product, where the inventory's being held, all those types of questions. So, I think we'll continue to see that push on convenience, and I think those are going to be the folks that win. I think Target's a perfect example right now of how they approached it, but I think it'll only continue to expand.Josh:I think ... it's hard to say it's a major disruption, but I think just this change is going to force a lot of organizations to look at themselves a little bit differently. There's all these organizations that have been built on brick and mortar businesses, and how does that ... it's going to continue to evolve, ecomm is not going away, I think to that earlier point of what becomes a part of peoples shopping habits is there, so how do you adapt internally as an organization to continue to put out product and content at the speed of which consumers are demanding it in that space? And then there's, I think, as more and more shopping shifts online, how does buy online/pick up in store disrupt what we're doing? How does a lack of impulse purchase disrupt what we're doing from a company? So, I think it's just going to be an evolution of how we go to market.Josh:I guess the other interesting thing that I've been thinking about recently is just the power of brands in this space, and again, the shift to ecomm, it's always been coming, maybe it's been accelerated, but it's coming more, but can bigger brands ... there's been a resurgence in bigger brands in this space, and is there a renewed emphasis on brand building as everyone starts to move online, will the big brands win? Will they win the search? Will they win the share of space, sort of the infinite shelf space? They're winning in the pandemic, can that continue?Stephanie:Yeah, that's a good point. I think that bigger brands seems like they would, of course, have a leg up, because the people who are coming online who maybe weren't always there before, they're already top of mind, or that's already someone that they trust, but it does seem like there's also a lot of room to kind of gather that new trust, or get that brand awareness out there in a way that wasn't done before.Josh:Yep. And I also just wonder if the standards are going to change for what that experience is going to be that you expect from a big brand. Sometimes digitally native brands can be more nimble, deliver more personalized experiences, so what are those ... is it a more experiential experience that you're looking for, whether that's in store or in the digital space, how do the expectations change from a go-to-market perspective? And I think that'll continue to evolve.Stephanie:Yeah, with so many of these new brands popping up now, I mean, it sounds like ... I mean, there's a lot of new great companies that are popping up, but it also seems very noisy, and that could also maybe hurt the consumer experience if they have a couple bad purchasing experiences with smaller brands. So, how do you guys stay focused, and not kind of get caught up in all the noise, and have like your true north of like, "This is where I'm headed, and this is what we need to do.", without getting caught up in maybe the trends, or the quick things that are going on right now?Josh:Yeah, I mean, for us I think it always has to be true ... our true north ultimately is the mission, and that funnels down into everything that we do. So, what kind of experiences do we want to give to people online, it's going to be in service of that mission. When we think of giving personalized experiences, it's how do we make that a better experience for you, but again, always in service to the mission. The creativity that, or the messaging, or the crafts that I offer up to someone who's coming in that's an adult with no kids versus a parent with a three-year-old, those should be different experiences. So, I think for us ... but it always comes back to inspiring creativity in the best and most relevant way possible. So, I think if you've got solid ground in that regard you can kind of cut through the noise and say, "Hey, these things are extraneous, but these things are in service of a better experience that brings our mission to the forefront.Stephanie:Yep, I love it. All right, so I want to shift over to the lightning round brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask a question, and you have a minute or less to answer, Josh.Josh:Okay, let's see how I do.Stephanie:Dun-dun-dun. What new ecommerce tool are you trying out and having success with right now?Josh:Interesting. I think one of the tools that ... I don't know if it's a tool. I do think shoppable social is an area that we have been focused on, as I mentioned. So, I think we've seen in our little test and learns some success in that space as we try to merge content and commerce, and we'll probably continue to expand on that.Stephanie:Cool. What is a favorite piece of tech or an app that makes you more efficient?Josh:That makes me more efficient?Stephanie:Or that you just love.Josh:I was going to say, I went to what app do I love right now-Stephanie:Yeah, there you go, what app are you loving right now?Josh:So, I would say it makes me more efficient ... you know what? I wasn't a fan of Teams in the beginning, but I have actually found that Microsoft Teams has really helped from a connectivity perspective during this time, and it really has become a very frequently used tool. The app that I'm loving right now is a tiny little app called Readwise, which I think is super fun, and Readwise basically, if you ever read on the Kindle and take notes, or if you're reading books in general, you will actually take the highlights and things that you've taken out of those notes, or if you've read a physical book it'll just take the most highlighted sections by other people of those books, and serve them up to you in whatever increments you want every day. So, if you wanted five highlights a day, seven, and it just helps to build and reinforce those memory structures of the things that you're reading at there, and that can be whether that's articles, or whether that's books, I think it's a neat app that I've grown to love over the last few months.Stephanie:That's cool, I'll have to check that one out. So, what are you reading these days?Josh:Man, a lot of books during the pandemic, some of the most recent ones were a couple of Brené Brown books, which is sort of all about workplace culture, been reading a bunch of the Tim Ferriss books that are out there, The Lean Startup, is a recent one that I read. So, I don't know, I can probably keep going on a bunch of other ones, but there's ... for whatever reason I've been reading a lot more recently.Stephanie:That's great. What's up next on your shopping list, or ... Actually, no, I have a different question, what is a favorite new product that Crayola just released? What is your favorite newer product that maybe a lot of people don't know about yet?Josh:Oh, my favorite product that a lot of people don't know about yet. So, I mentioned Scribble Scrubbie Pets-Stephanie:Yep.Josh:... I think that would be one of my favorite ones out there, and the other one is a line that we launched last year called Take Note! I mentioned that, that was sort of writing tools for teens and tweens, so it's got erasable highlighters, incredibly vibrant dry erase markers, gel pens, the whole works, and I really have grown to love that line of products and have many, many of them sitting on my desk in front of me and in my office here.Stephanie:Very cool. Well, Josh, thanks so much for joining us on the show. Where can people find out more about you and Crayola?Josh:So, certainly finding out about Crayola you can go to crayola.com. For me, I can't say that I'm a huge Twitter or LinkedIn poster, but @JoshKroo, you could follow me there, and yeah, generally just look for Crayola wherever you'd be looking for creative inspiration.Stephanie:Cool. I love it, thanks so much.
Brand loyalty is something that every company wants but few actually attain. To build a loyal customer base, you need to provide the best experiences possible, offer unique products or services, and deliver on quality and in a timely fashion. It’s a tough ask, and for those in the grocery industry, it’s even more difficult since differentiation between product selection is not as easy as it might be in other verticals. But when it comes to customer loyalty, there are ways to separate yourself from the pack. And that’s where Rachel Stephens comes in. As the Vice President of Marketing, Digital and Loyalty for Stop & Shop, a major grocery chain with more than 400 stores, she thinks about this every day. Thanks to a new online platform and through a loyalty program that customers actually want to engage in, Rachel explains that Stop & Shop is finally gaining access to some of the dark data it couldn’t access in the past. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Rachel explains why that kind of data is a true game-changer for any brand. Plus she reveals some of the consumer psychology that she looks at when building loyalty programs, and she peers into the future at how the use of A.I., machine learning and natural language processing will further advance not just Stop & Shop’s ecommerce experience, but the entire ecommerce industry. Main Takeaways: Is it Actually on the Grocery List?: When building or improving loyalty programs, having an understanding of data is critical. Everyone has to take on the role of data scientist and look at the data analytically, especially as it relates to consumer behavior. Just because a customer says they want something or they intend to make a purchase, does not mean the data will always show that. Word for advice: trust the data and build a program around what is actually happening instead of what customers are saying. Accessing Dark Data: For too long, grocery stores have asked only for customer phone numbers in order for them to have access to loyalty cards. But if that phone number isn’t linked to a real name or address, and is changing hands faster than an email address would, there is a huge amount of data left in the dark, which makes it impossible to build a meaningful database of customer information. To access that critical data, companies need to build programs that are truly enticing that customers want to share their data with that helps not only the brand but also the consumer. The Psychology of a Discount: Tune in to hear what Rachel saw in the data when reviewing their sales and discounts. Hint: higher is not always better. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce, I'm your host Stephanie Postals, co-founder of Mission.org. Today we have Rachel Stevens on the show, vice president of marketing, digital and loyalty at Stop & Shop. Rachel, welcome. Rachel: Thank you very much for having me. Stephanie: Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on. I saw a little bit of your background before hopping on here and I got very excited when I saw that you have worked at the TJX companies, which I was hoping we could start there with your background. Rachel: Are you a brand fan? Stephanie: Oh, yes. I mean, I love TJ Maxx and when I saw that I'm like, "Ooh, this is my interview. This is the one." Rachel: Yeah, I was actually the assistant vice president of CRM Loyalty [inaudible] within TJX. And that really matched the TJX rewards program ... was a program that fell under my group and my responsibilities included the day to days and ensuring that our customers really wanted to participate in our program, our loyalty program so that we had clean data at the end of the day. And we were able to provide additional value in savings on top of what customers were already saving with the strong value that TJX stores provide. Stephanie: Very cool. How did you first get interested in the world of loyalty marketing, what lead you there? Rachel: I started actually in loyalty marketing at Pet Smart in their corporate headquarters in Phoenix and I think the thing that really appealed to me was marriage of data and customer communications, so understanding what customers say and what customers actually do is vital, I think, to the success of an organization because customers can say, "Yes, I have intent to purchase X,Y,Z." But when you look at the actual data, the data doesn't lie. Rachel: So, loyalty programs give you a vital tool for success within your organization to take a look at consumer data and then apply your marketing tactics really that are from acquisition, retention or reactivation perspective based on what that consumer is doing in a particular moment. So it's really, to me, such a great marriage of a lot of different areas within marketing and it just was something that I developed an immediate passion for. When I started there on the Pet Perks Program and then went to TJX to work on the loyalty program for TJ Maxx, Marshalls, Home Goods, [inaudible] Trading Post, and HomeSense, I feel like when I was there honed in on my skills within the loyalty space, so the position at Stop & Shop to really develop the role and develop what the new program was going to look like was incredibly appealing just because of my passion for this space and for retail. Stephanie: That's so much good experience to be able to bring to Stop & Shop. How have you seen consumer behaviors or loyalty programs having to change since you started? Rachel: Since I started in loyalty or since I started at Stop & Shop? Stephanie: I'd say in loyalty program, in loyalty overall. Since you started back in the pets days. Rachel: Yeah, I think there was a transactional nature to loyalty programs in the past. I think it was you give and get and that was usually based in points programs whereas today obviously I think more experiential programs have come about and providing more omni-channel experience, which wasn't really the case back when I first started within the loyalty space. I'd say that there's a number of people that really do a great job at this. I think Sephora's loyalty program is top notch. They do an excellent job at marrying the in-store and the online experience, really making it truly omni-channel tied in with their loyalty program. Rachel: I think that a lot of retailers have caught up and are doing a good job and I still think there's a lot of room to grow. And I think grocery retail was stuck in the loyalty stage of two tier pricing and I think we have a to model grocery loyalty programs more after what a lot of other retailers are doing in the loyalty space and even hotels. Airlines, I think that soft benefits and providing experiential benefits are really critical to the success of a program. Stephanie: Yep, yeah completely agree. Now that we're touching on grocery a bit I would love for you to explain what Stop & Shop is for anyone who doesn't know. Rachel: Sure, Stop & Shop is actually a grocery retailer with over 100 years in the industry. It started out as a very small grocery in the east coast and now we have over 400 stores and of course our online experience at Stop&Shop.com and the Stop & Shop app. Stephanie: That's great. And Stop & Shop, you guys just started moving into e-commerce, right? I think I saw that you launched a new platform just in a couple months ago, am I right? Rachel: We did actually, on July 28th in fact. We launched ... we had Peapod with a partner company. Peapod actually was owned by Ahold Delhaize, which is the parent company that owns Stop & Shop and we have integrated Peapod into Stop & Shop now. So, within Stop & Shop's footprint to order grocery delivery or to get pickup you actually now go to the Stop & Shop website or the Stop & Shop app versus Peapod. That integration occurred again at the end of July, and it's been going incredibly well so far. Stephanie: What was that transition ... what did that look like behind the scenes of not only integrating a current path that people are using but also I'm sure adding on additional functionalities that maybe weren't already there. What was the process behind the scenes or any maybe hiccups that you guys experienced when you were going through all this because it sounds like a big project. Rachel: Yes, yes. In fact, huge project. And all of our sister brands went through the same scope of work at the same time. We work with an internal agency who actually is responsible for all of that development work. And the agency actually had to develop the platform for all the brands. There was Giant Martin's out of Carlisle, Pennsylvania and Giant Foods in Maryland, also went through the same transition. Rachel: And there was obviously ... it requires a lot of work to marry the database, really marry those platforms. There was a Stop & Shop website, a Peapod website and H Brands app, so marrying those together was a huge, enormous undertaking that has taken approximately two years. And when I first started two and a half years ago actually that was really when we had worked on all the business requirements for this project. And it just takes a significant amount of time to match up all the data on our customers and combine those platforms and ensure that everything is running smoothly because if you think about the number of transactions that the Peapod site had going through it before and the number of customers that were going to the Stop & Shop site, you can imagine that there's just a tremendous amount of customers that we wanted to ensure were not left behind in this transition. Rachel: So, there's definitely a lot of work that went into this project and in terms of hiccups, of course there was a lot of those. But I think you try and block out all of the things that went wrong during the launch and you just only remember the good, right? Stephanie: Yep, that's great. And I'm also very familiar with Giant. I'm from Maryland. I'm sure everyone else is like, "What's that?" I know very well what that is. Rachel: Oh, great. That's great. Stephanie: Yeah, so when you guys are thinking about launching this new e-commerce platform, what kind of opportunities were you excited that it would open up? I'm sure you get access to new kind of data and you can have new offerings and you can send that data maybe to your other partners and maybe they can give you deals. What things were you most excited about that you didn't have access to before? Rachel: I think that what I'm most excited about is omni-channel data access. We did not, again, have that before because it was Peapod who really had all of the data for delivery and pickup and Stop & Shop who had all the brick & mortar data. The combination and looking at a consumer from an omni-channel, to me, is what's most exciting. Rachel: If I'm going to do a marketing campaign using digital tactics or any sort of in-store tactics I really need to know what you do as a customer. You could channel switch, you could go from pick-up to in-store to delivery all within a very short period of time. And so, I think the efficiency in marketing, by having that data to me is really what's most exciting. And being able to actually accurately talk to our customers is something that really interests me because how many time have you received communications from a company where you're like, "Wait, I was just in there. I just bought X, Y, Z and now they're sending me an offer for something," or the communication just seems out of left field. Rachel: And I think of years past when Starbucks didn't have a fully integrated data solution. If I was a coffee drinker and I always drank coffee once in a while I'd get tea offers and it just didn't make any sense to me. I think it was just bad use of data. Stephanie: Yeah, I still get that right now. I'll get things marketed to me around pregnancy. I'm like, "I am not pregnant and haven't been for a while." Rachel: You're not pregnant. Stephanie: In a while. Come on, about six months ago, stop that. Rachel: Right, exactly. Stephanie: That's smart. So, what are you excited for omni-channel in general outside of Stop & Shop. What do you think that landscape's going to look like in the next couple of years? Rachel: I think that COVID has certainly advanced a lot of, specifically in retail, advanced a lot of retailers. I think their technology and their offerings, I think omni-channel, to me, has to be that seamless experience in-store, online. And it has to be being able to look at you from a customer lens and understanding that you may channel switch and your experience or the offers that you're given or you're customer service shouldn't change. There shouldn't everybody anything remarkably different about whatever channel you're in. Rachel: So, for me I think that the omni-channel landscape is going to continue improving and COVID has definitely advanced that. Stephanie: To dive back into the loyalty program conversation, because I'm very interested in that, we haven't had a ton of people on the show who've talked about that, so I'll probably keep circling around that for a little bit. Rachel: Sure. Stephanie: I want to hear how you think about developing a successful loyalty program now. How do you get people to engage? How do you get them to be excited about it? Rachel: The most important thing is research. You have to understand what customers want first and foremost of course. That's the first step in any real loyalty program whether you're launching a loyalty program or enhancing a loyalty program or just completely transforming a loyalty program. You have to understand what research, what customers want. You have to look at the data and understand what they actually do. Rachel: So, it's the this is what I say I want and then this is what I actually do. And you rally have to be a data scientist and understand what it is that is bubbling to the top. If I know my to customers are coming in and I'm looking at the data that tells me they come in X amount of times per week and they shop for key products, then I can understand and I can translate that back into transactional offers. I can say, "Okay, these are the top products that I need to make sure are relevant to that consumer base on a regular basis." Rachel: But it doesn't get at really what drives them and motivates them to be loyal to the brand. So, I think that that research is such a critical step in really understanding how consumers really feel about your brand. You don't want to be the brand that customers just feel like you're on the corner and you're convenient so they have to shop you. You want to be the brand that they want to shop at. Loyalty isn't just about the program, it has to be about the total solution that retailer provides and your feelings about that retailer. Stephanie: It seems like there would be a lot dark data out there, especially for maybe grocery stores because I'm thinking, would my local grocery store even know that I go in and out because I don't interact with them online right now. I sometimes put my phone number in, sometimes don't. How would you make sure you have a good sample size of people to use for your research when building that out if maybe you still have quite a few of your customers that you don't even know yet. Rachel: No, I think that's a great question. I think you have to ... There are panels that you can go, usually your consumer insights team has access to panels of customers who volunteer to participate in research studies, so that's typically the first place that I go if we don't have enough data within the database. If there's enough data in the database to start with, usually that does require an e-mail address or a physical mailing address and not just phone number. Rachel: So, if your local grocery store only requires phone number and ... I'll say actually that was the case for Stop & Shop prior to the transformation of our new loyalty program where we really just ask for phone number point of sale. And that gave customers access to that two tier pricing. That doesn't do anything for a company, just having phone numbers and actually going to build off your database of course. Then you don't have a way to really round out that customer experience and understand. You got to be able to tap into that customer and ask them what they want. Rachel: It is really important that you're coming up with a program or if you have a program that it's enticing enough that customers want to give their data, they want to give you the right e-mail address or they want to give you the right mailing address so that they do participate in the program but they also are willing to give your opinion when you ask it. Stephanie: Yep. It also seems like making sure you have a seamless experience when asking for that data is really important because I can think of a number of times different stores have been like, "Oh, can you type in your e-mail?" Or just, "Read it off to me and I'll type it in very slowly." I'm like, "Ugh, just don't worry about it," or "I don't want to use your old type pad that's not really working and I'm going to have to delete it 10 times to get it right." Rachel: Right, exactly. Yeah, you're absolutely right it has to be simple, seamless. I think digital cards is a great way to make it simple and seamless. It's easy enough for a POS to scan a digital barcode that ties back to your loyalty card or phone number, provided the fact that the number actually is tied to a valid e-mail address or valid mailing address. Any way that you can provide convenience for consumers to access their program seamlessly, quickly is really important. Stephanie: Yeah, I completely agree. When you're setting this up, even If you don't have access to maybe huge amounts of data, are there any unifying themes that people just generally when it comes to loyalty or rewards programs where you're like, no matter where I've been it seems to always get someone to sign up if we have this or this offering. Rachel: Well, I think a based program, it has to be about savings, right? Every program is at it's core about saving, so hotel, airline, you're earning points to get free something or to save on something. And so, at it's core you have to have a savings in the value proposition. And then I think everything else that goes on top of that whether you have a tiered program where you're providing your top tier customers with more of those experiential benefits or more of those softer benefits is really, it's dependent on the industry and your ability to provide different levels of benefits to customers. Rachel: I think in the supermarket industry you don't see a lot of tiered programs. I think that that's mostly because there's not a lot of experiential benefits that you can provide that consumers really are interested in. I think a lot of customers look at grocery shopping as a chore. There are, there's certainly a core of customers who really enjoy it but for the most part a lot busy consumers today do look at it as a chore and I think that lingering in a store is not something that a lot of people are really interested in. Stephanie: Yep, yeah I completely agree. Is there any research that y'all have done when to what really matters from a savings perspective? What percent actually drives someone to purchase something they maybe wouldn't have purchased prior to seeing that savings? Maybe 5% eh, maybe not, 20% probably so. Anything that you've seen around that? Rachel: It's funny that the higher up you go in savings, a lot of times customers say they don't believe that. When you say save 20% or 25% or whatever, it seems somewhat unbelievable and I think a lot of customers question it. With our go rewards program we actually know that customers saved 15% or more. We did a lot of research because the and more was actually the savings is more like an average of 20% but customers really felt like, "That seems high, that seems really unbelievable." So, 15% we're like okay, let's just actually take that down because that seemed to be more palatable percent for customers for some reason. Stephanie: That's really interesting. Rachel: Isn't it? Stephanie: I know. I mean, when you see these shopping sites when it's like 75% off it actually makes you just one be like, "Well, was it ever worth the price that you listed it at?" And then are you going to get a 90% off. So I do question brands that have huge sales like that more than I do with someone who's consistently like, "You get 15 or 20% off no matter what promo code or coupon or anything that you get, it's never going to be higher than that. Rachel: Right, yeah. You start to question the quality and you say, "Oh, geez." I mean I'm sure the average consumer doesn't think in terms of margin but I start thinking about margin. Stephanie: I do too. Like minds, very like minds. [crosstalk 00:22:05]. "How much were you making before this?" Okay. Rachel: Exactly. Stephanie: That's great. How do you think about metrics when it comes to these loyalty programs. Are they unique and very different than maybe metrics for other e-commerce business or other programs that you might set up? Rachel: Well, I think first and foremost most companies will look at sales as a huge metric within their loyalty program because it's an investment for the organizations, so ROI is going to be important. But the ROI actually comes from retention and in some cases reactivation. You know that a lot of times it's true, the cost of getting a customer is equivalent to retaining eight. Rachel: So, I think if you can look at ... most organizations look at sales from the program and incremental sales from the program. I think that that is the real true metric. Engagement of course is also important. And customer satisfaction is vital. Stephanie: Yep, that makes sense. Are there any memorable campaigns that come to mind. You're like, this one was my favorite marketing or any other kind of campaign hat I've done that you want to share? I'm always interested in stories around that. Rachel: Yeah, no I think that I worked on so many great campaigns but the ones that are truly, fully integrated across every channel is that's what's really exciting. When you see a campaign, for example right now this might sound silly or small but we have this pizza campaign. We've got a commercial on air about the best pizza is your own pizza and we've got that campaign in every other channel, so digital, e-mail, social media, through my go rewards program, we throw in extra points when you buy certain products within the category. That's really what excites me is I think when you see it come to life and you see really the full ecosystem within marketing utilized to support something. That's when you really see the power of marketing come to life and you see how it actually makes sense obviously to have one point of view and to be more customer centric in your campaigns. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And it's like a better way to measure things as well if there's this one initiative going across many channels and you can look at it without having a bunch of other players messing the data up. Rachel: Right, right, exactly, exactly. I see some marketing campaigns right now and [inaudible] there's some big players out there that did all of these back to school campaigns and it drove me nuts because it's like we are not back in and it showed all the kids walking down the hall and of course I know that they had all these commercials shot in the can well before a lot of this happened but I feel like you're talking to a consumer base that is in a very different place right now. I think that obviously understanding what consumers are looking for and really being relevant like that pizza campaign. There's so many people who are at home cooking together right now. I feel like that's really where I get most excited is when I see obviously that relevance and then more of that omni-channel and cross channel campaign. I think that that's really where you see some good results from marketing. Stephanie: Yeah, that's as good point about people still running their commercials that they maybe shot a long time ago. The only one that I think has done really well in my mind that I've seen recently is either Trader Joe's or Target that had grab your back to school supplies and it was at a line rack. I'm like, "That's good, that's relevant and I'm going to get some [inaudible] now." Rachel: That's perfect. Stephanie: Yeah, really good. We had someone on this show who was also mentioning you should have different scenarios, especially at a time right now where you don't really know what's going to happen and you should be ready to pull your campaigns and slot something in really quickly. And it seems like a lot of larger brands or especially older brands just didn't think that way or maybe just thought, "Okay, let's just release this and see how it goes anyways." Why do you think that's the case? Why do they still put this out into the world when many of them probably knew it was not a good fit? Rachel: No, and I think it does more harm to your brand than anything to be honest because obviously if you're not relevant and you're not listening to what's going on in the world then I think that it does more home. At the beginning of COVID we did a lot of work around providing at-home solutions. We had a chef who actually did a cooking show within social media. I worked with this chef to come up with a series of cooking shows within Facebook and we did a number of other just activities to do with the kids at home and there was more relevance to our campaigns and it really resonated. Customers really appreciated the fact that we were giving them content that actually was valuable, interesting and just relevant to what was going on in the world. Rachel: You can't be deaf to what's happening and you have to really just make sure you're always paying attention and listening to what customers are saying. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. Earlier you were talking about the pizza campaign and how you put on many, many channels. Which channels are you finding are most successful or are there any new ones that you're experimenting with that you're finding some early success in. Rachel: I think that we do a lot within social media and I think that the channels in social media that we're finding some early success in would be Next Door and TikTok to some degree. I think with TikTok, youth are still clear we haven't done a whole lot there but I think that the brands that have been on TikTok and have done some really good work and have seen some great results. And I think the social media channels are probably the ones that give me the most excitement because I think there's such a great way. Rachel: We're working towards integrating commerce into social media. That's a big project that my team is working on right now and it's such a great way to capture an audience when they're just in their downtime. They're in a different kind of mindset and they're more open to maybe looking at inspirational content, recipes, things like that within Pinterest or within Facebook or Instagram. And they may want to buy it right then and there and they may want to say, "I want this recipe, I want it delivered to my house. This is great." So, I think that any of the campaigns that we've done in social have really been my favorites. Stephanie: You mentioned integrating commerce into social media. Are you all taking that initiative on yourself or are you more relying on the platforms to develop the solutions to tap into? What does that look like? Rachel: Yeah, we are relying on platforms. Obviously we have to, there's a lot of work that needs to be done still in this area. And I think that's a little trickier just for a supermarket because you're not going to buy just a tomato. Stephanie: [crosstalk] tomato from Stop & Shop. Rachel: Right, it's not like when you see a pair of shoes on Instagram and you have to have them. You don't really have to have that tomato on Instagram but you may want that full recipe so making sure that there's enough content that is actually worthwhile to the customer I think is the challenge and that's what my team is trying to figure out right now. Stephanie: Got it. When I'm thinking about commerce or social media, has Stop & Shop explored ... or maybe you guys already have this like your own products where it's like you can only get it from here. It's not a generic brand it's actually like ... I mean, that reminds me a lot of what Trader Joe's does. It's like if I want this one, well they discontinued this prune juice I really loved. [inaudible 00:32:00], yep. I love their prune juice, they discontinued it. Anyways, I knew that they were the only ones that I liked it, that's the only one I wanted to have. And so, have you explored something like that of creating certain things that will be top of mind where it's like Stop & Shop is the only one that actually has this kind of recipe of whatever it may be, prune juice. Rachel: Yes, actually in fact we have our own line, Nature's Promise is a proprietary line across the Ahold Delhaize brand. And we have our private label brand of course and then we have Taste of Inspirations which is a really nice higher end private label brand for us. And we are definitely doing more within that space, integrating with go rewards with our new program. When you buy a recipe that is all Nature's Promise ingredients you earn extra go points. Rachel: We have these recipes called take five that were featured within social media and we've got them in our circular and in other areas. And if it's all our Taste of Inspiration products you earn X amount of go points. We have a lot of those types of promotions that we're doing now and that's definitely what we'll be integration into our social media commerce platforms in the future. Stephanie: Very cool. And I feel like there's a lot of interesting opportunities too as you now explore ... you're going to have this new e-commerce platform to get new data and to see what people are really like and what's maybe swaying them to buy one thing versus the other. It seems like there's a lot of opportunity that'll come up around building new offerings that maybe you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. Rachel: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I think if you look at solutions that's definitely really important to our customers right now. There's so many families that are just so busy and providing meal solutions, even a night, a couple nights or a week of meal solutions is such a huge time savings for a lot of families. Stephanie: Yes, I feel that with three boys now. I'm like anything to not have to cook from scratch would be appreciated. [inaudible] it's frozen, whatever it is. If it's edible it's cool. Where does personalization come into play or you guys? How do you think about showing offerings throughout your e-commerce experience or your apps that really connects with the person who's looking there? Rachel: Well, personalization [inaudible] success, so I think whether or not we get it right 100% of the time I think is something that remains to be seen. I think we have made some huge advances in personalization with the new platform, with our program. The more data we have about a consumer's shopping behavior, what they like, the better the offerings that we'll be able to give them. Rachel: So, if I purchase Doritos all of the time, hopefully I'm not getting a offer for something else, Lays potato chips, I should be getting offers for Doritos. So, that relevancy is really, really important. And that's something with this new program that we're providing customers whether it's through product coupons, which today now that I look in my coupon gallery on my app, I have six products that are relevant to what I purchase every week which is really great, so I know the algorithm is working correctly. Rachel: Then on top of that we also have more of those category offers. So, if I'm somebody that always buys fresh produce now we're actually doing more of the $5 off your purchase when you add a fresh produce. More of those category offers that are relevant to what I purchase every day. I think it's incredibly important. And then through the e-commerce journey this is really where I'd like to see us make some improvements. It's on recommendation engine type of logic, so if I'm putting a pizza dough in my basket on my e-commerce platform then hopefully somebody's going to be recommending some mozzarella and pizza sauce to me. Rachel: That type of a level of personalization is something that we strive for and want in the future. We have some degree of that today but that's certainly where I expect we will be going in the near future. Stephanie: Radical. When it comes to those recommendations are there any tools that you're relying on to build that out or is it everything you did in custom or how is that working behind the scenes? Rachel: Yeah, the recommendation actually is homegrown, so that's where our internal partner actually has been using all of the data from the loyalty program and understanding what customers buy, and there's propensity models that we have in place. So, somebody who has the same profile, who typically purchase X, Y, Z. "We actually build a model to say here are look alike customers and here's what we should recommend to them because it looks like that customer is similar so they may be interested in these types of products." And that's something that our internal data scientists have been able to build out for us. Stephanie: That's great. Is there anything when it comes to machine learning or the world of data that you guys have access to that you're maybe preparing for or different capabilities that you're building out right now that may be other grocers or other e-commerce stores are maybe a little bit behind on? Rachel: Yes, there definitely at the Ahold Delhaize level. I think that AI and certainly machine learning is something that everybody is going to have to be prepared to work on in the near future and be prepared to have teams working on that in the near future. And Ahold Delhaize does. Stop & Shop as a brand doesn't but at the Ahold Delhaize level we do. Stephanie: Very cool. And do they usually come up with something at the higher level and implement it within all of their stores or do they test it out and say, "Okay Stop & Shop you're going to pilot this and we'll learn from you and then we'll have our other brands try it as well," or how does that work? Rachel: That's exactly what it is, yeah exactly. And I see a big trend in experimentation and learning done with artificial intelligence, natural language processing. The first steps into conversational commerce and customer service. I think individually each of those is interesting but when you string it together it becomes really compelling and AI is now being given enough transactional information. And when combined with data science can match and predict customer behavior at a level not previously possible. So, natural language, processing and conversational tools really make it possible to help customers during the purchase journey and even more importantly in many aspects of customer service. Rachel: So, these previously somewhat academic technologies are being put in the hands of digital commerce managers and we begin to see the results. So, I fully expect that within the next couple of years what we're testing at a Ahold Delhaize level will be brought down to each of the brands. Stephanie: Yeah, it seems like there could be an interesting ... that you would get interesting results from the different brands because I can see very different consumers who are maybe shopping at Good old Giant back in Maryland. Rachel: Yes, you're absolutely right. Stephanie: How do you approach that when you're trying out different things and maybe you're like, "Oh, we see this with our customers at Stop & Shop, let's try this at another brand." And you're like womp womp that actually failed at that [inaudible] are so different. Rachel: Yeah, no it's a great call out and I say that all the time. I say what matters to somebody in the food [inaudible 00:40:18], so what matters to somebody maybe in North Carolina is different what matters to somebody in New York City. So, we have probably the toughest competitive market not only from a grocery retail perspective but even just from a media perspective and trying to ensure that our voice is heard within these difficult tough media markets. Rachel: So, for Stop & Shop really it's a little bit tricky and we do have to take a look at every single opportunity that comes our way and say, "Does this resonate with our consumer base?" Because a lot of times it won't. I think that there were a couple of examples of trying out even just a walk-up pickup service. In a city location you can walk to get your groceries handed to you. There've already been shop for you versus the traditional pickup where we load it to your car. That doesn't work everywhere obviously. [inaudible] work in the suburbs, it really only works at urban locations. That's one thing that comes to mind, there's a number of them that come to mind but each brand does have an option to opt out if it's not something that resonates within their base. Stephanie: Yeah, it makes sense. Try and implement that in New York city and all of a sudden these cars are being towed and then they're mad. Rachel: Right. Stephanie: [inaudible 00:41:48]. So, to go a little higher level I want to talk about general e-commerce themes and trends. I wanted to hear what kind of disruptions do you see coming to commerce that are not just from COVID or not just COVID because I think a lot people on here are like, "Oh, COVID's the big disruption." What else do you see happening in the world of e-commerce that's maybe coming down the pipe right now? Rachel: I mean one that's already here really is one stop shopping like Amazon. So, the retailers who adapt and constantly expand their options, shorten the supply chain, enhance customer service and develop great options for delivery and pick-up have the most success. So, I think that the model that Amazon has and Wayfair, the direct to consumer shipping is not as much as a disruption to e-commerce. That's here to stay and I think we have to learn from that and we have to adapt in order to stay competitive. And I think a lot of retailers are going to have to adapt in this new world. Everybody's going to have to be able to figure out how to provide that one stop shop because it's similar to brick & mortar shopping. You don't want to go to multiple locations on a Saturday afternoon. Rachel: It's the same thing, if you're going to pay for shipping you're going to pay for it once from one retailer or get free shipping, of course with a subscription service or promotion. And I think that's definitely here to stay. I think that convenience and the ease of finding everything in one place is that it's that big box retail mentality from back in the 80s when the big box retailers really exploded. Stephanie: Yep. Figuring out delivery and trying to compete with Amazon, man that seems very, very tough. Rachel: Very tough. Stephanie: Consumers have very high expectations now of what they want and yeah, it seems like they are quick to get upset if it's not one, two day shipping and, "Oh, it can't be here within two hours? Okay, I'm going to have to cancel the order." Rachel: Right, exactly. And "Oh, you don't have all the other things I need to? I need my face lotion and my bread. Wait, you don't have that?" Stephanie: Yeah, "Why would you not have that right next to each other?" Rachel: Right, exactly. Stephanie: Yeah, this has been awesome. Is there anything that I missed that you wanted to highlight before we jump into the lightning round? Rachel: No, I don't think so. Stephanie: Okay, cool. Well, I will pull us into the lightning round brought to you by SalesForce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready Rachel? Rachel: Oh, boy. Stephanie: All right, first one, what does the best day in the office look like for you? Rachel: Best day in the office today is at home. Stephanie: There you go. What does your virtual best day look like? Rachel: My virtual best day is when I actually have time between meetings to go get something to eat [inaudible 00:45:01]. Stephanie: That is actually a big problem I've heard from a lot of my old coworkers and talking about their whole day is now filled with meetings that maybe would've taken just a couple minutes to have a quick catch up and instead it's like, "Okay, 30 minute slots to discuss maybe one question." Rachel: Absolutely and you use your hour to the fullest extent and you're not moving around from meeting room to meeting room anymore. You're literally just sitting at your desk all day, so my best day is when I actually have a break to get up and go get something to eat because food is important to me. Stephanie: That seems like a crucial part of the day, so what's up next on your Netflix Queue. Rachel: That's a great question. I've actually blown through almost everything. Stephanie: And what was your most recent then? Rachel: I just watched the Enola Holmes. Stephanie: I'm watching that now, it's so cute. Rachel: Oh, it was excellent, I loved it, it was really great. I love Millie Bobby Brown, I think she's fantastic. Stephanie: Yeah, she was really good. Highly recommend that one. What's up next on your travel destinations when you can travel again? Rachel: Oh, gosh I want to go to Scotland so bad. Stephanie: Oh, fun. What do you want to go there for? Rachel: I want to golf. I love the countryside, just looks amazing, beautiful. I want to go hiking there. I have a lot of grand plans for Scotland and Ireland too as well. Stephanie: If you were to have a podcast what would it be about and who would your first guest be? Rachel: It would definitely be about true crime because I'm obsessed with true crime, which I know everybody is right now but I really do find it fascinating and I always have. This isn't just a fab for me, I always really liked it. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You started it, everyone else followed. Rachel: Yeah, exactly. I'm a trendsetter of course. Stephanie: Yes. And who would your guest be then? Will it be a serial killer? Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. I would love to interview a serial killer. I just want to know what goes on. I want to get deep for sure with a serial killer, name any one. Stephanie: All right, I mean I would listen to that. I hope they're behind bars when that happens. Rachel: Yes, yeah. I could do the interview behind bars for sure. Stephanie: There you go. And if you were to pick a virtual event right now for your team or if you already had one that you've done recently, what would it be that you think is engaging in these times? Rachel: I think there's a women's conference coming up in Boston that I would love for my team to attend. I just attended a women's leadership conference that was really amazing. It was very inspirational, even virtually I was really surprised at how well done it was and how just thought provoking the virtual conference could be. It was really fantastic. Stephanie: That sounds awesome. All right, and then the last one, what is a favorite app on your phone right now that you're loving? Rachel: This is bad but I have the CARROT app, which I don't know if you know, CARROT is the weather app. Stephanie: No, I actually don't. Rachel: It's a weather app that actually gives you a really sarcastic, snarky message every day when you open it up, so ... Stephanie: Oh, my gosh. That's great. I like that, that's really good. Well, Rachel this has been such a fun interview. Where can people find out more about you and Stop & Shop? Rachel: So, Stop&Shop.com Stop & Shop app and me, my LinkedIn profile, so Rachel Stephens, S-T-E-P-H-E-N-S. Stephanie: Awesome, well thanks so much for joining the show. Rachel: Thank you very much for having me.
When you’re entering a new company or a new market, there are lessons to be learned from the past and opportunities to grab hold of to propel yourself and your company forward. Paul Lanham entered a new company and industry all at once when he became the Chief Information and E-Commerce Officer at Charlotte's Web, a CBD company. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Paul details how he used his experience at companies such as Crocs, HCL and Brookstone to help guide him as he helped grow the Ecommerce business at Charlotte’s Web to the point where it now represents 65% of the business. Paul explains the methods he has used to generate qualified traffic, conversions and a high retention rate, and he discusses the technology he thinks is going to make a huge impact on Ecommerce in the future. Main Takeaways: Respect The Work That Came Before You: As a leader coming into a new company, there can be a tendency to try to change too much too fast. Instead, acknowledge and respect the work that was happening prior to your arrival, and then try to evolve that work into something more. Let the Tools Handle the Work: Humans are excellent at many things, but we all have inherent biases and miss certain correlations or connections. Rather than trying to analyze all the data you have on your own, employ technology like A.I. that will ignore most (unprogrammed) bias and can do the deep work a human brain is incapable of. Tech is Catching Up To Personalization: For so long, there has been a promise of technology that could interact in a human way with customers in real-time. That technology is finally starting to become a reality and those that can implement it properly can take personalization of their Ecommerce experiences to the next level. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. This is Stephanie Postles, co-founder of Mission.org and your host. Today we have Paul Lanham on the show, the Chief Information and Ecommerce Officer at Charlotte's Web. Paul, welcome. Paul: Hi, nice to be here. Stephanie: I'm glad to have you. Yeah, I'm really excited. I've used Charlotte's Web products before. So, when I saw that you were in our queue for interviews, I was like, "Oh, this is going to be a good interview." Paul: That's good to hear you have some perspective then. Stephanie: To start, I was looking through your background and was really impressed by some of the companies that you've worked at. I'd love for you to first before talking about Charlotte's Web, kind of go through a little bit about your history and then what brought you to Charlotte's Web. Paul: Sure. As you just noted, I have a pretty diverse background mostly in the retial and CBG and technology industries. What's really colored my career is that I've been given a lot of opportunities, some of which I hadn't had a lot of experience in including Ecommerce when I started in its infancy in the mid '90s when you had to build everything. You couldn't really go to the corner shop and buy an Ecommerce server. Paul: But I basically have touched on virtually every aspect of Ecommerce over the past 20 somewhat years. I've been a C level executive for about 25 years and worked for a diverse group of companies, a variety of sizes. Some startups. Paul: I started my own tech company and now it's Charlotte's Web, which I have to say is very much different in terms of its make up versus the companies I've worked for in the past. Stephanie: Yes. And just for people to know the difference, it would be great if you could name drop a bit. I know people hate name dropping, but I'd love to hear what were some of the companies, the largest ones you've worked at? I think you can compare it to Charlotte's Web. Paul: Sure. I worked for what was a startup, Crocs. I think people will recognize the infamous shoe company that is just located down the street from where I work. Paul: I've worked for Jones Apparel Group, which is a mega apparel conglomerate that own companies like Barneys New York, Jones New York, Apollo Jeans, et cetera, in the apparel industry. Paul: I started a tech company that eventually became a subsidiary of HCL Technologies, which is a global tech firm based in India. Paul: And Brookstone, which is the gadget shop, competing with Sharper Image. Again, near its infancy as well. So, a diverse group of experiences. Stephanie: Yeah, that's amazing. With some of these companies you've worked at previously, are there a lot of lessons that you were able to bring to Charlotte's Web or is it just such a different beast that you kind of had to just start over and had a completely new hat on? Paul: Well, basically if you've been a C level executive for a number of years you have some successes and you have some failures and hopefully you learn from the failures, and I've had them too. Paul: Implemented virtually every kind of system you can imagine. Been on the business side from an Ecommerce perspective and learned a lot of different things that I've been able to bring to Charlotte's Web. Paul: Back to the diversity of my career, one thing I can note, I probably have been in just about every function that you can imagine from finance, to marketing, to sales, to Ecommerce, et cetera, et cetera. Paul: So, I think that brings somewhat of a unique perspective to a company like Charlotte's Web, where I frankly I have a lot of empathy for my peers in other departments because I've done a lot of their jobs. Stephanie: Yeah, that is so important. I've worked at previous companies where someone doesn't understand I worked in finance back in the day and people do not understand the complexity or why there are certain procedures set up and you can definitely see tension between certain groups if they've never worked in that team before. So, that's key I think. Paul: Absolutely, and financial people can be fun. Most people don't know that. Stephanie: They can be. Just like me, I'm fun. You're fun Paul. I'd love to hear or I'd love for you to explain what is Charlotte's Web and maybe even starting with the story behind it, behind the name. Paul: Sure. Charlotte's Web is CBD company that was founded by the seven Stanley Brothers and that's a wonderful story in it of itself in that they grew up in the Cannabis industry. Paul: But the company's namesake, Charlotte Figi, who many people may remember from the Sanjay Gupta CNN Specials from years back and most recently illustrating how there was this trajectory of various peoples and things to help a little child basically survive. Paul: So, our namesake Charlotte really is like our guiding star or north star in the context of our mission, which is to help people through natural products that Charlotte's Web produces. Paul: So, it's a young industry, it's a young company where we are a market leader. Obviously we are commercial, but we're always grounded by our original mission and we still do help quite a few people to where our product is very essential like the Charlottes olive oil. Stephanie: Yeah. I was looking at the I am Charlotte video on your website and it definitely gave me goosebumps. When did you guys create that campaign? Paul: Well, it's basically been the past year. The point is with her passing it really shook us all to our core because frankly it was probably one of the core reasons that most of us joined the company. I was fortunate to be able to meet Charlotte and her mother Paige a couple of times. Paul: But many people in my company, and obviously the Stanley Brothers basically grew up in this company attached to Charlotte's story. The I am Charlotte campaign is currently just obviously a testimony and our take on how beloved she is and still is. Stephanie: Yeah, I love that. The CBD industry as you mentioned, it is kind of a new-ish industry. When you're in California it seems like it's been around forever, but when you go to other states or back to my hometown, people still kind of have they either don't know what it is or yeah, are just very unclear about what it is. You have different preconceived notions, you can say. Stephanie: So, how do you all think about kind of educating the public or new buyers who come to your site for the first time? Paul: Certainly. Two points, actually about 15% of households have had some experience with CBD in the United States. And still because it's such an emerging industry, word of mouth is still very important. Typically, people first get exposed to CBD by a relative or a friend or somebody mentioning it that it helped them. Paul: When they go to search for it, we basically are actually a leader at Charlotte's Web because we rank very high on the first page, in the first third with what is CBD. To that point, we spend a good deal of time on our site through blog entries and various educational videos that we put out to educate our customer on the difference, for example, between hemp and cannabis or what is the efficacy of CBD and various in-depth, I guess, videos to illustrate the depth of what they could know about CBD. Paul: So, it very much is still an educational process as you've mentioned to evangelize the use of CBD. Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree. How did you all become a market leader? I know you were not first, but you definitely were some of the early leaders or even starting up in this industry. But how did you go about making sure people had your name as the household name when it came to CBD? Paul: Sure. They were among the first and the brand story between the Stanley Brothers and Charlotte really resonated. It was made for this industry and the mission that the Stanley Brothers inoculated into the company and we still have in terms of evangelizing the product and natural products to the world to help people, I think resonate with people. Paul: When you talk about, for example, our end-to-end integration from seed to shelf, our quality, et cetera, all those things kind of are confluence in terms of being perceived as a quality brand and a premium brand to a consumer. Paul: There are a lot of smart business decisions along the way, frankly, in terms of becoming that market leader. Stephanie: What kind of smart business decisions? Now you've piqued my interest. Paul: Okay. For example, going really strong in Ecommerce initially in that the nature of the industry is that there's been a slower adoption in the major retailers because hemp frankly, from a federal perspective, wasn't quite legal until a couple of years ago based on the format. Paul: There are some reticence in terms of conservative retailers to carry the product. So, they were very smart in not necessarily going the mom-and-pop route even though we have a big natural store population on the retail side. Paul: But going very strong with Ecommerce and hiring the right people right off the bat a couple few years ago to basically push the commercial side of this. Ecommerce right now represents about 65% of our business as was in the first quarter. That's somewhat of a higher percentage than many of our competitors. Stephanie: What do you think is attributed to that higher percentage? Paul: Being first out of the gate. Being very professional about it. But the primary drivers, they're a couple, back to the brand story that really resonated, was beautifully presented on the site and for media. Paul: Secondarily, the quality that we bring to the table that we try to communicate to other consumers. From that seed to shelf continuum, we test the product 20 times, we track each individual bottle or tincture or the like back to a specific lot and seeds. We could document virtually anything anyone needs to know about that particular product. Paul: So, particularly in this industry where you have an influx of competitors, some of which frankly are not quite as sophisticated in the context of testing and the branding. You can really stand out by basically taking care of those issues. Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree. That is how I found you guys in the early days was because quality to me is the biggest factor when it comes to CBD. Paul: Absolutely. Stephanie: And it's also something that a lot of people worried about early on because you do hear horror stories and it felt good going to a company knowing yeah, they've already got everything figured out. They've got the dosing down to its seed. They've got it's non-GMO and yeah, I think that's so important with an industry like this. Paul: Absolutely. Stephanie: The one thing I was thinking about was consumer journeys. Everyone is coming to your website maybe at a different place like we were mentioning before. Some people are brand new or they've maybe never even heard of it, where education is key. Stephanie: Some people have heard about it. You've got the people who maybe are hiding their browsers when they're looking for it or the people like me it's like, "Yeah, this is an obvious thing that can help you." Paul: Sure, sure. Stephanie: How do you personalize either your Ecommerce experience or your marketing efforts to kind of go after all those people and meet them where they are? Paul: Well that's a good question because when I mentioned sophisticated we invested in tools that enable us to personalize that journey. So, for example, back to my comment on what is CBD. Paul: If somebody enters that as a search term and they have to click on our link, we will take them initially to the education materials and will kind of guide them through the process from the Ecommerce perspective of walking them through that journey and hopefully they purchase. Paul: We do that in the context of segmenting our email channel. We have a variety of channels and we handle each one differently. Our affiliate channel, for example, is very strong in terms of the partners we deal with like a Healthline.com, which yet again is another educational component in that we're very strong with them. Paul: So, depending on the channel, depending on the entry point of our consumer, we will treat them differently in the context of where we land them on the website, what we offer to them in the context of their journey through the website, and what promotional activity we engage with them. Stephanie: Got it. Yeah that make sense. When it comes to affiliate programs, how did you all think about setting that up and is that still a big part of your strategy or did you kind of pull back on that once you started becoming more of a household name? Paul: It's still and will be a very big part of our strategy in that penetration of CBD from a search to perspective is still relatively low compared to what I've experienced in the past so that we're still in an emerging phase where we need to use and leverage every channel we can. Paul: So, as strong as our Ecommerce business is, which happens to be frankly Ecommerce alone at Charlotte's Web is a market leader in revenue compared to every other CBD company, just alone. It kind of tells you the scale of our business. Paul: But what I'm getting at, the Healthline.com affiliate is very important to us in that it is the number one rated medical advice site, I believe, if I look at the statistics recently. Paul: Every entry point is different for every consumer and we need to leverage all those different entry points. We can't, for example, rely solely on organic search as an example, not that we would. But we basically go through every venue. Stephanie: Got it. What does it look like setting up a partnership like that? Because, I think that is really important kind of finding someone who has a good reputation that a lot of people trust. But what did that look like setting that partnership up and making it so both sides feel like it's a win-win? Paul: Well to your point, it's important to vet the partner because obviously you don't want to be presented on a site that doesn't quite meet your value set or your brand image. So, we're fairly choosy in terms of the affiliate partners that we work with. Paul: Obviously, in some cases it's a longer negotiation in that obviously we want to do it on advantageous terms in terms of the share basically. So, we don't cast a wide swath in the context of the affiliate partners we deal with. We're very selective. Stephanie: Got it. So, the one thing that I was wondering earlier when you were mentioning failures and you of course have a huge backlog of experience at other companies, what did your first 90 days look like coming in to Charlotte's Web and what big things did you change from the start based on maybe past failures or successes that you've had at prior companies? Paul: Well, like entries in the most companies it's a rush. My story, this is pre-COVID times obviously, I talked on the phone with a board member and my boss, the CEO, on a Friday. I flew over the weekend, got there on Monday. I took the job sight unseen after a phone call. Stephanie: Wow. Paul: I was so enamored of it. I've never done that before. And Danny has never hired anybody like that before, it just went so well. I showed up on Monday and I didn't leave for 90 days, much to the consonation of my significant other in Boston. So, we worked it out. Paul: But it was just a rush of understanding the industry in-depth, doing triage in the context it was still a start mentality, triage in the context of building a business intelligence stack, revamping the Ecommerce organization, planning the next iterations and improvements, setting up for the holiday season for example. Paul: When I joined, literally the week after I joined we kicked off a new platform upgrade that we only had a couple of months to do prior to holidays. So, it was a lot of long days. Stephanie: Was that something that you feel like you could step into because I'm sure you've done many re-platforming experiences before? Paul: Yeah. There is some muscle memory and back to my point, you always want to learn from your failures and not do them again or at least understand the context and admit them. Basically one of those issues is that one has to listen very carefully. Paul: I parachuted into a company that was going 1,000 miles an hour and one of the lessons I've learned in the past is honor the past because there was a great deal of work and a lot of great work done that I took the attitude of evolving and adding to as opposed to turning the part which many C level executives take that as their mandate. Paul: I've never really done that. It's one of the failures I've learned from in my past that basically sometimes evolution is better than tearing things apart. Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, I love that and I think the quote too. Paul: Yes. Stephanie: So, I'm sure another thing that you kind of the change of thinking on would be how you track the success of a business or the Ecommerce site. What kind of metrics, did you maybe look at prior companies where you were like this is our set of metrics that always made sense versus what do you look at now at Charlotte's Web? Paul: Well, there are quite a few. You know the Ecommerce business, there are probably 20 things that you look on a daily basis. That's my routine in the morning, I get up and I look at basically all the metrics. Paul: But what's important here, more so than perhaps, it's always in the top three conversion for example, on unbalanced traffic. It's significant here because you're engagement with a new customer and maybe fleeting because of the nature of the industry, the curiosity about CBD, people not knowing about it. Paul: I actually had to look at that statistic or those statistics several times because they didn't believe them, they were so high. That's a testament to the people and the staff that were here in that whether it's educating the consumer, or the customer experience on the site, or customer care on the backend, we have a high percentage of sales that convert. Paul: So, that probably is a much more important stat that I've paid attention to in the past. It's always been in the top three or four. Paul: Retention of consumers. Again, in this sort of industry because of the fleeting interaction with your customers, we have a very strong subscription program that is very important to us, which are typically customers who deem the product to be essential to their wellbeing. Paul: So, we've put a good deal of emphasis on that as well as retaining customers, and again, without divulging the statistics, it's much higher than I've experienced in my past 20 plus years of experience in Ecommerce. Stephanie: What do you think is making it so high? How are you all retaining customers so well or encouraging people to subscribe? Paul: Well, it's high because I guess in a way our traffic is more qualified, then again I've experience in the past. When they come through the site and they've been educated, there's a slightly high degree of propensity to buy. So, that's a factor. Paul: Plus some of our tools really facilitate the conversion in that. Not that we're pushy but we don't let go in the context of okay, this isn't right for you, maybe this or how about this promotion or have you rethought this through the customer journey in the site? Stephanie: Yeah. Paul: Basically, there's a pre-decisive to buy basically once they get to our site. Stephanie: Is there any initiatives that you've implemented when it comes to, like you said, it's nice you don't let go and you make sure to make to keep reminding them or showing them new products or new ideas. Stephanie: Is there anything that you've implemented recently around those kind of initiatives that have increased conversions or increased subscription rates or anything, or anything that you've done where you're like that was a big flop, don't try that? Paul: Well yeah. Again, getting much more sophisticated, I don't think anybody else has implemented the suite of what I call campaign tools and analytical tools. Typically, people use the standard GA or Google tools and we've gone past that and utilizing tools that I've used in much bigger companies without naming the company. Paul: So, we can have a high degree of personalization in terms of how we treat our customers as they kind of navigate through our site. A much higher capability in terms of test and react and basically inoculating those scenarios and situations into our campaigns eventually down to the individual level. Paul: So, we're still learning some of those. We've implemented those over the past three or four months. The company is still, my staff is still learning some of the aspects of those tools. Paul: On top of that from an analytic standpoint, which is a little unusual in the industry, we dived in with both feet from an artificial intelligence perspective because I joke with my staff and they read too rapidly that my experience doesn't always mean anything. I think I know everything about my customer and I'm confounded constantly in terms of why I was wrong on that. Paul: It comes down to the data and what artificial intelligence does for example, is that it makes those deep correlations that none of us would have thought of, I would have never thought of with my 20 plus years of experience of how our customers actually interact with our site or what are they thinking in the context of their purchase strength. Paul: So, when you put all those things together from a capability perspective, I love it in terms of being data driven, in terms of understanding our consumer at a deeper and deeper level and being able to provide the best experience and the best service that we can on an ongoing basis. Stephanie: Got it. That makes sense. When you're implementing AI, first can I ask what platform are you using for that and what kind of surprises have you found when you implemented AI? What were the consumers doing that you would never have guessed before? Paul: Well it's a third party app. It's a bunch of data scientists who basically provide the service for us. They're conduit for the massive amount of data that we have. To your question of surprises or those correlations or what people have affinities for in terms of say, an add-on purchase that we would never think of, what prompts them to basically make that leap to make the purchase in the context of their journey through the site. Some of which are counterintuitive to some of our experience particularly for certain segment of our consumer base. Paul: It's just some of those interesting nuggets of information. The hard part of it is, there's so many correlations that we have to rank them and we basically test each correlation over a period of time to vet out the action. Paul: Our challenge at this point is basically getting into a much more test and react cycle on these correlations. Stephanie: That's really interesting. Paul: Yes. Stephanie: So, if you were to implement AI all over again or you had someone who does not have that on their site right now, what would you do maybe differently or if you were like we could go back and maybe I would change the way we did this or think about it differently when implementing it, what are some advice around that? Paul: Well what slowed us down was the notion of producing what I call hypothesis based on our prior knowledge. That tends to put you into silos of information and doesn't quite give you the breadth of correlations that AI can do for you. Paul: So again, it was all of my advice that hey, I think I really know this aspect of consumer behavior. I'm really interested in terms of their conversion activity when they do X, when they do Y. Paul: I wouldn't be so structured in those hypothesis going into it and probably a little more open minded in the context of looking at the correlations in a much different broader way. Stephanie: I love that. That's such a good reminder about the kind of biases you bring when looking at data or your consumers and why all that should be scraped from the beginning and just let the technology work for you? Paul: Absolutely, absolutely. Stephanie: In your industry I'm sure you probably get a lot of questions around this. But I'm thinking about all the regulations you have to deal with especially on a state level and when it comes to having Ecommerce be such a large part of your business, what does that look like behind the scenes when it comes to shipping or selling in certain states? Paul: Well, it's mostly an impediment from a retailer, particularly a major retailer perspective because to your point, there's a hodgepodge of regulation in the state. Even though hemp was 0.3%, THC less than 3% as federally allowed, depending on the nuisances of what is in California or Florida, et cetera, retailers may be averse to getting into ingestibles as opposed to topicals. Paul: So, back to our point, one of the reasons why we're industry leaders we've invested heavily in internal, external lobbyists that can guide different parties and factions, whether it be congress at the federal level or legislations at the state level or associations to evangelize the notion of CBD. Paul: One thing that people miss the point on, we welcome more defined regulation from the FDA because we feel that we're heads and shoulders above most of our competitors in the context of how we test, how safe our product is, how we document it and the like. Paul: So, it's an ongoing journey that hopefully more clarity will emerge at both the state and federal level whether it's with the FDA or with various state legislatures to make the retail sales of CBD more palatable. We do ship to all states in the Ecommerce perspective. Stephanie: Okay. Yeah, I like that idea around encouraging the FDA to look into it and implement regulations because you're like my product is so good, we should have the other products regulated and be held to a high standard as well because that is what can maybe hurt the industry as a whole, is having people making subpar products that aren't as high quality as Charlotte's Web. Paul: Yes. It's kind of adding to that, major business publications have basically stated and make the articles that CBD is here to stay. It's a multi-billion dollar business growing at a rapid rate and it's frankly grown so fast and it's a new industry that regulations haven't quite caught up with it. Stephanie: Yeah. I was reading a bit about demand surges especially during the pandemic right now. I think maybe it was your CEO who was mentioning like, oh we had a surge in demand for two weeks and then people kind of pulled back for a little bit. Stephanie: I was wondering how you guys are keeping up your inventory levels, how you manage that and then if you're changing anything going forward after seeing these surges of hopefully consumers that are going to stick around going forward? Paul: We've been really gratified and continuing to serve our customer because the majority of the customers consider our product to be essential for their wellbeing whether it's the type of tincture they use or the ointment or the like. So, it's been relatively stable for us. Stephanie: Okay. Paul: Now from an notary perspective, as a growing company our processes have become more sophisticated and over the past year we've implemented an NSLOP process or production planning process that I'm more familiar with in my CBG background to really dial into marrying strategic plans to budgets, to demand forecast and skew level and doing a relatively sophisticated job of planning product demand. Paul: Now the flip side of that, this industry is volatile in the context of demand in general because retailers, some are still adverse to taking the product, so it's hard to predict demand in that context. Paul: So, we place a little more emphasis on safety stock and agility in the context of the co-manufacturers we deal with and the like. Stephanie: Got it. What are some of the best practices you set up when it comes to setting up that forecasting process because I know you've had a lot, like you mentioned, a lot experience with that. What did you bring to Charlotte's Web that maybe they weren't doing before? Paul: Well, they had started it but I amplified from an Ecommerce perspective, a rigorous skew demand process that is three dimensional and that it adds up from top to bottom and extremely rigorous analytical process of continually revising those forecasts taking into account promotional cadence, taking into account day-to-day iterations of different campaigns. Paul: So, it's a fairly in-depth forecasting process in Ecommerce so that our accuracy is much higher. It's in the 90 percentile by skew in terms of our monthly demand, for example. Paul: One of the things I've learned in my past is that sometimes you have to take a leap of faith on a particular product because you don't know how high you can go. On the other hand, that's what safety stock is for. Stephanie: Got it. What does that look like when it comes to thinking of new products? How do you influence your decision behind that, like you were mentioning, behind the sales channels and the marketing channels that help you influence your ideas or thoughts behind it. What does that look like when it comes to new products? Paul: We do have outside data and with a caveat that it's such a rapidly growing industry that tends to change overtime. But I feel is obviously one of the standard firms we use in the context of a longer term view, in terms of product categories and growth and certain segments and the like and we use that as a baseline. Paul: Obviously we use our trend and my counterpart on the retail side and myself where basically experience marketers and sales people and that we have our own opinions in terms of how we correlate our thoughts on category growth versus what we're seeing in external data, for example, like Brightview. Paul: So, we listen very closely to our consumer in terms of what categories we're pushing. Stephanie: I was just going to say I'm sure you guys get a lot of customer feedback of what people want or what they're looking for. Paul: Yes we do. Stephanie: How do you grab all that and put it in a meaningful way because you probably know best. So, a lot of times consumers might ask for something and then not actually buy it or not really want it. Paul: This is true. They certainly vote with their dollars. But on the other hand, we have a pretty good customer care department that is in my peer bid where I've managed those sorts of departments in the past but this is in an interesting one, the group of individuals that the empathy, because of the nature of the product and the stories they hear and the people they try to help, the empathy they exhibit in terms of comments from customer is just outstanding. Paul: So, it's not only commercial, but to the extent that it's practical based on the information they have, they are advisors to the customers that call in and we have a high volume of calls that come in not necessarily about order standard things, but really what should I do? What about this product? Paul: The other aspect is we have a fairly rich library of customer reviews and the technology we use enables us to slice and dice some of the categories of the customer reviews and try to get to a gist of what's working versus not, whether it's from a product efficacy perspective or perhaps a defect of some sort. Paul: The dropper may not work exactly the way we wanted to and the like. So, we have multiple sources of information of customer contact. Stephanie: I think that's so key to be able to call in and actually talk to someone. That's the perfect way to develop trust is by having someone that you can actually get on a phone with and be like, "Okay, I don't know what to do now. Tell me exactly what I should be doing." Or same with reviews, being able to see someone who sounds like me reviewing the product just seems like a great way to develop trust all around. Paul: Absolutely. From a hiring perspective, I have lunch, a virtual lunch nowadays with every associate in my group at some point. Today I just, prior to this meeting, I had lunch with three of our associates just to kind of get a feeling of that. Paul: When it comes to our customer care associates, I've never met such a group of people that are truly empathetic to where they hear a story and they're crying on the phone with the consumer. They're doing everything. They have a wide latitude of actions they can take to help our customers more so than I'd had in the past in much larger companies. Paul: But they really have the right mindset, I think, as opposed to working in a call center. Stephanie: Yeah. That's so key and so important. Paul: Absolutely. Absolutely. Stephanie: So to shift a little bit into more of a marketing mindset, I wanted to hear a bit about how you guys are investing in different digital channels. What's working and what's not? Paul: Sure. Just the overview is that you may have seen our Trust The Earth campaign, which I loved, we started last fall that kind of instills what our brand messaging is. Basically, a lot of our marketing efforts go to that because again we're an emerging industry, we're maintaining our market lead, we want to convey a certain image, just a random stat based on our efforts here today. Paul: We have over 400 billion impressions from the various things we've done versus, I think our closest competitor from the stats that I've seen were about two billion and it dropped rapidly. So, marketing our digital efforts from a broad perspective are very effective and that shows in the context of where we are in organic search or educating the consumer, long ways to go. Paul: From a digital perspective obviously we're active in every social media component and we're very assertive in terms of educating our consumer through that channel, conveying our brand message. Paul: The industry is in a place right now, there are some restrictions in terms of how aggressive that you can market CBD on social media like on Facebook, for example, or Twitter. But that's not a real problem for me right now because for me we want to activate understanding and education and our brand story at this stage of our growth in the social media channels. Paul: So, a lot of our digital, aside from our paid media, which we're very good at I believe, a lot of our digital is focused on building our brand. Stephanie: How are you thinking about expanding into other markets? I think I saw that you were looking at going into a few other countries. How are you guys exploring that right now? Paul: Well, we're basically putting our markers out there. We have a staff of people who are very experienced internationally. I have a good deal of international experience as well from an Ecommerce perspective in retial. Paul: But one of the constraints still is the regulatory environment in that we won't sell in any country that obviously it's not allowed. There aren't too many countries that actually allow it. So, we're basically putting the building blocks in place if in case that would be our strategy to understand what the international market would mean to us. Paul: But it's still evolving because it's basically not allowed from a regulatory standpoint in quite a few countries. Stephanie: Got it. So now that we're kind of predicting our future a little bit, I'm wondering what kind of Ecommerce trends are you excited about or preparing for right now? Paul: Well, in general, like I have for a number of years it's the technology keeping up with my visions of personalization. In the perfect world I'm interacting real time with the individual consumer in the context of whether we're educating them or guiding their journey and the like and the technology is starting to catch up with that capability even at a company of our scale. Paul: So, that's the trend that has been there for a little while but the promise has been there, but the reality is starting to catch up. The other one I mentioned is using deep technology to a point within certain boundaries to understand our customers behavior and needs and wants and applying, point number one, the personalization with that. Stephanie: Yeah. That makes sense. Is there any new tech that you're experimenting with right now that you guys are loving? Paul: Well, I've experimented with in the past in terms of client side speed of devices. Every Ecommerce and you know all the tropes about how conversion is impacted by site speed and page loading and all those different things. Paul: But what I've been enamored of in the past couple of years is utilizing technology to tailor the experience on whatever the device our consumer has. You know there's somebody out there who's still on dial-up, if that still exists. Stephanie: You caught me Paul. Paul: With a new browser, right. It doesn't matter how efficient your site is or your servers are like, you have to tailor the experience, strip down the page load, the content, rejigger the Java script on the fly depending on that individual's device because as far as they're concerned, they may have a iPhone 5 that hasn't been updated in five years but they still like that experience. Stephanie: Yeah. I completely agree. That's really important because I think a lot of people assume that users are always on a newest and the latest and greatest. The one thing, yeah, I had, let's see, we're doing a study on I think Google maps users in India and the majority of them were on such outdated versions that they were never seeing updated streets or an update at all in maybe a year or two. Stephanie: I think it's just a good reminder that a lot of people are on older versions of things, not just in other countries but here too. Like you said, some people still use dial-up. Sowe have a quick lightning round coming up. But before that, I wanted to ask you one last question because I love your excitement towards the company and your energy behind it and I wanted to hear what is the best day in the office look like for you? Paul: The best day in the office, let me think about that for a moment. Stephanie: Yeah. Paul: As I mentioned before I'm usually willing to go every day. It's when I'm in the thick of it, I'm a great delegator I believe, and I think the people who work with and for me would say so. Paul: But I'm most happy when I'm in the thick of it, not being Mr. Executive and my people interacting with, like a peer to some degree, in terms of coming up with ideas, debating certain concepts, making things happens. Paul: It's still small enough company where many people I'll be a jack of all trades and that's where I've shined in my past of, okay, rolling the sleeves up and figuring it out and having to learn things. Paul: Many of my jobs have reflected that. So, that's when I'm happiest, when I'm learning something new. I think I've been told I'm really, really curious to a fault. I ask too many questions sometimes. Stephanie: I think that's a good thing. Paul: Yeah, I guess so. But that's what jazzes me, being in the thick of things, making things happen. Now having said that, as a C level executive you have certain programs and responsibilities to create a conducive environment for your people to work in to make them feel trusted, to stretch them to the extent of their capabilities giving them a vision. Paul: On the other hand, I've always been a believer of an executive being able to walk the talk having done something. Being able to do it, without actually doing it. That lends a certain amount of credibility in your interaction with your staff. So, I think that's very important. Back to your point, that's what makes me happy is just being in the thick of it. Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree. I like that idea and I heard a ratio or it was a metric that an executive used called the say do ratio, and it was how much do you do what you're going to say you do, and that's how he gained the trust with a new company he was joining, was he actually tracked it. Paul: Well in a small company I think my first interaction with an associate at CW is riding up the elevator that Monday, they had heard of me, and they asked my name and they heard that I was a tech guy. I was really the Ecommerce business guy and tech guy and they asked me about an email problem they were having. Stephanie: A personal or a company one? Paul: A company one, yeah. Stephanie: Okay. Paul: "I can't quite get this to do this." It was a sales executive or a sales manager that we had. She asked me a question not knowing exactly what I did so I spent a half hour tracking it down and getting back to her. Paul: Later when she learned, you're in charge of Ecommerce and tech and all that stuff. To me, in a small company like ours, you have to be personal, you have to be willing to help anybody with anything and follow up on it and get it done as opposed to always delegating and there's a balance obviously in terms of the work balance. Paul: But you have to show that direct interest in everybody's issue in what they're doing. Stephanie: Yeah, I love that. That is such a good mindset to be in, like you said. Especially coming from a larger company where employees might be like, "Oh this guy is going to just delegate everything," like showing them you're willing to get your hands dirty and help them with their needs and stuff. It's also crucial. Paul: Yes. Stephanie: All right. Next we have the lightning round brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Paul: Okay, lightning round it is. Stephanie: Are you ready? Paul: I'm ready. Stephanie: Roll up your sleeves, get ready. All right. Paul: They're already rolled up. Stephanie: First, I'll start with an easy one. Paul: Yes. Stephanie: What's up next on your Netflix or Hulu queue? What are you watching these days? Paul: On my Netflix queue let's see, geez I don't watch a lot of TV so you're going to stop me. I have 30 seconds left. Mostly about historical dramas. I've always wanted to watch The Crown, which everybody has watched. So, that's probably next on my queue. Stephanie: Cool. I haven't watched that yet. You'll have to let me know how it is. Paul: There you go. Stephanie: All right. What's up next on your travel destinations when you can travel again? Paul: Wow. When I can travel again? I'd like to go back to Tokyo. I've traveled so much in my career personally. One point I spent about 50% of my time overseas. Stephanie: Oh my gosh. Paul: But Tokyo because I was born in Tokyo. Stephanie: Cool. Paul: And an American descent. But when I traveled I was always able to get there and see my cousins three or four times a year. But it's been a while. That would be my first place to basically get back to my roots. Stephanie: That is a good one. I love Japan. Paul: Yeah. Stephanie: What app or piece of tech are you most enjoying right now? Paul: I'm most enjoying, this is an odd app, is a password saver. I won't say the name of it, but I've been searching for the perfect one because I'm all about convenience and security and all those things at the same time. So, it's an odd choice but I found the perfect passwords saver. Stephanie: Yeah. That is actually a very good piece of tech. We recently implemented that at the company not too long ago and I was like, "Wow, this saves a lot of time. Who knew?" Paul: Absolutely. Get rid of the sticky notes. Stephanie: Yeah. All right. If you were to create a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be? Paul: My first guest I'm thinking big. Stephanie: Go for it. Paul: Because I'm thinking really, really big because I'm enamored of her career. I was actually at her first rally, Elizabeth Warren. It tells you a little bit about politics and no offense. Stephanie: That's okay. Paul: But I was still in Boston, I went to her first rally and I was just enamored, I've always been enamored of her and not withstanding what happens in the near future. I would just be fascinated to talk to her about her career and how she made that mid career shift and the [inaudible] plan. Stephanie: That's cool. So, it would be politics focused or more human centric on what's important when it comes to you? Paul: More human centric with a tinge of politics because I am interested in politics. Elizabeth Warren would be it. Stephanie: We could get her on the show. I would make that happen for you. Paul: You could make that happen? Stephanie: Yeah. Paul: That would be so cool. Stephanie: I could do it. Elizabeth call us. We're ready for you. Paul: Absolutely. I remember I've actually seen her a few times, in the crowd obviously. The last time was at a protest at the Boston Common and she was quite compelling in her speech. Stephanie: Well that's great. I will have to see if I can find that online. Paul: Yeah. Stephanie: The last hard one which you've kind of already answered this, but I'll throw it anyways at your way. What one thing will have the biggest impact on Ecommerce in the next year? Paul: I think the biggest impact is the turmoil going around the big guys whether it's Facebook, Google, to some degree Amazon. What is the regulatory landscape, what is the antitrust landscape, how will they evolve, how monolithic will it be? Paul: I think I actually think about that quite often in terms of how do we enact with them, do businesses, make the leap into Amazon as a third party do, how do the algorithms evolve from a group perspective. How does privacy work? Paul: That really weighs on me in the context of thinking through how do those outside forces that are so monolithic in the tech industry impact Ecommerce. Stephanie: Well that's a big juicy one. We'll have to have a whole nother episode just to talk about your thoughts on that. Paul: Right, right. Stephanie: Well Paul it's been such a pleasure having you on this show. Like I said, I use Charlotte's Web. I've been around it for a while and I really appreciate you coming on and taking the time. Where can people find out more about you and Charlotte's Web? Paul: Well obviously our website, Charlotte'sWeb.com and I have a pretty fulsome linked in profile that shows you how haphazard my career has been but it's been a fun ride. Stephanie: Yeah. That's where I found out all about you. Well thanks so much for coming on. We'll have to have you back for round two in the future. It's been great. Paul: Absolutely enjoyed it. Thank you very much.
How does a guy who used to sell fighter jets move on to build an Ecommerce company that sells single-blade razors? It’s an interesting question with an even more interesting answer, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Patrick Coddou tells the tale, and gives some insights into the world of Ecommerce along the way. Patrick is the founder and CEO of Supply, and even though the company has been in business since 2015, has seen 80% of its total profits have come in over just the last several months. So what’s Patrick’s secret? In today’s interview, Patrick dives into the nitty-gritty of what changed, including how he finally discovered exactly what profit margins he — and most companies — need to hit in order to achieve sustained success. Learn what that number is and more, on this episode. Main Takeaways: Always Be Testing: To achieve the best user experience and optimize sales, you need to constantly test new ideas. Whether it’s pop-ups to showcase new items, implementing a legacy program, or experimenting with video, you learn something new every time you test. Plus, sometimes the failed tests are even more valuable than the successful ones. It’s All About the Margins: Businesses live and die based on their gross margins. If you are not charging enough and/or pay too much to have your products made, you’re putting an unnecessary financial strain on your business that could break it. Riding the Ecommerce Waves: There is a ton of volatility in the Ecommerce industry. In order to achieve sustained success, companies need to be nimble and able to adapt to the changing tides. Keep overhead low, focus on your P&L and build processes that allow you to make quick shifts when needed. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome to another episode of Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles and today on the show, we have the founder of Supply, Patrick Coddou. Patrick, welcome. Patrick: Thank you for having me. Stephanie: Yeah, we're excited to have you on. I was doing a little bit of LinkedIn stalking and your background... At first, when I stumbled on your LinkedIn, I'm like, "Is this the right guy?" I saw a background in selling fighter jets and I wanted to start there with you of kind of like a little bit of your background before you founded Supply. Patrick: Sure. So I spent my education as a mechanical engineering and before starting this company, I spent eight and a half years in the corporate world. I worked in the aerospace industry and in particular I worked on military aircraft. We make some fighter aircraft here in Fort Worth, Texas where I'm from. Stephanie: Very cool. And what does that look like behind the scenes of working on aircraft? I saw that you did, I think an $8 billion deal. So I want to hear a little bit more details around that. Patrick: Yes. I worked on it. It would be very, very arrogant of me to claim that I was responsible for that deal. Yeah. So in general, and I'm happy to go deeper if you want to, but in general, the US government works with foreign militaries to arm and equip them with certain pieces of equipment that we think that are necessary for them to have and to support interoperability between allies. So one of those aircraft was called the F-35. And I think the deal you're talking about was maybe the deal with South Korea we did probably five or six years ago where the US government sold, I don't remember how many, 60, 70 aircraft to South Korea. Patrick: So that was a really phenomenal experience getting to fly there and negotiate with our partners over in South Korea and spent a lot of time kind of immersing myself in their culture. Just a cool, cool thing to be a part of. So I learned a lot there, but at the same time was ready to get out when I left. Stephanie: Yeah. So let's hear a little bit about you're almost a decade at, I think Lockheed Martin and you're starting to get the entrepreneurial itch. So what was happening while you were there and what had you make the jump. Patrick: Yeah. So as outrageously cool as the subject matter was of what I worked on in my previous life, it was... As awesome as the subject was, it was as equally terrible to work in a corporate environment like that one for me personally. Not for everybody, but for me. And especially working with the US government. Just procedures and processes and just layers of bureaucracy. It just led to boredom and frankly anxiety and depression personally. Just wanting to be fulfilled in my work and not finding the ability to be so in what I was doing. Patrick: I tend to plan and think ahead a lot. When I visualize the future of my life there, it was like I could literally see myself sitting at the same desk like doing the same things that I had been doing for like the next 30 years of my life. For years, I wasn't raised as an entrepreneur. I don't really have that in my family. I didn't know the first thing about starting a business, but for years I was always thinking about kind of what is kind of my path out of this life and kind of into the next one. Patrick: I always had ideas and never really kind of jumped on them because I wasn't a risk taker, I was an engineer. Taking risk was the furthest thing from what I was used to. And I finally have this idea for a razor that I wanted to invent, and we can kind of get into that if we want to, but in general I've always kind of struggled with irritation and ingrown hairs with shaving since the first day I started shaving. I came across this old style of shaving, shaving with a single blade safety razor and just fell in love with it and decided I wanted to try to kind of make a modern version of this old razor that I found. Patrick: Then in addition to that just decided like this is kind of... It's kind of now or never to make the leap from this job to doing something on my own. So it was kind of a perfect storm of the idea came and the necessity came and the opportunity came at the same time and just decided to go for it. Stephanie: Yeah, that's awesome. I think a lot of people probably have those same feelings of getting stuck somewhere. I know I have in the past. There was a point in my previous life when I was working at Fannie Mae and I had the same kind of thing. I'm like, "Oh my gosh. Do I want to end up in a semi-government job or corporate job?" And even at Google, it's like, "Oh, things feel so great right now. Should I leave? I feel like I'll stay here for a long time because it's so comfy." So I think a lot of people have the same kind of feeling of now or never. I better jump before I get stuck here for the rest of my life. Patrick: And the further you go in those career paths like the harder it is to leave. What can an aerospace engineer that has worked as an aerospace engineer for 20 years do other than that after they've been there so long? Stephanie: Yeah. I had the same feeling. What year did you start Supply or did you start something before then or was Supply your first company? Patrick: Yes, Supply is my first kind of real company. Prior to starting Supply which we started in... The company started in January of 2015, but we launched publicly in August of 2015 with our first Kickstarter campaign. And prior to that, I started a website with one of my best buddies called razorpedia.com and that was like, I think, we started in 2012 or 2013. Long story short, it was a kind of razor review website that really was kind of a... Just kind of a stupid fun thing to do with a buddy on weekends where we wanted to kind of test razors and try to find the best razor on the market. Actually, the website ended up getting pretty popular and we ended up selling it later. But that's really where the razor kind of story began with shaving. Stephanie: Yeah. I mean, I read that the Razorpedia was like the number one google search result and it had like 1 million organic page views over 30 months. So it sounds like it was actually a pretty big deal. Patrick: Yeah, it was pretty successful. We were fortunate enough to like... We literally launched I think the same week that Harry's launched. Stephanie: Good timing. Patrick: Yeah. It was good timing and we wrote a blog like the same week about Harry's. We ended up like kind of being... If you searched razor reviews online or Harry's razor review, we were right at the top of the search results. So it was kind of dumb luck. So we started to kind of monetize it with ads. We didn't know what we were doing. We were making it up as we went. The best thing that came out of that was the realization that all these multi-blade razors that we tested were all... In my opinion, were all trash and just not good razors. It was that website that actually led me down the path to find this old style of shaving, which is this single blade style shave. Stephanie: It's really interesting how marketing can really train us like "Oh, the more blades the better, and this one has two. Oh, this one has three." You wouldn't even think like getting back to the roots of like you're talking about a single blade is maybe actually the best way of doing things. Patrick: Yeah. There's an old Onion article from like 2002 and I think the most blades in a razor was maybe three or four at that time, and the title of the article was Screw It, We're Doing Five Blades. So they actually foresaw the five blade razor. I think you can actually buy a seven blade razor today. Stephanie: Oh my gosh. So you have this idea of Supply. What did the early days look like? I mean you have this old-time razor where you're like, "Oh, this actually works really well." What was it like to actually start the company and find a way to create and manufacture this razor? Patrick: It was very challenging to say the least. So I had the good fortune of one of my friends. I wanted to just make the leap and just go cold turkey and go all in on the company and the idea from day one. I had the good fortune of having some friends in my life that I listened to that said, "Why don't you try to figure out how to make this product work before you just leave your paycheck behind?" That turned out to be really good advice because it took me about a year and a half if not two years to go from Kickstarter campaign, which was kind of the initial rough prototype to no kidding supply chain or product that I could actually sell at scale. Patrick: I have no background in consumer products at all, whatsoever. So a lot of that kind of two-ish years was just me making it up. I had no investors. I had no real network or people to rely on to help me figure out how to kind of make this product. So a lot of it was just kind of figuring it out as I went and making a lot of mistakes and fixing those mistakes when they happened. Stephanie: So how were you finding ways to... I mean, you get a really well-funded Kickstarter. What was the next steps after that? Did you go and start meeting with people who manufacture razors already and you're like, "Here's my new design idea?" Or since you're an engineer, were you actually like trying to make your own? Patrick: Yeah. No, I did not make my own. We've always done outsourced supply chain and production since day one. We're currently actually not working with any of our early manufacturing partners. We've got a really phenomenal network of manufacturers that we work with today. But in the early days, it was a lot of googling although that doesn't really get you too far when it comes to manufacturing. Patrick: And then just a lot of calling and cold outreach to anybody that I could get to pick up the phone. So I think I probably called somewhere around 50 or 60 different suppliers that I just found through Google or recommendation from somebody who would talk to me, but didn't want to do the work for me or something like that. I eventually settled on... And this is a very common practice in the consumer products space. I eventually settled on... I never really know what to call them, but kind of an outsourcing kind of middleman sort of company where they're a... This is what they do is they go find factories to make you your product. Stephanie: Oh, interesting. Patrick: Yeah, I found a guy local to me. I don't remember how I found him. I think he was on Upwork maybe and he managed the manufacturing of our first batch for me. Stephanie: Very cool. So what led you to change manufacturers? You said in the early days, you had one manufacturer two and then you don't use them now. What happened and what kind of lessons did you learn through switching manufacturers? Patrick: So we launched our campaign August of 2015. I promised delivery by March of 2015, and that was in my mind plenty... That was more than enough time. That was like I was being generous with that timeline. And the manufacturer knew that. They were on track with that. March came and went. No products. April came and went no products. May. And then June I finally... I'll never forget, he literally shows up on my doorstep with a big old dolly of... I think we had ordered maybe 2,000 razors or something like that and he drops him off inside my house. Then as he's walking out the door, he says, "Oh, by the way, there's a problem within." Patrick: I'm like, "Oh, now, you're going to tell me there's a problem." Anyways, it turned out there was an issue with the razor to where if it wasn't used properly, it actually wouldn't even really shave at all and you couldn't load a blade. Stephanie: Oh my gosh. Patrick: Yeah, just a little problem, which was just devastating because I had already spent all my money that I had raised, I think about $8,000 on that production batch. Essentially what we did over the next kind of two to three months is I set up a little shop in my garage to try to kind of adjust the razors to make them work and we did the best we could with that. We were very open with our backers and that's always like number one thing. I always tell young founders or operators is like when things go wrong trying to cover it up or not being honest about it with your customers is just going to make it worse. Patrick: You need to kind of be honest. We were telling our customers what's up like here's what happened, here's what we're trying to make right about it. Oh by the way, if you want to wait, we're going to start up a second batch with a new manufacturer, but it's just going to take some time. Patrick: Anyways, we ended up kind of salvaging some of that initial bash. We ended up having to scrap a lot of it, lost a lot of money on that first batch and then we started up a second production line and eventually made it right with our backers and delivered everything we promised, but it took... I think it was the following March before we finished delivering what we had promised. So it took a year longer than what we had told people it would take. The lesson for me is and has always been at the end of the day, all I have personally that's keeping my business alive is the relationships with the people that I work with. Patrick: Those relationships and that trust is everything. It's extremely difficult to, on the front end, determine if you can trust somebody. But I always highly leverage towards trust when I'm evaluating a new partner rather than capability, right? Because capability is just kind of table stakes for us to even have a conversation. Something is going to go wrong and what happens when it goes wrong is what makes all the difference. Patrick: So that first vendor, his true colors were showed when something went wrong. The vendors, I'm with now, things go wrong all the time, but what happens is they make it right. So that's kind of the biggest learning lesson for me and the biggest advice I can give people is going into business with people that you not only enjoy working with, but can trust to make things right when things go wrong because that's literally all you have. What's written on the contract doesn't even really matter when you're as small as me, right? Because I can't sue somebody. It's just... Anyway. Stephanie: Too much time, too much money to even try and do that to begin with. Patrick: Yeah, exactly. So it's all about relationships. Stephanie: Yeah, that's a really good point. So on your Twitter I think I saw that... I mean, you guys have been in business for a few years, but 80% of your lifetime profit has come in the last six months and I was wondering what's the catalyst behind that? Why are all the profits coming in now? Is it better marketing? What's behind the scenes to drive that profit now? Patrick: Two things, supply and demand. So on the supply side, I worked all last year. This is another kind of big learning point. I've gathered over the years. I worked all last year to significantly improve our gross margins or essentially how much our products cost to make versus what we sell them. The first four basically years of my company, I wasn't charging enough for my products and they were costing me too much to make. So 2019 was a big kind of cost cutting year for us. Patrick: Then in addition to that... So those cost cutting initiatives went into effect on November 1st. So that's the supply side and then the demand side is November 3rd we aired on Shark Tank. So that was the beginning of a big tidal wave of orders. So those two things coincided very nicely to bring us to a place to where we're significantly profitable in the way that we've never been before and that really changes a lot of things for us. Stephanie: That's awesome. So how did you go about figuring out what areas needed to have cost cut down? What does that process look like? Patrick: Yeah, for us, I mean it's less about... We've always had very low overhead. Started the business with my wife. We've barely ever paid ourselves much... We've had a very small team always. We worked out of our house for the first three years. So overhead has always been very low for us. I always, always, always urge young businesses and founders to keep overhead as low as possible. I think a lot of the reason you're seeing a lot of companies go out of business or have issues this year since COVID hit is they don't have the flexibility in their overhead to withstand volatility in the marketplace which is what's going on right now. Patrick: So that's always been low for us. It's always been a thing that I've held important. What it costs us to make our products versus what we charge for them, I had what I'd consider a friend/mentor get on a phone with me. He runs a very successful men's clothing business that's probably 10 times larger than mine. He shared with me, "If you're not charging at least 4X for your products what you make them for, you're never going to be able to scale in a meaningful way because customer acquisition costs are just too high to let you be able to scale with any less margin than that." And he's right. Stephanie: Did you take his advice exactly and do 4X of how much it costed you? Patrick: Yes, I did. Stephanie: Cool. And what was the price before for a razor and what did that jump to? Patrick: Without getting into the engineering side which is maybe a little boring, but we didn't really necessarily change the price of the razor. We have two versions. We have what we call an alloy version and a steel version. The steel version we increased the price probably about 20 to 30% and we introduced an alloy version which is a lot less expensive to manufacture and we actually kept and almost kind of lowered the price on that one because we were able to bring our production costs down so much. Stephanie: Got it. When you're lowering your production costs, I know you mentioned overhead is a big thing, but was there anything with your production costs or the materials that you also looked at decreasing the prices for? Patrick: No. I mean, we kind of kept the packaging the same. Another thing that you'll probably hear a lot of people, supply chain guys talk about is we're always trying to get like ahead of the curve when it comes to ordering because historically we've always had to rush shipments via air. Not all of our stuff, but a lot of our stuff is made overseas and air shipments cost anywhere from five to 10X more than ocean shipments. So that's always really painful when you got to spend 20 to 30 grand just to ship something versus two to three grand. Patrick: So getting better forecasting so that we can order far enough ahead of time to put something on the ocean instead of the air is another big thing we're doing. Otherwise, it's just like constant... I live in my profit and loss statement where I'm just counting every single penny that goes into my cost of goods sold whether it's the cost to ship to me, whether it's cost to ship to my customer, the fees I'm getting charged by my credit card companies, cost of my boxes. Patrick: I mean, it just requires relentless dedication to constantly being in the numbers to make sure that... It's just like... It's like entropy. All things tend towards chaos. Well, everything in your P&L tends towards higher costs if you don't stay on top of it because you're just going to spend more and more money. Stephanie: Yeah, I completely agree. I think a lot of founders oftentimes avoid looking at it because, one, it's kind of hard to read a P&L or a balance sheet or something like that if you haven't taken the time to figure out what all the line items mean. But then also like you said like a lot of things start adding up behind the scenes whether it's subscriptions or just stuff where you're like, "Whoa, I didn't realize my credit card fee is this." Maybe it's actually cheaper just to you know get a loan or do this and start thinking differently about how you're spending your money. Because a lot of those costs do add up especially in the early days. Patrick: They do, and software too. Stephanie: Oh, yeah. Software is a big one. And forecasting. I thought that's a really good point about forecasting in a way that you don't have to airship things. We actually haven't had someone on the show talk about air versus ocean, so I found that very interesting. Patrick: Yep. Stephanie: So the other thing I was wondering I would love to hear more about is your Shark Tank experience. We've had quite a few Shark Tankers on here and everyone's had a slightly different experience. I want to hear a little bit about what that looked like. Patrick: Awesome. I mean, it was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of deal. Never will forget it. We had a blast. I went on with my wife. We both pitched. We filmed in June of last year, so June of 2019 and then we aired in November of 2019. Just all the way through from the very... I applied three years in a row. It took me three years to get on the show and from the first day I applied the first time all the way through the last interaction I had with them after filming, it's just a really class act. Up and down, just phenomenal people. Patrick: I'm not talking necessarily about the sharks, although they're all great. You work with them for literally 30 minutes to an hour. You never see them again, but all the people behind the scenes are just a class act. Just the experience of standing in front of these people that you've watched for close to a decade, if not more than a decade on TV and actually talking to them and them talking back to you and saying your name. It's just like this very kind of out of body experience to where you kind of like in a sense like black out a little bit. Like don't even really remember what happened, at least personally. But we had an absolute blast. We ended up getting an offer from Robert and accepted his offer. We actually didn't end up closing that deal, but just had an absolute blast. Stephanie: Oh, and you said you didn't end up closing it? Patrick: No, we did not. Stephanie: I think that's also interesting to know that not all the deals close and there's things that maybe happen afterwards that could impact that on both sides. Patrick: Yeah. About half of them don't close. Stephanie: Yeah. So what was it like after you went on the show? I'm sure you had a large increase in demand? Did you guys have any website issues or inventory issues or what did that look like? Patrick: Yeah, a huge increase in demand. I think in November, we did you know 4X our previous monthly record. So big increase in demand. It really strained our customer service. It strained our supply... Not our supply chain, our warehouse a bit although we had just onboarded with Shopify Fulfillment Network. They were doing a phenomenal job of keeping up with things. It was more of what was straining was getting stuff in stock from our vendors on time. Patrick: So we had some orders that took us like three to four weeks to ship and that made some customers pretty upset since they were Christmas presents. We did get everybody everything they needed before Christmas which was like my one thing that I wasn't going to sacrifice on. We ended up getting it done. But between November 3rd and Christmas, it was pretty painful, in a good way. But the response was pretty phenomenal. Stephanie: Yeah, that's great. And are you seeing continued demand from that or did you start leveraging other maybe customer acquisition strategies or marketing tactics to kind of build on that demand? Patrick: Yeah, so it really put a ton of wind in our sales. It's really helped us kind of upgrade a lot of our business kind of to the next level. But in terms of like sustained demand, no, you're not getting a ton of like post Shark tank people streaming it and coming to your website. Although, I'm sure that happens. What it has done for us is it's given us kind of a social proof of being on this national platform. Patrick: So we've used a lot of footage and assets from the airing in our advertising. So if you go to our website, you'll probably get retargeted with some Shark Tank style ads. And just in general, it's given us the ability to taking us from this quiet kind of nobody brand to... I won't call us a household name, because we're certainly not, but a lot more people recognize us like, "Oh yeah, I've seen that before." Patrick: So it helps with everything. I mean, it helps with not only the company but your partners and your vendors are now even more excited to work with you. Press finds you that hasn't found you in the past. We'll be in The Wall Street Journal this weekend. Stephanie: Oh, cool. Patrick: We are in GQ's best single blade razor of 2020. These things just kind of slowly snowball. It's been a really phenomenal experience. We're very grateful for it. Stephanie: Yeah, that's great. It's such a good reminder of how PR can work if it's done the right way because there's all these PR companies who always say that they can help you, but it depends and that's just a good reminder that it can work well if you get the right outlet and getting featured in like Wall Street Journal or places like that. Very beneficial. Stephanie: So what kind of digital channels are you finding the most success in right now when you're going about... You're talking about retargeting and different marketing tactics. What kind of channels are you finding success in? Patrick: Sure. I mean, no surprise Facebook, Instagram and Google in that order for volume. We've always wanted to test these other channels like Snapchat and Tik-Tok and whatever and we probably will sooner or later. But there are some other things we want to spend some more time on building before then. We do a little bit of affiliate. We do a tiny bit of influencer, and that's really kind of I think what we're going to start turning our eye to for maybe the next phase of our growth. But yeah, those are really the big channels for us. Stephanie: Yeah, cool. So when you were building up supply and you mentioned Harry's earlier. The razor market feels like it's been pretty popular for people to start companies in. You've got Dollar Shave Club, you've got Harry's. How did you think about that competition and making sure that you stood out among the other brands that were launching? Patrick: Yeah. So our value proposition is very much kind of anti-Harry's and anti-Dollar Shave Club. Then our positioning and our pricing is similarly the complete opposite. So they're clearly competitors of ours, but I don't really consider them necessarily direct competitors. What I do consider them is people that I can steal my customers from. So it's a single blade. I haven't really talked much about the product. It's a single blade. Stephanie: Yeah, let's hear about that. Patrick: Yeah. It's a premium single blade razor and the value propositions are there's a few. Number one, it's not a cheap product. It's a $75 handle, but the value prop is you invest a lot up front, but then you save tons of money over time. So our blades are 75 cents a piece and they last somewhere between eight to 10 shaves. So after you buy the handle, you're spending... If you're shaving every day, you're spending maybe 24 bucks on blades a year. Then you've got this handle that lasts forever. We actually guarantee it for life. Patrick: So you never have to buy the handle again. But then aside from that, the value prop is a single blade gives you just as close of a shave as a multi-blade razor. But for roughly 30% of guys, they experience like myself a really severe razor burn and or bumps typically on the neck or in the sensitive parts of the face. And a lot of that is caused by multi-blade razors. We don't have to go that deep into it, but the way they're designed is works for some guys in terms of giving you a close shave, but for guys like me who have sensitive skin, it actually does the opposite. It makes things worse for you. Patrick: Anyways, so going back to Harry's and Dollar Shave Club. So a lot of guys, they just use these razors and they just think like this is the way everybody shaves and they just have to deal with this issue and just deal with the razor burn or just not shave. So what we're telling them is no, it's not the case. You can actually shave and enjoy it and not have your face be a train wreck after you shave. Patrick: So we're slowly helping guys kind of wake up from this myth that multi-blades are better and that's like the only way to shave. If it doesn't work for you, then too bad. Just keep shaving and tearing up your face. Stephanie: Yeah. How are you going about that education process because I was going to say that it does seem like there's quite a bit of education required for that and just for like... I mean, you mentioned shaving eight to 10 times. I'm like, "Oh, I think a lot of people probably shave with the same blade for long time." I'm thinking about myself, I'm like, "Oh, man. I'm pretty bad at that." So how do you go about getting people to change their behavior? Patrick: Yeah. Honestly, it's tough. I mean, I'll give you an example. We present in our ads like why multi-blade razors are bad for your skin and we literally present it the same... We present the same data that Gillette presents. It's on their website. Multi-blade razors are literally designed to lift... The first blade tugs the hair out of the skin and like the second and third blade kind of cuts it below the surface of the skin. That's literally how Gillette has designed them to work. Patrick: People accuse of us of lying and making that up. And it's like, "No, just google it." You'll see it straight out of the horse's mouth. So the point is like it takes a lot of education. When they don't even believe that you're just saying what your competitor says, clearly they they need a lot of education. Patrick: So we do it through video. For example, if you buy the razor, you get four emails from me, the first four days after you buy it and each one is a short 60-second training video. It's not like this outrageously complex course of learning how to shave with our razor. It's 60-second videos. But guys, we've learned are very prone to throw instructions out so they don't read anything that we include with the product. Stephanie: You think they fancy videos like you call them, "Hey, come look at this." Patrick: Exactly. It continues to be a challenge, but in general video seems to work the best in terms of teaching guys how to do. And actually, we're starting up our YouTube channel next week to kind of help that process as well. Stephanie: That's really interesting. Another thing I read. I don't even know why I know anything about razors because I did read an article about the marketing behind them, how a lot of the traditional companies show the razor getting like water all over it and sitting in the shower and that actually degrades the blades and then you have to change it more frequently and that was like their whole plan. Do you think that's true or am I just reading conspiracy theories behind razor blades? Patrick: Yeah, I don't know exactly what you've read, but I mean it is true that water, what it does, I mean, if it sits on a blade it causes it to rust which degrades the edge. I mean, we tell our customers don't leave your razor in the shower in a damp environment. We tell our customers not to do that because that's very... That's true. Stephanie: Yeah. I mean, all these things I think most people probably are doing right now, I'm thinking of myself and our producers typing in there that how long she goes from changing her blades. So I think there's a lot of education to do in the market in general. How are you guys also thinking about new products because these are designed for men, but I'm like women definitely have a lot of the same issues. Are you thinking about launching new products geared towards women as well or are you just strictly focused on men's products? Patrick: The short term, we're focused on men's products. We do have women as customers. My wife and my co-founder is a user of our product. So we're more than happy to have the ladies buy from us. But what's really, really difficult or at least I've found is to position our product as both a men's and women's product at the same time. I don't know the best. I'm sure there's a good way to do it, but I don't know what it is because shaving your face and shaving your legs are too... They seem similar, but they're very, very different things. Patrick: I'd love to do like maybe different landing pages or product pages because the value props are basically different, right? So I don't know, man. Maybe I could use some advice for how to sell... Maybe the problem is I just don't know yet how to sell razors to women. Stephanie: It sounds like my team. We've got ideas and we'll team up with your wife and we can all figure it out together. Patrick: Yeah, yeah exactly. It is on the to-do list. It's just something we haven't been able to get to yet. Stephanie: Very cool. So tell me a little bit about how you developed your website like the experience... I mean, when you're selling something that kind of needs to be tried out or you need to hold like the handle to see like wow, this is a good quality like piece of steel here, how do you convey that to the customers who are coming on and how did you develop your website experience. Patrick: Yeah. It's tough, it's really tough. I don't think we've arrived by any stretch, but certainly, certainly made a lot of progress. We have a very, very talented development company. We work with agency called Fuel Made. Good friends, just good people and they do amazing work. So they handle just from the front end and the back end design. They're handling most of that for me. Patrick: Prior to that when we were smaller, I think it's a complete, complete waste of money to spend any money on complex web design. There are so many free or very cheap templates out there that work so well. I would encourage people to not spend any money on development and take any money you have and invest it all in creative and start with just phenomenal photography. Patrick: Find a very, very talented photographer and spend your money there if you're going to spend your money anywhere. So I have a very good friend of mine who is that person and he takes all of our photographs. And so we over index on beautiful photography. We're now at a point to where we can afford kind of an expensive agency to develop our site and otherwise, we do just tons of AB testing. Every month, we're testing something new or we're launching a new feature. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails miserably. Each month is just an opportunity to get better. Stephanie: What kind of tests have you seen work versus fail because I think a lot of people may be thinking about trying out some of the same kind of features or tests that you're thinking about. So is there anything that comes to mind where you're like this really worked well with conversions or increase cart value versus this one did not work at all and it seems like it would have. Patrick: Yeah. I probably have more this didn't work than this does work. Stephanie: Let's hear it. I like those stories just as much. Patrick: Well, man, I'm really sad about this one. We just did one where once you add the razor to the cart, there's a pop-up that immediately shows up that says, "Hey, do you want to upgrade this to our starter set which is our second best seller aside from our razor?" We tested different variations of that pop-up. We tested it against no pop-up and there was like no clear winner after, I think it was two weeks and a very significant amount of traffic. No clear winner. Patrick: So we decided not to go with that pop-up. I launched a membership/loyalty program in April. The way I designed it was outrageously complex and I put a lot of development work and dollars into it, let it run for eight weeks and then I canned it. That was painful to do because it was just too complex. Stephanie: What made it complex? Because I've actually heard similar themes from a few other people who've been on the show who said that they thought that a loyalty program would work for them, but it ended up not working like they thought. So what do you think made it too complex or would you have done it differently or are you just like, "We're not trying that again?" Patrick: Yeah. Two things on the front end and on the back end. So on the back end, the code, it was completely custom designed from a code using scripts on Shopify and it just got really complicated. But on the front end, it was kind of confusing to the customer. So the program was essentially like it was kind of like buy a razor and get a free lifetime of blades offer which sounds like a really compelling offer, but there's always kind of... There's got to be a caveat to that statement. Patrick: So it was like you could get a shipment every quarter of blades, just pay for shipping or you could buy our premium membership, which was like 20 bucks a year and then get the blade shipped to you once a quarter, which is a great deal, but offering them those two options was really confusing and then just the way we made them sign up for it was confusing. Patrick: In general, we're going to try to launch another program in the future, but it will be far less complicated. If you can't explain it in a sentence or less and have people get it immediately, then you've set yourself up for failure. And that's what we did. I've explained the program to people and they'd be like, "Okay, wait. But if I buy this, what happens?" Stephanie: I need my Google spreadsheet out like which way will I save an extra dollar? Patrick: Yeah. So anyways, things that have worked. We actually launched international currency on our website because we do a pretty big chunk of business overseas and that actually increases conversion rates quite a bit for us. I'm blanking right now. We've had other wins, but I'm blanking on it right now. Stephanie: That's all right. If you think of any more, we can circle back because I actually think it's very interesting diving into some of these tests like this because I'm sure other founders are thinking about similar tests. Patrick: For sure. Stephanie: Very cool. So a couple general Ecommerce questions. Now, that you've been in the world for a while and kind of doing a bunch of tests and you launched your company, what kind of trends or patterns do you see coming down the pipe right now especially with everything with the pandemic. Are there any changes that you see coming in the future around Ecommerce? Patrick: I guess this is probably cliché, but the only thing I know is that I have no idea what's coming next. I think there's a ton of opportunity in the future and a ton of volatility in the future for Ecommerce. I'm very, very grateful, number one to be in the industry I'm in to continue to operate and be healthy and growing. I have friends in the restaurant business that cannot say that. Patrick: So I'm very bullish and grateful for the industry I'm in. I'm not planning on changing anytime soon, but at the same time, I think consumer behavior is going to continue to be like challenging to kind of forecast. People say this all the time on Twitter, but I just don't get the fact that our stock market is so high and our GDP is so low and so many people are out of business. Patrick: To me, it's like, okay, when is this... Part of me is waiting for the other shoe to drop and when is this all going to come crashing down and the other part of me is like eCommerce is 30% of retail now and like that's not showing any sign of stopping anytime soon. So I don't know if that's a direct answer, but in general what I'm doing is I'm doubling down. I'm building processes and teams for growth. Patrick: So we actually just left our long time marketing agency that I had a great relationship and love and really enjoyed working with and it was really difficult to leave them. But the main reason I left is like I'm convinced the brands that are super nimble and able to react and adapt really quickly are going to be the ones that survive and thrive in this environment, in this volatile environment. Patrick: So whether Facebook CPMs are up or down or what's going on, I think we're just going to be really flexible and part of what I'm doing to be flexible is building more internal teams to move quickly rather than just being a bit slower. Stephanie: Yeah. That's such a great point and I think a lot of other companies are probably starting to think about that too especially around like being able to move quickly and not having costs that are recurring for like the next three years that you can't get out of or long-term contracts and even around like not relying on just a single manufacturer and being able to kind of like move around if needed. So definitely being more nimble will probably be how a lot of companies are thinking about this going forward. Patrick: Yeah, and it's tough because at the same time you also, I think... We started the call off kind of like this, it's like you have to keep overhead low at the same time. So you've got these competing priorities to be able to move fast and have an internal team, but then also not have a bloated internal team that you just can't respond. Your overhead can't respond quick enough to any kind of unforeseen events. Stephanie: Yep. Completely agree. So is there anything that you wish I would have asked you that I did not bring up? Patrick: Let me see. I don't think so. No, nothing I can think of. Stephanie: Man, I'm just the best. All right. Cool. Then we can move on to a quick lightning round, if that sounds good. Patrick: That works for me. Stephanie: All right. So the lightning round brought to you by SalesForce Commerce Cloud. This is where I will ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Patrick? Patrick: I am ready. Stephanie: Cool. So if you were to start a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be? Patrick: Okay. I know the answer to this one. Stephanie: You're prepared. Patrick: This is no offense to you at all. Stephanie: All right. I'll try not to be offended. Patrick: I would start not like a one-on-one podcast, but like a round table debate style podcast with roughly three to five people. I want vigorous like vitriolic... I don't know if that's a word, but debate. I want people that are so ingrained in their opinion that they're willing to fight other people to the death about what they have to say. The topics would be all Ecommerce or retail related. Stephanie: Okay. Patrick: So anyways. Stephanie: I feel like I see that happening on Twitter right now though. Patrick: Yes, it's Twitter and podcast form. That's exactly what it is. Stephanie: Yeah. I see all these people getting very angry about stuff with certain Ecommerce or someone calls something like D2C and they're like, "That's not data saved." I'm like oh my gosh. Patrick: That's exactly what I'm talking about. Stephanie: That's funny. We at Mission have done roundtables before, but they're usually with like three CMOs and then one of us hosting it. So it does not get that heated. So I'd be very interested to see how your podcast goes. Patrick: Yeah, it would be a requirement for yelling to happen. Stephanie: That sounds great. What's up next on your reading list? Patrick: Let's see. I just downloaded been a book by Ben Horowitz. I don't remember the name of it but it's about building culture. Stephanie: Oh, yeah. What is that new one? Patrick: I don't remember. But it's all related to this kind of transition I'm going through right now is what I call a transition from founder to CEO and focusing less on doing things myself and focusing more about delegating and building a team that can accomplish things without me involved. So a huge, huge, huge part of that is culture and I have no clue how to build good culture. So I want to learn from the best. Stephanie: What You Do Is Who You Are? Patrick: Yes, that's it. Is that new or is that old? Stephanie: Yeah. That one is his newer book. I was listening to it on Audible and I like it because it ties in history along with building a culture, but it's like here's what happened a long time ago and why these themes are still relevant. So I'd recommend that one as well. Patrick: So you liked it? That's good. Stephanie: Yeah. I thought it was great. Patrick: Okay, good. Stephanie: What's up next on your Netflix queue? Patrick: I don't really watch a whole lot of Netflix. Stephanie: No? Nothing? Everyone always starts by saying that and they're like, "Oh, wait. I just did this. I just watched this whole series." Patrick: It's funny. Me and Jennifer will turn on Netflix to watch something new and we always default to just watching The Office. Stephanie: That's a good one. That's a good go to, to Keep you smiling. Patrick: I will say we did just start. We dug up an old DVD set of Seinfeld and now we're watching Seinfeld right now. Stephanie: Oh, nice. Pulling out the DVDs. That's awesome. Patrick: Yeah, the DVD. Blu-Ray though, yeah. Stephanie: Yeah, got to be. What app do you enjoy most on your phone? Patrick: What app? I use twitter probably too much. It's a good thing and a bad thing. A lot of the good things that have happened to me over the past year have been through connections on Twitter, but it can also be a time suck. Stephanie: Yes, I agree. All right. And then the last one, what is a favorite piece of tech that you use or a trying out that's making you or your team more efficient right now? Patrick: More efficient. Well, we're trying out a productivity app called ClickUp? Have you ever heard of it? Stephanie: I think I have. Tell me a little bit more about it. Patrick: It's kind of like a monday.com or an Asana. So like project management, task management. I've never found one I like or that works. We've tried doing it in Notion before, although I love Notion. So we're trying that in ClickUp. I don't know. We'll see. I like it so far. Stephanie: Cool. Yeah, we'll have to check that out. We use Basecamp for almost everything, but I'm open to other things. Patrick: Go ahead. Stephanie: Oh, go ahead. Patrick: I was just going to say, I don't know that I'm a huge fan of Basecamp. I could never get it to work for some reason. Stephanie: Yeah. It is a little high when it comes to like starting up and teaching the team and everyone learning from it, but it gets better. Patrick: Yeah. Stephanie: All right. Well, this has been such a fun interview, Patrick. Thank you for coming on the show. Where can people find out more about you and Supply? Patrick: You can find me on Twitter where I spend most of my time. My handle sounds like canoe. Because my last name sounds like canoe, it's Patrick Coddou. So you can find me there and that's really where I spend all my time. And then our website is supply.co. You can see our company and all of our products there. Stephanie: Awesome. Thanks so much and have a great day. Patrick: Thank you.
If you want to keep up with what’s going on in the eCommerce industry, the best thing to do is to go straight to the source and ask. But where can you find a group of eCommerce business owners openly talking about their pain points, sharing tips about how they grow their businesses, and combining their knowledge to solve problems together? Does such a mecca exist? Andrew Youderian is here to tell you that it does. Andrew is the founder of eCommerce Fuel, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, he discusses how he built a community of more than 1,000 seven-figure eCommerce business owners, plus he shares all of the insights he’s gathered along the way. From questions about Amazon, to a crash course in community-building, to the single metric he says should guide eCommerce businesses today… Andrew divulges some of the industry’s best-kept secrets and more in today’s interview. Key Takeaways: The Value of Selective Community Building: A community is only as strong as the people in it. Together, a community can deliver ideas, content, and capital to other members who would not be able to find those things on their own. But to ensure that all members are receiving value, it is important to be selective about the acceptance process. Finding Your Way Through The Amazon: “If I'm selling to wholesalers, should I let them sell on Amazon?” “How do I control my brand identity on Amazon?” These questions and more are plaguing the industry and at eCommerce Fuel, the community is gathering to come up with answers, including how to capitalize on the recent delays in shipping Amazon has seen. Meaty Metrics: While most owners will point to revenue as the main metric to judge success, it is widely believed that revenue is one of the least important metrics when judging the health and long-term viability of a business. There are other metrics that are more telling, including repeat purchase rate, and one other that gets very little fanfare but could change the course of your business: price per visitor. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce, this is your host Stephanie Postles and today we're joined by Andrew Youderian, the founder of eCommerceFuel. Andrew, welcome. Andrew: Hey, thanks Stephanie. I appreciate you having me on. Stephanie: So, is a weird feeling a podcaster being interviewed by a podcaster? What are your thoughts right now? Andrew: I think it's great. You have to do all the work and I can just sit back and relax. Well, unless you send some really pointed questions my way, so maybe I shouldn't be relaxed, so we'll see. Stephanie: Oh, yeah. I don't know. Andrew: But, yeah- Stephanie: You might have to sit up straight and get ready, this might be intense. Andrew: This may be, I need to stop slouching here. But no, it's good. Good to be on, it's fun to be on the other side of the mic for a change. Stephanie: So, I want to dive into your company eCommerce Fuel. I looked at it and it seems awesome. It seems like you have gathered so many insights from this company that you've built all around eCommerce, but I want to hear in your words what is eCommerce Fuel? Andrew: At eCommerce Fuel we provide community content and capital to seven figure plus store owners, and so we do that through an online form which is really the heartbeat of our community. We've got over 1,000 vetted store owners, and the idea was really just get a lot of people together that are doing this day in and day out, that we're running seven... our average store owner is probably doing three or four million dollars a year with their business, so that's community aspect. We also do a big event every year for our community through content, like you said I'm a podcaster. I've been doing the eCommerce Fuel podcast for I think it's about seven years now, which is crazy. Stephanie: Wow. Andrew: And then we have a capital arm as well where we invest in promising eCommerce businesses. We have 20 investors that have a lot of similar experience or world class experts, everything from Facebook marketing to email marketing to product design and so we invest in companies that we think are interesting, so that's what we do at eCommerceFuel. Stephanie: That's such a cool model. So, for you podcast I think I saw you had over 300 episodes. Andrew: Yeah. I think, actually I think we're... yes, we do. I've been, like I said, been doing it since July 2013. Yeah, been going at it for awhile. It's been fun. Stephanie: Yeah, that was really cool to look at your backlog and the guests that you've had on. So, your business models' really interesting how you have a capital arm and community, I mean two things that I would say are very hot right now. Everyone is always thinking about of course being investors, I mean at least here in Silicon Valley that's everyone's dream it seems like. And then building up a community is something that we've heard a lot of guests mention on the show, like how to properly build a community. What was your idea behind starting this business and having those different arms of the business? Andrew: They came in stages, so in a nutshell, left the corporate world and got my teeth in eCommerce for starting in 2008 on a couple different eCommerce businesses and built those up. So, I had a sense of this space and nobody was talking about eCommerce unless it was like from a Home Depot or like a Lowe's, like a, you know, Fortune 500 style? Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Andrew: And so I started writing about what it's like to grow an eCommerce business for a small team or a single founder and developed a little bit of a following on the blog, started podcasting, and then from there that kind of just naturally led to me meeting all these great people and I thought what if we got a bunch of people in a community together that had some kind of vetting thresholds and just made sure everyone had some level of experience? And that launched the community and built that up over time and then the capital arm is fairly recent, really recent in fact, it's about five or six months old. That just came as a natural extension of seeing all these interesting entrepreneurs that hopefully we'd built some trust and report with, or that people knew about us from the time running the business. And then also just a really great group of investors who also had not just money, but a lot of in the trenches experience and advice to lend, so it kind of came in stages. Stephanie: Yeah, that's really cool. To start with the community aspect, what are the vetting procedures that people have to go through? How do you know who to bring in to keep it a high quality community? Because I think that's biggest problem when you're getting in all these Facebook groups or communities, you're like, "Oh my gosh, just everyone's in here and I'm actually not learning anything." So, what does it look like to get into your community? Andrew: Yeah, you're right. I mean, if I could only do one thing well in a community it would be bring the right people into it. So, our guidelines are a little nuanced but you need to be operating a seven figure business. If you have a very proprietary product that you've made from scratch or that is a little harder to make sometimes we'll take people in kind of the mid to high six figure range. If you're selling just on Amazon usually we require a little bit more than that, so that's on the revenue threshold sides. Andrew: So, we keep it no major SaaS vendors, and then for service providers we're really careful. I'd probably say only 10% of our applicants that we accept are service providers and they need to be recommended by an existing member because you can... An amazing email marketing expert that knows the space, that is respectful of people and isn't going to come in at a hard pitch and is going to build relationships the right way through adding value, is a huge asset. But we want to make sure those are the type of people we have and not people who are just trying to sign somebody up on the first day, so. Stephanie: Yeah, that's really important. How many people are in your community now? Andrew: We have about 1,100 members in the community. Stephanie: Okay. How did you go about building that up? What is your method of bringing new people into the community? How do you get in front of people and even tell them about eCommerceFuel? Andrew: Community building's interesting. You've got this chicken and an egg problem, right? Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Andrew: And the way that I did it was when I was blogging and podcasting early on about eCommerce, just over that probably 12 month period really focus on not trying to monetize the business or anything, just trying to build authority, get a little bit of a reputation, and connect with people. Over the course of a year, just naturally, organically, met about 100 to 150 really interesting people. And any time I did, I'd just put a little tag on them in gmail and say, "Community seed member." Stephanie: Oh. Andrew: So, a year in a had this list of 150 people and I reached out to them and said, "Here's what I'm doing. I'm starting a community, are you interested?" And then over the course of about 30 to 45 days I dripped in, I added, about four or five people a day. I'd bring them in, I'd introduce them, I'd introduce them to other people, I'd ask them questions, kickstart discussions, and so it gradually grew. I didn't just drop everyone in at once, and it took about like 45 days but we had a bit of a community at that point. And then from there I had over the last year built up some traffic to the website, was able to put up a page that said, "Hey, here's the community. You can join," and that gave us kind of... because you need both things, right? Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Andrew: Like in community you have to have new people come in because you always have a drop off even in the most healthy. So, from it was able to kind of, with a lot of work, get to self sustaining within probably 18 to 24 months, so. Stephanie: Wow. Yeah, that's great. And it is a paid community? Andrew: It is, yes. It's a paid community, so it's... yeah, it is. It's $99 a month. Stephanie: That also helps... Okay, yeah. I'm sure that also helps with quality and bringing in people who are serious and really want to learn and contribute to get their monies worth. Andrew: Oh, it helps so much. I mean, for a couple reasons why. We have, just like you said, on the vetting side, yeah, it shows that people are actually serious about this. The other nice thing is it gives us the resources to do things like hire a real community manager. We have someone full time that their whole job is just to vet people to make sure that if people have questions that don't get answered they can move them to the right people. It let's us invest in technology, we've probably poured six figures plus into the custom tech for the community, so yeah, it makes it a lot easier. Stephanie: Yeah, that's really cool. When it comes to keeping the community engaged, because to me that's one of the biggest things to make sure people keep renewing their membership and they want to check in everyday and see what's new and see who's talking, how do you go about keeping them engaged? And maybe what have you seen works and what didn't work? Like any tests that you've done where you're like, "We've tried this and this failed," or, "We tried this and this really increased engagement a lot and helped keep it going?" Andrew: I think the best thing you can do, two things, the first thing is to actually have discussion and content that are highly relevant to what people are doing day in and day out. So, again, kind of going back, if you get the right people in the same room that's 80-90% of the battle. From that point, setting up custom notifications is really important. So, some of the custom tech that we've talked about, when people sign up we don't just blast them with every single discussion that pops up, that's crazy, right? They'd just drowned in a fire house because we have like 5,000 comments every months in there. But we do try to figure out like, hey, what are you an expert in and what are interested in learning about? And then when they join we tailor their notifications to try to create the highest level of a signal to noise ratio possible, and so that's another thing. The third thing is just maintaining a really respectful environment, like we have a pretty strict no jerks rule. I probably shouldn't say this, but I get a lot of pleasure out of throwing people who are just downright disrespectful and just, you know, kind of just generally unpleasant out of our community because they're horrible. Stephanie: Yeah, good. Boot them. Andrew: And also non-solicitation. We kind of have a one strike, one warning, and then if you do it again you're out. So, we don't put up with pitches, you know, if people are hard pitching stuff they're out. So, I think those are the big things that help with maintaining an active community where people keep coming back to. Stephanie: Yeah, those are such good points and it's not only applicable to your business but even thinking about any eCommerce business of how to build up... I mean, everyone talks about building these communities but how do you actually make it helpful and personalize it to people in a way that people want to engage on your social media post or they want to engage on your blog or tag themselves wherever they're in your clothing or with your mug or whatever. So, I think these lessons actually can apply across industries as well and not just upon building a community like you're doing. Andrew: Yeah. Community building, it's interesting, it's kind of like a brand. It is a brand. It's insanely hard to get up and running, like the amount of time and energy and love and relational just work that you need to put in, I don't say it in a bad way, but just building relationships takes a tremendous amount of work. It takes a ton of time, just like building a brand. But it's insanely defensible, I mean, if you're willing to put in that, you know, if you have a multi year approach. You can't steal people's friends, right? Stephanie: Yeah. Andrew: And that's what happens, whether you're building a community for your brand or kind of a micro niche community like this for eCommerceFuel, is people come in and they stay because they get value and they stick around for a couple months but then they come to an event, they connect with people via PM, and then build genuine friends. I don't know, you'd be hard pressed to tear me away from my good friends and it's really defensible in that department, so. Stephanie: Yeah, I agree. I love that. So, you probably get a lot of really good insights into the world of eCommerce and where things are headed just by some of the questions that some of the members in your community are asking each other, and I wanted to know what kind of top questions do you see occurring right now where it's like quite a few people are asking the same type of question or these same things keep popping up? Andrew: Yeah. Let's start with the 500 pound gorilla in the eCommerce space, and that's Amazon. Some of the questions I think people are asking on there is how do I... I'll just go through a handful of them and then maybe we can talk about ones that are most interesting to you. If I'm selling to wholesalers, should I let them sell on Amazon? How do I control my brand identity on Amazon? There's some interesting popping up right now about how... I don't know if you've noticed this, but Amazon Prime used to be for awhile it was free shipping, then it was two day, and it was one day, and now it's like- Stephanie: Yeah. Andrew: ... three to five days if you're lucky depending on where you live. Stephanie: Yeah, I did notice that and I was like, "What's happening here? Usually I can get my stuff for my son in like a day and now it's taking a week." Andrew: Yeah. It's kind of crazy, and of course because of just with COVID eCommerce is blowing up, the capacity is limited on the delivery networks. But it's interesting because it kind of levels the playing field at this moment in time for independent brands because the shipping factor is not so much of an issue, and in fact a lot of people are probably are almost in... If somebody gives you something and takes it away it's worse than if they just had never given you anything to begin with, right? Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, yeah I feel way more sad right now than I ever would have before this. Andrew: Exactly, right, because the expectation's there. So, that's creating an interesting opportunity. One of the things that Amazon just recently came out with I think in the last couple days was re-introducing... Way back, I don't know, two, three, four, I don't know how many years ago, multiple years ago, you used to able to ship your products from Amazon's warehouses to customers. You could use them as a 3PL fulfillment center without Amazon branded boxes. They changed that for many years and just this week I think they changed back to saying, "Oh, actually you can use our fulfillment services with your own proprietary boxes," or at least with unbranded boxes. And I think potentially... Who knows why they did it, it was kind of perplexing to a lot of people, but perhaps because they realize that they're losing on the shipping game and other merchants maybe are starting to migrate other places and if independent merchants are able to deliver the same shipping without Amazon maybe more then we'll move off. And one thing that we've done, we've done a State of the Merchant Report for the last three years, and our one for this year should be hopefully coming out fairly soon. But a trend that is really noticeable is the number of people that are going to Amazon is really... it's not reversing but it's plateauing very significantly. Andrew: And even just chatting with merchants and seeing a lot of case studies, people are taking a lot harder look at is it worth going on Amazon for how much channel risk you take on, how much loss of control of the consumer that you give up, you don't have addresses, all these things. They're just taking a lot harder look at is this good for my business long term? Stephanie: Yeah. So, do you think 2020 will show that a lot of people are pulling back from Amazon? Andrew: That is a good question. I think not a lot of people, but I do think when we released the report I made this prediction in the report too, so very likely could just fall on my face in the mud here, but I think the percentage of people who sell on Amazon, it was about 55% of all stores that we surveyed last time, I think that will decrease a small amount. I don't think we're going to see a precipitous drop but I think it goes from 55% to maybe 54 or f... I think we start to see that inflection point. Stephanie: Yeah, that's really interesting. The one thing I also read in your 2019 report was about the different marketing channels that people were using and I saw that Amazon ads had the highest ROI but not many people are using it, so I'm wondering what are your thoughts around that aspect of using it as a marketing tool? Andrew: Yeah. No, it's... Wow, good prep work. If you're on Amazon, Amazon ads you have to have a... people reported them being the most effective sales channel that they use. So, if you're on the platform they work really well, so definitely should be doing that if you're on the platform. I think it's just more of a... it's not a question so much of should we use Amazon ads if you're on the platform, you absolutely should. It's more of a question of do we want to be on Amazon in the first place? But, yeah, for people selling on Amazon they work really well. Stephanie: Yeah, okay. But then the other interesting thing I saw was that the average order value was way lower for... because if it's maybe a direct to consumer site or anywhere else people can maybe stack on additional things from your brand, where I think I saw on Amazon the average order value was much lower which makes me think you're not getting that, hey, you should maybe also try this from my brand and this from my brand as well and kind of increase the cart value. Andrew: I think that could definitely be part of it. I think a big part of it too is that if you have people on Prime there's no free shipping threshold, right? Have you ever ordered a... what's a good example here? Like a $3 koozie and it shows up and you're like, "How did they pay for the shipping for this? They lost money on this." Or even better, you order a $7 paperweight set that weight like 10 pounds and they ship it. There's no threshold so it's easy to impulse buy small stuff on Amazon. Stephanie: Yeah. Good point. Andrew: Whereas if you're buying from an independent merchant not always, but more often than not you're going to have some kind of free shipping threshold. So, either you're intentionally going to seek it out or you're buying multiple things so I think that probably also has a big part in why those order values are different. Stephanie: That's a good point. That's a good reason to look further into data and not just look really quickly like I did through the report. So, what other trends are you thinking are happening either right now, because a lot's been changing because of COVID and things are kind of just all over the place where some people are struggling, some people aren't. It seems like the market is changing quickly. What other trends or things happening do you see that people are surfacing in your community, or are you building into your next report coming out? Andrew: Yeah. So, eCommerce obviously no surprise here is just exploding, and we did a survey, this was in March when the world was falling apart and nobody knew what was happening and it was much more uncertainty than there even was now, and you saw early on in that you kind of saw a very big dip for the first probably week when COVID really started spiking and being taken seriously. And then you saw kind of half and half, half the businesses were doing okay or growing and half were failing, now I'd say you definitely have some businesses that are really struggling. If you're in the event space, if you sell items in the event space, any of the kind of in person things are having a hard time, but by large I'd say most of our stores are doing, you know, most of the industries are doing really well so that's fantastic. One thing that's tough, it's a downside, and anybody who's selling is probably going to be aware of is just the sales tax issue in the Unites States is just an absolute disaster, just on making- Stephanie: Tell me a bit about that because whether- Andrew: It's just a dumpster fire. Stephanie: I don't know if I... well, I actually probably have avoided anytime I see tax I'm like, "Oh, no thank you." So, I would love for you to dive in a bit and tell me why is the sales tax a disaster because [crosstalk 00:18:28]. Andrew: Yeah, so I'll try to be somewhat brief because you could probably talk about this for quite awhile, up until two or three years ago pretty much the case was if you... The only places you had to collect sales tax for was if you had Nexus in a state. So, if you had... I run a business out of Montana and Arizona, so Montana doesn't collect sales tax and so traditionally we've only had to collect sales tax in Arizona. There's a big Supreme Court case that came across in 2017 or 18. It was Wayfair versus South Dakota and pretty much the shakeout from that was that the Supreme Court said that states can require sellers that are outside of their state, they have no physical presence in their state, if they sell to a customer within their state they can collect sales tax on them if they reach a certain threshold. If they sell either a certain dollar volume in that state or if they have a minimum number transactions for that state. And it could be as low as 200 transactions and $50-100,000. So, the problem that causes is that now you have companies who create this economic Nexus and now all of a sudden they have to be responsible for collecting and submitting sales tax not just to 50 states but to potentially sometimes all these different municipalities and cites, and just creates a disaster of a compliance thing. Andrew: So, you've got companies that have sprung up to try to deal with that, and one top of that, if you sell on Amazon, technically if you have inventory... Normally, you send your inventory into Amazon and they a lot of times will split it up in three or four warehouses so it can be delivered quickly. Well, technically now if you have those inventory in those four states you have Nexus in those states and you have to also collect sales tax. So, it's just on the Amazon front, on the independent front, it's just created... We don't have any central governance for this. What I think would be best is if the federal government kind of took it over and said, "Hey, we'll create a national sales and redistribute." But at the moment you either have to deal with an insane amount of complexity, especially as you get larger, or you have to run the risks of being out of compliance and facing huge fines. It's a really rough place to be. Stephanie: Wow. How are you seeing eCommerce companies tackle this? That is not something that I've even thought about honestly, and it kind of scares me to ever start an eCommerce store now. Andrew: Yeah. There's a lot of different ways. Sometimes there's places... I have a company called The Tax Valet that helps out, they do a really good job. Kind of a personal hands on approach to doing this. Some merchants will use SaaS software like Taxify or TaxJar to be able to do that kind of stuff, Avalara as well. And some people just roll the dice and say, "Hey, this is a nightmare I'm not going to try to deal with this," so there's a lot of different... it depends on your risk tolerance, it depends how big you are, but people are taking a lot of different approaches to it. But to do it right it's really unfortunate. Stephanie: You'll have to hire someone. Andrew: Yeah, hire someone or really go deep on the SaaS side of things and dive in. Stephanie: Yeah, that sounds messy. Well, earlier you were talking about the howling out of eCommerce and I wanted you to talk a bit about that because we're talking still about the trends and what it's going to look like in the future, and I thought you had an interesting take on that so I'd love for you to go over that if you could. Andrew: Sure. And again, of course totally could be wrong here, but when I look forward into the future I feel like Amazon's going to be hallowed out in the sense that, or excuse me, eCommerce is going to be hollowed out in the sense that you have... On one side, you have brands on Amazon that sell either one or two things, they're either well known national brands, like the... well, I don't think Nike sells on them anymore so that's a bad example, but the... Why am I blanking on big national brands here? Tide for example could sell on there or Rubbermaid or Adidas, brands people... household names. They sell on there because it's just they know that brand, they go find it, and they want to buy it. You have people who are selling really small things, like we're talking about koozies or you needs stapler, or maybe you need a little backyard pool for the fact that your cousins are coming over and you really don't care if it breaks in three weeks and so you buy that. But then for anything in the middle that's like kind of not a huge national brand but also something that you want to have that's quality, I think a lot of those companies are going to start... people are going to buy much more from the companies themself, direct to consumer. Andrew: Because they can merchandise them better, the shopping and check out experiences are getting easier. I think brands are increasingly not going to sell on Amazon because there's, in addition to all the things we talked about, you also have huge IP issues and people ripping you off. So, I think that's going to be the hallowing out of eCommerce when Amazon's going to be a big donut and in the middle a lot of people are going to be selling directly on their own sites just because it makes more sense for all the reasons I mentioned, so. Stephanie: Yeah, that's interesting. We've also talked a bit about the conscious consumer that's kind of rising out of all this and how people are starting to care about what is the source of this product, is it actually sustainable? Is it a quality product? And less about can I have more and more focused on quality and sustainability. Have you heard that trend as well in your community? Andrew: Yeah, I would say I think that's something that's been kind of gradually increasing over the last five to 10 years. I think more than anything how it ties into our conversation is that Amazon over the last couple of years, and they've been fighting it and they've done some, to their credit, they've done some things to combat it, but they still have a... If you buy something on Amazon most people are not going to think it's... there's a little bit of a thought that it's probably not high quality, a little bit of a stigma for buying stuff on Amazon especially if it's not a name brand. Part of that- Stephanie: Even the name brands people wonder if it's it... is this a legit name brand, I've seen that a lot in comment and reviews. Andrew: Oh, totally. Partially because of review manipulation, partially because of counterfeiting, and partially because there's just a lot of... I mean, there's everything on Amazon so how do you filter through it, right? Stephanie: Yeah. Andrew: So, yeah, I think that's part of going back to that [inaudible] about the hallowing out of eCommerce unless it's a brand you absolutely have faith in or it's something that you don't care about the quality. Would you rather buy one of those borderline things from Amazon and roll the dice with an unproven brand, roll the dice with one of those mid-tier brands being counterfeited? Or, especially if you can get it just as quickly either because Amazon is shipping stuff really slowly or because increasingly independent merchants can deliver it more quickly with some of these other options via straight from the horse or straight from the source rather. So, yeah, I think for me that's how the quality issue ties in I think to the larger discussion. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. Do you think that is why the drop shipping model has kind of decreased? I saw on your report that that is not as big of a thing as it used it, and I just remember... maybe even like last year, over the last couple years that was a huge thing. Everyone just said, "Start a eCommerce company and just drop ship things and let other people take care of it for you." What are you seeing with the drop shipping trend? Andrew: Yeah. So, when we talk about drop shipping I think it's important to differentiate two different things that come into people's minds. One is drop shipping, you can build a great high quality business based around drop shipping. A couple of businesses I started were drop shipping based businesses, one of them's still, under a great new owner, is still doing well. Really at the end of the day it's less about the product quality and more about how it's delivered. So, like Home Depot for example, they drop ship a ton of their stuff, some of their even big name brands because they're can't afford to hold everything in stock and that can potentially work out reasonably well. I think where it got a really bad reputation with all AliExpress side of things and so where- Stephanie: Yes, that's the stuff I read. Andrew: Yeah, right. And that's a whole different ballgame, and for people who, you know, if you're not familiar with that the 30 second version is you go onto AliExpress which lets you pretty much ship pretty much ship products directly from the factory in China to consumers in the US very cheaply through some kind of loopholes in the postal service. You can set up a store really quickly but by and large the products are garbage. They're just crappy, so that I think is where... There was a big rise in that, people ran that for a while, tried to run with that, but the problems were you couldn't build a brand around it because the products were awful, and because it took weeks to get your product to your customer, and probably because most likely if you're launching one of those businesses you know nothing about the product, so. Stephanie: Yeah. Never seen it, you don't even know if it'll make it or not. Andrew: Yeah. But even on the other side I'd say, that all aside, even if you're selling really good quality products, Amazon in the last five years has completely solved distribution. When I started for awhile I sold trolley motors, I sold CB radios, and back in those days you really could get a business up and running purely by sourcing a relationship with a wholesaler, doing a decent amount of marketing, having reasonable customer service and you were in business. But like today if you know what you want to buy, you know the brand, and you want it at a fair price, at a reasonable quickly you're probably going to go to Amazon for something you discreetly know that you want. So, Amazon's solved, at least before COVID and probably still I'd say a large degree, they solved distribution. So, how do you add value? You got to add value through some other way, usually that's through a lot of education or a really curated product line if you're going to sell existing products and those can be harder to get right. So, I don't think drop shipping is completely dead but I think it's gotten significantly harder versus even just two or three years ago. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. So, one question I always try to ask on here is about metrics and data, and with access to your community I want to know what kind of metrics do people talk about as their success metrics or what do you hear people debating about when it comes to metrics behind if a business is doing well or not? Andrew: Yeah, I think the one everyone loves to talk about is revenue, right? But I think that's probably a pretty horrible metric to use. It's easy, and we're totally guilty of it, that's one of our thresholds for even membership. So, guilty as charged, I'm going to slay myself along with everyone that I slay here. We use it because it's easy, we use it because it's socially acceptable. It's way easier to say, "I do three million in revenue versus I made $600,000 last year. It's also way easier to say, "I did three million revenue," than, "Oh, I only made $20,000 last year and that was I didn't pay myself anything," right? Stephanie: Yeah. Andrew: But metrics that I think are most important, one that... To be totally frank, in the community we don't talk a ton about... a lot of our conversations really don't revolve around what metrics should you track. Bottom line is a big one, of course. Conversion rate's a big one, average order size is a big one. Repeat purchase rate is a big one. And I'd say we don't have tons of conversations about them, but I think probably the most important ones to think about today are repeat purchase rates because advertising is doing nothing but getting more expensive. It's getting harder and harder to get in front of people without paying the big tech gatekeepers. So, the more likely a customer is to come back to you and needing that product the more likely you can actually build a viable long term business, that's a big one. I think profitability per visitor is a huge metric. It's harder to calculate but if I was going to run my business on one metric it would be profit per visitor to my website. And the reason I say that is because it encapsulates a lot of things, conversion rate, traffic, all these different things. Andrew: But it really makes you focus on pricing. If I would have to identify the one thing that I have done across multiple businesses in my life that has had the biggest impact and taken the least work, hands down it would be pricing. And so few people play with it. Some people can't, a lot of people can. And it's terrifying to change prices because we all fear that when you change the prices that your business is going to disappear, but that rarely happens especially if you do it in a really smart way. And what you should be maximizing is your profitability per visitor, at least for new customers at a minimum. So, yeah, those are some of my thoughts on metrics, and again we don't... total frank, we don't talk a ton about... those aren't the hot topics but I think those are some of the things to really think about. Stephanie: Yeah. So, now you've opened up, what are some of the hot topics? What are some of the heated debates that are going on behind the wall? Andrew: That's a good question. You know what, let me pull it up. Stephanie: Yeah, open it up. Let's see. Andrew: I'm going to pull it up here. Stephanie: Sounds good. Andrew: So, we have a cool little feature. Let's just surface all the top discussions from the last year. So, I can't... for confidentiality I got to be sensitive, but here's some of our top stories from the last let's say month. The story about how someone sold their brand, their business that they built over the years and just the emotional rollercoaster and what they learned, and how they were looking to hire multiple... How to use influencers on YouTube to build an eight figure business. Stephanie: Oh, that's a good one. Stephanie: Yeah, the influencer one is interesting to me because it kind of brings about the question of the social shopping experience and how the US is so based... right now, I mean, a lot of people are looking towards influencers. Whereas other markets, like China, are not really as much about that. It's more about the social shopping experience. What were your thoughts, or what was the debate when it came to the YouTube influencers and how they utilize that, and do you think that's a longterm trend? Andrew: Yeah. I think one of the big themes I've seen is that the really big influencers a lot of times are spendy and hard to track, but you could potentially get a better ROI if you focus on helping maybe working with smaller influencers either for less money or just for product. Because it's, I don't know, I don't know about you but when I'm on Instagram and I see someone using a product, and especially if they even mention it in any little way I'm immediately a little suspicious. I'm like, "Is this person really like this product or are they just getting it comped and they're having to fulfill their end of the agreement that they signed up for?" Stephanie: Yeah, especially the more popular they are, like as it goes up to the really popular famous people then I'm like, okay, do you actually use that whitening strip? How much are you getting paid for that? Andrew: Yeah, and so I don't think influencer market is going away. I mean, we've had famous people endorsing things for decades, maybe 100+ years, especially in the United States, but I do think, yeah, I just think you can also waste a lot of money on it if you're not doing it carefully. Stephanie: Yeah, I completely agree. So, on your podcast I'm thinking, this is like self serveant, so I'll go with it, but what are some of the best questions that you've asked your guests before where you continued to get the best answers or the best stories? Andrew: Oh, good question. One of my... A couple ones, I would say what's the biggest mistake, or what's... excuse me, what's the last thing you apologized for I think is an interesting one. Stephanie: That's a good one. Andrew: I think another one is what's your number? Like, what's your number to be happy, like if you had X in the bank and what's your number where you'd be happy without having anymore? It's interesting to get a sense. You get numbers from all over the place from a million to 100 million, sometimes bigger, so. Stephanie: Oh, gosh. Andrew: Yeah. A lot of the questions are very specific to the individual person and their story, but for two general ones I'd say I like those ones and get some really interesting ones those times. Stephanie: Yeah, that would be really interesting. A good kind of peak into who that person is or how they think too. I like that. Andrew: Yeah. Stephanie: So, I know we haven't gotten to talk about the capital arm of your business yet and I wanted to kind of go into what that was like starting it up and what kind of issues you were encountering when starting a capital arm? What does that look like and I want a little behind scenes for the new side of your business. Andrew: Sure. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, and I'll say in total transparency, like I said, very early into this. We're only about four or five months into this, so still pretty new. But you asked, and specifically were you hoping to know kind of some of the hard parts about starting that? Stephanie: Yeah, like what was the... not the thought process, because that seems pretty obvious like you have this great community and you maybe see some of the challenges that are going on, but what was it like starting a investment arm and what kind of challenges have you run into so far in the first four months? Andrew: Yeah. So, what it was like, it was terrifying. And I think- Stephanie: Sounds like it. Andrew: Yeah, traditionally you kind of have these two approaches where either you go out and raise a bunch of money and then you get all these commitments and you close on it and then you have to go out and put this money to work. It's kind of your life for the next often 10 years, and it's a traditional fund route. The other route is what's called syndicate where you pretty much do deals on a deal by deal basis, which gives you a lot more flexibility but the problem is every time you get a deal you got to go pass the hat and call a million and half the people are out, you know, of those half a quarter of them decide at the last minute that... like the funding process is a nightmare on that side. So, putting it together I kind of did something of a hybrid of those two where we have a group of about 20 investors that are tentatively in. I know them, they trust me, I trust them, and there's kind of a... they signed an informal thing that says, "Hey, I'm in for the next three years for this amount of money." So, hopefully it gives us the flexibility of not have to go out and deploy money just to deploy money, but we can also can be a little flexible, and we can also have the commitment from some people to go forward. Andrew: So, that's totally on the technical fund side, probably super boring to most people. But in terms of some of the challenges, I think that the challenging thing is just the number of deals you have to look at to try to find a good deal. I mean, I looked at over 100 deals so far at some level of depth and it's just finding, A, just good companies, B, where it's a good fit for both parties, and C, where you can see it working out well for everyone. It's really hard to find good deals, especially as a minority partner that comes in to invest, especially on the eCommerce side because our approach and what we're trying to do is buy, invest, in the long run with companies to build profitable businesses, like we're not trying to flip them. And I think in tech investing you can get away with a lot of sloppiness because you're kind of swinging for the fences. So, if you have a bunch that don't work out it's a big deal, most of them don't work out. Stephanie: They don't. Andrew: But with eCommerce, our model... we're looking to do singles and doubles and it's just hard to find really good businesses that you feel are going to be around for three to five years. So, the hardest part for us has just been finding great businesses that we feel check all our boxes, so. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. Is there a common theme behind what these businesses are needing capital for? Andrew: Yeah, I would say... So, financing for eCommerce businesses is tricky. There are some options out there, there's things like Shopify Capital, there's ClearBank, there's PayPal Capital, Amazon Lending, all these things, but they're expensive. They also take a... often times you don't pay them back on a fixed rate, you pay them back on a percentage of revenue which can be good and bad. So, inventory financing is a big one but I'd say the people that we talk to it was probably half and half. Half of them want money for inventory financing to grow the business and half of them just really would love to have someone who has spent $15 million on Facebook ads in their career to be able to help them and give them some high level guidance on what to do and some thoughts there, or someone who's done a lot of importing to be able to tap into that knowledge based in that network, so. Stephanie: Yeah, I agree. When were thinking about fundraising back in the day I was like, "I actually don't really care about people's money as much as are they going to help me?" Like, I really don't want the most famous investor because I highly doubt they will spend any time with me. I want the person who's ready to get their hands dirty and help me with the nitty gritty stuff that I'm looking for help with. Andrew: Oh, totally. Yeah, there has never been... There's so much money sloshing around right now, right? And so there's a lot of places that get money, which is good if you're raising money, but it's greed. I think the real value ad is the experience side and the money is just kind of a nice perk that comes along with it often. Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree. So, you've been looking at a lot of businesses and you have a lot of businesses in your community, what is one thing that you wish online sellers would either start or stop doing? Andrew: Start or stop doing... Stephanie: I like to throw out the hard balls. Andrew: Yeah, no this is good. I would say I wish people would start having more fun with the copy in their business. So, one thing I always... and I didn't, I can't claim- Stephanie: That's a good one. Andrew: I can't claim credit for this one, but I've always liked to try to make the copy and confirmation emails and things like that fun and interesting and a little bit different as opposed to like, "Thank you for your order. Your order is 49732. We appreciate your business." Such a great... Transactional receipts are one of the most opened emails across all emails, shipping ones absolutely, and if you're trying to build a brand there's no better point to be able to, you know, have some fun and be able to be different and differentiate yourself, right? So, I think that's a big one. You can extend that to the product packaging, your website, all that stuff. But I would say take a little more risks and have a little bit more fun. I would check out a site called mancrates.com, have you heard of them? Stephanie: No, tell me a bit about them. Andrew: They're so good. They're so good. They sell fun gifts for men, so for example, instead of ordering your dad a tie you can order him a 16 inch by 16 inch wooden crate of beef jerky and steak rub that he has to open with a crow bar when it shows up to his house, Like stuff like this that's different. Stephanie: Oh my gosh. Andrew: And the copy is freaking just hilarious. So, check them out if- Stephanie: Oh, that's good. I'll have to check that out. Andrew: Yeah, they're really good. It's just you're buying an experience for the recipient and people pay up for it, so. Stephanie: Yeah, now more than ever with people not going out as much, not going in stores and stuff, you do have to figure out how to differentiate yourself. And I think that's a good point that, I mean, right now I'm even thinking I bought something and I'm getting the actual logistics email of DHL or whatever will be shipped at this time, and it's all this other text that I don't care about, so it's like, "Okay, I actually don't care about this email that's coming through." And if they would've made it unique and fun and exciting... like I don't even know what this is that I bought, that's how bad it is. There's no branding or anything, it's just coming apparently. Andrew: Yeah, if they were like, "The DHL guy had a wreck but your package was so important that he grabbed it from the fiery box and he crawled with one arm bleeding out and he handed it to the last person he saw and said, 'Deliver this, please. Deliver it to Stephanie,' and then he died." Stephanie: Oh my gosh. Andrew: That might be intense and maybe it doesn't work for all brands, but it sure as heck gets your attention and you're like, "Whoa, this is interesting." Stephanie: You need to write for our brand. I'm going to bring you on our team, Andrew, just for your copy. I need that. Oh man, that's good. All right. So, I want to do a higher level eCommerce question because I just think you're, one, you're willing to take a risk and you're willing to predict the future which I like. I appreciate that. So, I want to hear either what disruption is coming to eCommerce that's not already here, because a lot of people have said, "Oh, COVID's the biggest disruption." That answer's already been taken, so either the biggest disruption or you can tell me what the future of online commerce looks like in five years. Andrew: Biggest disruption coming, I'll try to tackle both of them. Biggest disruption is I think that... man, it's just coming from the guy. You talk about be willing to predict the future, I made a bet with somebody when Amazon was $200 a share that Alibaba was gonna out pace it. And now that Amazon is $3,000 a share, it was a humbling experience and it cost me a very experience steak dinner. That being said, here's my prediction... Stephanie: That's all right. I want your prediction still. Andrew: I would say the biggest disrupter, oh man... I'm going to throw a couple things out there, I think text is going to be a big one, SMS. But that's not like a big disrupter as much as just a new marketing channel that us marketers can leverage for awhile until we completely destroy texting for everybody which will probably take three or four years. Stephanie: That's a good one though. What are thinking around using that as new marketing channel? Andrew: Oh, I just think, I mean, if you look at the... I think email is just getting harder and harder unless you really want to hear somebody's email. So, I just signed up for the service HEY, are you familiar with that from Basecamp? Stephanie: I've heard about it and I seen a bunch of drama on Twitter about it, so. Andrew: Yeah. There has been... probably between them and the App store and all that kind of stuff? Stephanie: Yes, yes. Andrew: Yeah. So, one of the reasons I signed up for them is because they have this thing where you can screen your emails now, and the first time you get an email from a new sender you can say, "Hey, I want this person to pop in my inbox, or no, Johnny, from Michigan I don't care about your boat covers. Don't ever talk to me again. It's unsolicited." So, that kind of thing, I think email is going to be... there's going to be more and more tools and services that let you curate your email and really slice down who gets to hear from you and so email is going to get harder and harder. But if you look a just text message delivery versus email it's an order of magnitude higher engagement, readability, click through, et cetera, and I think that marketers are already, I mean, they're already starting to do that. People that I know that are on the leading edge have five, I haven't six figures, but definitely seen some good mid tier five figure SMS lists and they just do really well. So, the problem is you got to be really careful because when people text me about things that I'm not interested in... like texting for me is very personal. I text my wife, my family, my good friends. Andrew: I don't text with Bobby's Boat Shop in Michigan, and if he sends me a promotion via text I'm going to be pissed off. So, you got to be really careful about how you use that but I think that will be a big marketing channel going for, so. Not really sure if that's really a disrupter and it's already kind of here in some regards but I'll throw that one out there. Stephanie: Yeah, I like that. I think that's a good one though to think about how to be careful when you start using these new channels, because completely agree. I've had I think someone just texted me this morning who's like, "I'm the education blah, blah, blah person of your district." I'm like, "What are you texting me right now? Don't." Andrew: Oh, totally. You can really... and I think there's some pretty stiff penalties for not being careful about that in terms of if you just spam people via text, which is good. But yeah, nothing's worse than getting a text from someone you really don't want to hear about, so. Stephanie: Yeah, I agree. All right. So, next we have a lightning round, if you're ready, Andrew. It's where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Andrew: Perfect. For each question? Stephanie: Yeah. Andrew: Awesome. Is there like a booing sound if I go over so I stop talking? Stephanie: No, it'll just be me, "Boo! Boo!" in the background. Andrew: Do it, do it. Stephanie: All right. What's up next on your Netflix queue? Andrew: I don't really... Oh, actually I do have... what is it? They're in Arizona, there's a place called Biosphere 2 where they locked all these people into this kind of self contained environment as a training mission to go to Mars, and they isolated them from earth atmospherically for two years, and surprise surprise it was a huge trauma fest. Can't remember the name of the movie but that's what I'm watching next on Netflix. Stephanie: Oh my gosh, that sounds insane. Andrew: Spaceship Earth is the name of the documentary. Stephanie: Spaceship Earth, okay. I will have to check that out. Very interested in that, and I also pontificate about Mars sometimes on our other show Mission Daily, so it's perfect for me. Andrew: Oh, perfect. Watch it tonight. Stephanie: All right. Where are you going next for your travel destination when you can travel? Andrew: Probably down Tucson, Arizona where... I'm up in Montana right now, but probably Tucson, Arizona which is where we live, so. Stephanie: Cool. Andrew: That's kind of a cop out. I need a better one. Stephanie: Wait, you live in Montana and you live in Tucson? Andrew: We're up here, we spend some time in the summertime up in Montana just to see family, friends, like that. Stephanie: Oh, cool. Andrew: Yeah, so we're heading back there soon. Don't have any plans at the moment but the next big trip I would like to take would be to Mongolia. Stephanie: Oh, that would be very interesting. Do you have an Instagram? I'll have to follow along when you go there. Andrew: @capalisthippie, so. Stephanie: Okay, I'll follow you. If you were to create a Netflix original, what would it be about? Andrew: Oh, this is easy. It would be... I'm fascinated with the question of where is the balance between running a business and being ambitious and chasing entrepreneurial success and having a great life and traveling and seeing your family and nurturing other side of yourself, and I feel like so few people get that right. So, my documentary would be pick 12 entrepreneurs from varying levels of that spectrum, live with them and follow them for two months each and try to come to some conclusions about if you were going to try to design your life to be able to maximize both of those, where's the line? Stephanie: Yeah. That's a really good one. I need help with that right now. Andrew: I think a lot of us do. Stephanie: Yeah. What podcast guest are you trying to get on that you just can't get, like they're just not responding and you really want them? Andrew: Oh, that's a good one. I think awhile we were trying to get Tim Ferriss on the show, which is super cliché. It didn't work out. Stephanie: Ouch. Andrew: Yeah, I know. I'm still upset about that, Tim. What is the favorite piece of tech that makes you more efficient? Andrew: Good question. I would say text expander is a big one so you can do saved replies and bump those out. Yeah, I'd say that's probably one of my favorite. Asana is another great one. I love Asana for we manage all our SOP's and long term projects there, so I'd say those two. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. I like them. All right, the last one, what new eCommerce tool are you hearing about that a lot of people in your community or outside of it are having success with right now? Andrew: I would say there's a tool called Bonjoro, and it's not necessarily just for eCommerce, but it allows you to send custom welcome videos to people really easily. If you think about sending a video to a customer it's probably not the filming that's the hard part, it's probably like the okay, I have to film it and then I have to send it, and then I have to edit and export, and it just lets you cue up these emails, send videos to people for kind of nicer customer service touch. So, yeah we use that for onboarding for a lot of our members and I've heard people have good luck with that, so. Stephanie: That's cool. Well, Andrew, this has been such a fun interview. Where can people learn more about you and eCommerceFuel? Andrew: Yeah, if you like podcasts, which at the end of listening to me talk for 45 minutes you prob are- Stephanie: Do you want more? Andrew: ... a glutton for punishment, yeah. I would love to have you as a podcast listener on the eCommerceFuel podcast, so you can get that anywhere you get podcasts, iTunes or elsewhere. But yeah the big home is just eCommerceFuel.com, so you can learn about the community there if you're a store owner and want to get plugged in or if you have an interesting business that are looking for either money or probably more importantly some expertise from a group of really experienced eCommerce investors. Yeah, I would love to have a discussion with you. So, eCommerceFuel.com is the best place for all that stuff. Stephanie: Well, it's been a blast, Andrew. Thanks so much and we will see you next time. Andrew: Yeah, this has been fun. Thanks for having me on.
In this digitally-native world, it might be surprising to learn that an old-school marketing tool is actually one of the most effective customer acquisition and retention tools. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Renee Lopes Halvorsen, the VP of Marketing & Ecommerce at Marine Layer, joined us to dive deep into the merits of catalog marketing. Renee cut her teeth in the marketing, eCommerce and omnichannel world at the Gap and Athleta. Now she is guiding the team at Marine Layer using a data-driven and blended approach to marketing that has led to profitable customer acquisition, high lifetime customer value and retention, and a fully engaged customer base that is coming to stores with more buying intent than ever. How is she doing it? Find out on this episode. 3 Takeaways: Long-term vision is key: You can spend a lot of time and money on the “cheap thrills” of marketing promotions, but those customers will never repeat buy. Instead, focus on retention and getting those high-value customers. Catalog Crazy: There are certain page and product count requirements that will determine whether or not a catalog is the right tool for a company. When those numbers are met, though, there are few better avenues to tell your brand story and drive conversions… and it may even perform in ways that an Instagram ad never could The cost to acquire customers: There is a high amount of risk involved when you acquire customers at a loss. You can predict customer behavior pretty accurately in the short term, but predicting long-term trends and purchasing is much more difficult. Therefore, it may not benefit you to model out a one-or two-year strategy toward profitability when it comes to customer acquisition. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome everybody to Up Next in Commerce, the number one show for all things eCommerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles. And today, we're chatting with Renee Lopes Halvorsen, the VP of Marketing and Ecommerce at Marine Layer. Renee, welcome to the show. Renee: Hey, Stephanie, how's it going? Stephanie: It's going well. Yeah, excited to have you on. Renee: Yeah. I'm excited to be here too. This is my first podcast, but I'm an avid podcast consumer. So, I'm excited about this. Stephanie: Oh, we are very eager to have your first. So, I saw that you have a very interesting background of working at some good name brands, and I was hoping we could start there where you tell me a little bit about some of the previous work that you've done, and what brought you to Marine Layer? Renee: So, I've been at Marine Layer now for about five years. But about before that, I spent eight years at Gap Inc. I graduated college and like a lot of my peers, thought it would be a good idea to get into investment banking. But then about a year and a half of that, I was like, "What am I doing with my life? This is exhausting, and I'm not particularly interested." Renee: I think I was working on a petrochemical deal at one point. So, I wanted to join a company I was excited about and I found Gap. They were hiring in San Francisco. And Gap is amazing because I think they give you a lot of opportunity at the entry level to move around in the organization. So, I feel like I really got a rad retail background experience in all things. Renee: I started in real estate finance, and then I was able to join a corporate strategy team, where we were really looking at international expansion opportunities for Gap Inc and acquisition opportunities. And then, after about a year and a half of that, Gap Inc had just acquired Athleta brand. And I was a female athlete in college, always a huge advocate of women in sports. Renee: So, really wanted to join their team in whatever capacity I could get my way into the organization. And they were hiring in marketing strategy, which was ended up being perfect for me. Because I think I have a real passion for business analytics. But then, I also love just consumer trends, and consumer behavior, and just how those things roll up on a macro level. Renee: So, I joined the marketing strategy team. It was initially brought in to really look at a lot of the ways that Athleta was spending their marketing spend, and inform if they were overspending. I think Gap was particularly concerned about how much I thought it was spending on their catalog. So, they wanted more of an objective strategy team to look at that investment, and prove out that it was really driving incremental demand. Renee: And it ended up just being like the most incredible experience. I spent close to five years there, and started looking at the efficiency of catalogs to drive incremental demand. It ended up being when digital marketing was really taking off as an acquisition channel, and retention channel. So, spent a lot of time also weigh out what's a stronger growth tool catalog, or digital marketing. Renee: I was there and they're opening up a lot of their stores. So, I was thinking a lot about omni channel, customer health. So, love that job. And I think after spending a little while, it's like, "Gosh, I want to take all this newfound knowledge, and apply it to somewhere that's in a younger growth stage." And ended up meeting the CEO of Marine Layer, we hit off. Renee: He told me that he really wanted to start a catalog, and I was like, "Gosh, I think I'm probably one of the youngest people in our industry that knows a lot about catalog." Stephanie: Yeah. I haven't actually heard that term in any of the interviews referencing at catalog. Renee: Oh, yeah, it's funny. It's like an offline way to really do customer look alike modeling. I think people think of it as super old school. But when I look at what's happening, like on Facebook, or within digital marketing generally, it's the same things that the catalog industry has been doing for 30 years. Stephanie: How interesting. Renee: Yeah. It's just like using customer LTV assumptions to inform how much you're willing to spend to acquire a buyer. That's the core principle that I think has been a part of catalog investing for 30 years. And I think now, that's a huge part, that's the biggest part of a digital marketing acquisition too. Stephanie: Okay, cool. So, what learnings did you take from Gap, especially around the catalog versus digital marketing, and bring to Marine Layer? Renee: I think my biggest takeaway was actually the importance of not being promotional. And the importance of being really focused on long-term customer health. Renee: It was like a stark contrast for me, I think working in the Gap, Banana Republic world, and then shifting over to the Athleta world where they had super, super high percentage of their transactions happening at full price. But I just think getting into a discount space, it's a super slippery slope. Renee: And I think it was so exciting to watch within the Athleta environment that you might have to spend a little bit more on marketing, spend more on brand, but what you end up driving is really high rates of retention. I think it makes your business a lot more predictable, and healthy in the long term. So, it's super high level, it's focusing on long term brand health versus finding those cheap thrills with little promotions here or there. Stephanie: Yeah. When you joined Marine Layer, did you have to shift your thinking because I'm thinking the people who are at Gap or the consumers of Gap are maybe different than Athleta versus Marine Layer? Have you seen different buying profiles, and ways to connect with that audience, and get people to buy full price? Renee: So, Athleta and Marine Layer actually were more similar, but definitely Athleta and the other brands, I think are super different. The AOVs are pretty similar for Athleta and Marine Layer. I think the other category tends to be a really big driver of retention. So, it's known in our industry that if you are a bottoms-focused purveyor that you generally have a higher retention rate. Renee: I think that's what it benefits from being a bottoms-focused activewear brand. So, the retention rate is a little higher than what I was expecting coming into Marine Layer. Stephanie: How did you shift, yeah, when the consumer is may be different. Marine Layer and Athleta, you're saying are similar. Versus Gap, maybe they are used to sales and things like that. How do you shift your strategies and your learnings that you took from those two brands to Marine Layer? Renee: Yeah, okay. Absolutely. So, I think it's really around how you focus on measurement of your marketing channels. I think when you're focusing on discounting, it's pretty easy to focus on what was the comp over last week, or how many units have been moved through? But I think when you're focusing on long-term premium brands, you're really focusing on was it incremental? Renee: Could I have gotten more in the long term if I'd done it differently? What was the impact to customer LTV? What's the quality of customer that I'm bringing into my brand? I guess a big difference is that for Marine Layer, we won't do a lot of promotions in the acquisition stage. Because it's been proven for us that if you bring in a customer, or a lower price point item, or a lower overall transaction, or just a bigger discount. Renee: Those buyers won't repeat buy from you. So, basically, you've wasted that unit in selling to them on their first transaction on a buyer that's not going to be a big part of our brand a year from now. So, it definitely changes the marketing channels that you're looking at, and also changes the way that you measure them. Stephanie: That's a really good point about not showcasing maybe, like here's our discount $3 item, and then wondering like, "Oh, hey, why didn't they come back and repeat buyer, or where'd they go?" That's a really good point. Renee: Yeah. And even more recently, we've been having a lot of internal conversations on whether or not we should be selling our cloth face coverings in digital acquisition tools. So, you're probably seeing there had been a lot of brands out there that are including them in the way that they're trying to bring in customers to their brand. Our face coverings as a company are very reasonably priced. Renee: We're doing them more as a service than a real growth driver for our business. So, I think if we put them on our paid social channels, and use them to acquire buyers, I'm sure it would get a lot of acquisitions. But I just don't know how healthy those acquisitions are a year from now. I don't know if they're going to be buying from us in 2021 and 2022. Stephanie: Yeah. That long term vision. So, well, maybe before I keep having you dive deeper and deeper, it'd be good to have you tell people who don't know what is Marine Layer and what is your role? What is your day-to-day at Marine Layer? Renee: Yeah, absolutely. I get so excited talking about marketing. It's easy to forget the high-level stuff. Stephanie: Oh, me too. I was great after 1,000 more questions in the week. I'm like, "Oh, wait, we probably should talk about the brand first so everyone knows what you do." Renee: Totally. So, I'm the VP of Marketing and Ecommerce for Marine Layer. I joined the company five years ago as our Director of Ecommerce because Marine Layer was actually, it's a DTC emerging DTC brand, but grew at store base faster than it grew its Ecommerce business. When I joined in 2015, we had 10 stores. Now, we have 45. Renee: And really, our online channel was considered something to help with replenishment for people that were acquired in store, and then they wanted to buy it again online. So, I think that's where my role started. Over time, we just started building out these new marketing channels to drive online growth separate from the retail channel. Renee: So, my responsibility started to include more and more marketing functions. And then, more recently, I've started also leading our creative and brand teams, which I really, really loved doing because I think there's so much value in finding good tension between big brand ideas, and then long-term health of brand, and near-term sales goals. Renee: I guess zooming out again, Marine Layer is a casual clothing apparel brand. We are based in San Francisco. Our company was founded in 2010 because our CEO, his girlfriend threw out his favorite shirt, and he set out to recreate that incredibly soft, broken in shirt. And he did that. So, it was really founded on the best ever men's t shirts. Our shirts are just absolutely absurdly soft when you touch them. They make a wreath- Stephanie: Yes. I can vouch for that. Renee: That's awesome. And then, he started expanding the assortment for men's beyond t-shirts. And then, I want to say a few years later than that, he started expanding into women's shirts. It's definitely more of a tops focused business than bottoms. Although now, we have some really strong business in women's bottoms in particular. Renee: But now, it's a full assortment of California casual. We really focus on making everything comfortable, soft. We want it to be your favorite. We talked about the importance of it being like a top of the stack t-shirt, the go-to item that you go for. You're looking for it when it's coming out of the dryer because you want to wear it even though you have other ones in your closet. Renee: So, there's a lot of intention, and love, and care that goes into every single item of clothing that we make, whether it's a dress, or a t-shirt, or outerwear. It's really just around creating timeless, emotional, comfortable pieces. Stephanie: That's great. So, how do you convey that messaging on your website about how soft the fabric is? What techniques do you use? Especially, since you just got into helping tell the brand story, and the product stories, and all that. What are you finding works when it comes to talking about something that ultimately, it'd be nice to touch before you buy it? But if you can't do that, how are you conveying that message? Renee: So, lots of little ways. I'd also just definitely say that this is something we're always working on improving as the technology changes a little bit online. I think for us, it's communicating that our stuff is special, and that it has a fun, emotional connection to your stuff. It's not just any old t-shirt. We want you to feel like our brand is maybe an old friend of yours, or it's a comfortable place to be. Renee: So, it's in every single tiny touch point. The models that we use, how we style them, the copy that we write for our shirts, it's not going to be just like a bunch of bullet points with the fiber makeup of the shirt. It's going to be describing what you could put in the pocket, or where we used to wear this shirt, or what it was inspired by. Our model notes I think will be like so and so is a size medium, and 5'10", but he also plays in a band on the weekends. It's really. I think- Stephanie: That's right. Renee: And bringing the product to life in a way that feels unexpected, but then at the same time, just familiar and fun. Stephanie: I love that. Renee: Yeah. I think we'd like to play with more ways to test video on our site to really convey softness. And then, the other thing I would just say is that I think our store experience is a really big part of our brand experience. And I do think it's what makes our site so successful. Our best customers, this is true everywhere, but are the customers that shop online, and in store. Renee: And I think it's because those customers have the benefit of touching our stuff, interacting with like, are extremely friendly, and mellow store associates, and they understand what's special about it, even without the context of the site. And yeah, and then I'd also just add that it's another reason why I love catalog marketing. Renee: Because it just gives us more space to express the fun of our brand, and show off our lifestyle beyond just what you see in a flatter online experience. We love just shooting and fun inspirational locations. Our copy, I think is so funny and on point. I always love when I read the first draft of catalogs coming through that they can just make me smile. So, yeah, it's a multitouch approach to really bring that softness to life, even if you're not in store. Stephanie: That's great. Yeah. I definitely am in the same camp that if copy makes me smile. Renee: Yeah. Shopping should be fun. I think that's a big part of what guides our store experience and our site experience. We don't want to over iterate on it. We don't need to be the most innovative provider out there. We just want it to be fun, and make you smile where we can, just bring a little bit more joy into your life. Not in a cheesy way, but just an honest, approachable, fun way. Stephanie: Yep. Yeah. I think Trader Joe's does a really good job too with the pamphlets they send out. Renee: Totally. Stephanie: And I've either read them, but they have really good copy in them. And you also learn something, and you're smiling throughout it, and you're like, "Oh, I want to buy that bag of plantain chips also." Renee: Yeah. And I think it makes a lasting impression. When you're thinking about where you're going to go shopping, you're like, "Gosh, I guess I'll go to Trader Joe's." We think really intentionally about our promotions that way too. We don't want to do a sale and have it just be a sale. The lead story can't just be 70% off, although we would never go that deep, or even 20% off. Renee: There has to be a story behind it. Is it a funny story about a dad joke if it's a father's day story, or is it like, "Oh my gosh, my favorite promotions we ever did was when there was a blackout in San Francisco." Probably like, I think we all woke up that day, and nobody had any power. And we all came into the office, terrible shower situations, looking terrible. Renee: And we're like, "Let's just do a blackout sale, a sale until the lights come back on." And I think there's a shared experience that you have with your customer. And it makes your content just more memorable and honestly, I think people are more likely to participate with a smile on their face. Stephanie: Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. So, we mentioned catalogs earlier, but I want to dive a little bit deeper, because like I said, you're the first one who's come on the show who's really mentioned it, and talked about this. And I'd love to hear about how you think about brands, should they or should they not have a catalog? How do you measure performance, and how do you think about that as one of your acquisition or marketing channels? Renee: Yeah. Great, I love talking about catalog, so we can do this all day. I think it's a real great way to drive the story of a brand lifestyle. So, I feel like that lets you know right off the bat. It's not just a product, if we're just talking about a couple of skews that we're building on top of, then I think it's hard to pull together a catalog. Renee: But if you have an assortment of over 100 items, and there's a lifestyle component that you're trying to celebrate, then I feel like there might be good space for you to test into a catalog. I think it can also seem super intimidating from a cost standpoint, but there's ways to pull together photoshoots in a super scrappy way. Renee: Gosh, I think the first catalog Marine Layer I ever sent out, we use models that were good friends of the brand, and we shot locally, I think in the woods outside of Calistoga. So, it doesn't- Stephanie: Great. Renee: Yeah. When I was at Athleta, the budgets that we had for catalog content were much, much bigger than the type of stuff that we do for Marine Layer. Although, we have definitely professionalized our setup a little bit more. So, I don't think the creative cost needs to be super big. It's more about making sure that you have the breadth of assortment to support a catalog. Renee: And I think in order to send something meaty out there that's really going to drive results, you want to send out at least a 44-page catalog. So, that's where I'm getting to, like you probably want about 100 different styles that you want to market in there. So, yeah, we started mailing catalogs in 2015. And our books are about 44 pages. Renee: And now, our assortment has grown, and so as our catalog page counts, and also our catalog meal frequency, and I think what's really powerful about them is, again, just making that lasting impression on a customer about who you are, and what you stand for, and the breadth of assortment that you make. I think people really knew Marine Layer as a t-shirt brand and the catalog, especially for online buyers. Renee: And even now, people that maybe buy their first product off of Instagram or something like that, and it's just one item. It just shows them how much more we do, and what we're excited about. I think- Stephanie: That's great. Renee: They're also very easy to overlook, as I'm sure once people start sniffing around at the cost per piece, and the CPAs associated with catalogs, they're not cheap. But what I found at Athleta, and definitely at Marine Layer is that people that you bring into the brand on catalog tend to be a lot more productive in the long run. So, they're much, much healthier buyers than somebody that we may be acquire through an Instagram ad. Stephanie: Very cool. So, what is the average CPA to expect if someone were to start a catalog, and how do you track that incrementality, and ROI on that? Renee: It's going to vary for so many different reasons, but gosh, I feel like anywhere between a $70 CPA to $100 CPA would make a lot of sense. I feel like people are always so fascinated by how you do catalog tracking. I always get questions like do you just track all the orders that come in through the phone? Stephanie: Oh, my gosh, I wasn't going to ask that. I'm interested in tracking, but I wasn't like, "Are you talking to people on the phone?" Renee: No, no, no. No one is calling in to place orders. A couple of people do per season, but it's not like you're getting tons and tons of people calling in to place orders. It's more about like you're in the catalog match back process. So, you will know who you mailed your catalog to. And then, you can use third party providers to help you understand with all of the orders that were placed in the last two to four weeks when the catalog got in home. Renee: How many of them matched back to somebody who received a catalog? And then, I think beyond that, once you start mailing a little bit, people can start to ask, well did these people place an order because they received a catalog, or because I launched this new collection? And then, I think you can start to holdout testing to see for the folks that mailed a catalog versus didn't mail a catalog, how powerful was the catalog for driving new demand? Renee: So, all those things are things that you can do to measure performance. But in my experience, I think and in talking to other industry professionals, usually the first time you mail a catalog, you feel it. Your business was operating at a certain level for the last four weeks, and then all of a sudden, it's operating a different level for the next couple of weeks. So, that's good. Stephanie: Are you mailing catalogs to only current customers, or are you also doing people who've never bought before? Renee: So, we do a mix, and we do to new customers, and to existing buyers. As an existing buyer, I think it's a really good retention tool. And it was exciting, we've been measuring CLV for a while now. It's like you see the CLV of our brand for the average customers brought into our company. And then, when that catalog started getting mailed in June 2015, it just moves up, and then it starts at a new baseline. Renee: So, I definitely feel like it shifts our retention of our buyers. And then, we also do it for customer acquisition. So, we work with data co-ops, where we can rent names. So, we never actually take possession of those names. I don't know who I'm mailing, but I just know that I'm mailing customers that look like my customers. Stephanie: Very cool. Yeah, that's great. When it comes to performance, if a lot of people come in, and they have their digital marketing hat on, and you're talking about catalogs, how should someone level set expectations for here's the type of performance and ROI you can expect with catalogs versus digital marketing? How do you level set that? Renee: Yeah. I think we look at the CPA-LTV ratio. So, over a three-month time period, or a six-month time period, or a year. So, even though your CPAs are going to be higher for your catalog and for your digital acquisition business, I would expect that your LTVs will be a lot higher too. So, for us, the ratio ends up working out the same, or in a lot of years, sometimes even the ratio is a little higher for catalog. Stephanie: Got it. Renee: The complexity of catalog too that I just want to throw out there is definitely less nimble, which is, I think, frustrating for a lot of new age DTC folks. You have to send your catalog, create it about a month in advance, and you can't always control exactly when it gets in home. If there's a tornado, then the post office is going to mail it to certain post offices across the country. Renee: And so, I think what can be frustrating is that you can try to get it right in the catalog creative, and then when the catalog gets in home, maybe you're sold out of a certain item, or you didn't get something, you have to presell something because it's not actually available when you thought it was going to be available. Renee: All those little things that are hard, like those bigger moving pieces, they can really impact catalog performance. And I think with digital marketing, you can be just like super nimble. If the item is not in stock, you just don't market that item. Pros and cons to both. Stephanie: Yeah. That makes sense. So, in our research, I saw that customer lifetime value is your number one metric. And I was wondering, are you willing to acquire customers at a lost? And if so, how much are you willing to take on? Renee: So, we don't acquire customers at a loss. We focus on being profitable upon acquisition, or I'm sorry, being profitable upon acquisition, or zero to positive dollars coming in on the first transaction. That's changed over the last couple of years. I think in some years, we've let it get up to about a zero to six-month profitability time window. Renee: So, we expect to be back in black, six months after customers are acquired, I'm not an advocate for one year to two-year time periods. I just think there's too much risk involved. I have a pretty good idea what's going to happen in the next six months, and customers can be pretty predictable. But to focus on those longer time horizons, I don't know. Renee: That's just never really been my appetite for risk, or my company's appetite for risk. But I really feel like that decision is just a super specific decision made for every company based on where they are in their growth stage, and what access to capital they have. I think it's changed For Marine Layer. Renee: And I think it's fun for me now that we're focusing on being profitable on acquisition or better because I can take those dollars that we're getting at the first acquisition, and I can invest them in new tools, or I can invest them in improving our brand. And so, it feels like a healthier ecosystem for us to operate in. Stephanie: Yep. Yeah. I completely agree. It seems like a better approach, especially with everything that's going on right now. Renee: Oh, my gosh, I know. Stephanie: It's hard to predict going to happen next month, which makes me want to ask the question, how are you guys moving forward in this COVID environment? You were mentioning retail locations before, what's changing, and what are some things that you're doing differently going forward? Renee: Yeah, gosh. It's so funny because recently as a leadership team, we were looking back at our goals for the beginning of the year, and asked to rethink those, given that everything's changed. And the one that stood out to me that makes me laugh now is I had some goals around doing bigger campaign marketing planning. We're a really scrappy organization. Renee: And sometimes in January of this year, I thought we were almost too good at whipping things into shape last minute, and reworking copy, or reworking direction of campaign really close to the finish line, to the point where it inhibited our ability to tell bigger stories across more marketing channels. But now, I'm like, "Oh, my goodness, it's an awesome value and strength to have to be really, really nimble." Renee: Our big change for us during COVID is that we're really reviewing all of our emails, really close to when they get sent. We're not trying to create content on a Monday and send it on a Thursday. We might create a first draft or something on a Monday, but we'll keep reviewing it and make sure that the voice, and tone, and products that we're featuring all mix in up until a few hours before final send time. Renee: So, we're definitely just reviewing content, and we're also talking to our customers more frequently. I think in March, when everything was changing so quickly, and also our business was seeing a lot more softness, as I think COVID was becoming a huge, huge, huge reality. And the change was we were experiencing it personally, and our customers were experiencing it. Renee: There were moments when it just felt like you were paralyzed into not wanting to do anything, not wanting to send an email because you weren't sure what to say, or not wanting to post on social because you didn't know what to say. Stephanie: Yeah. I saw so many articles about that too, like how should your brand discuss COVID, and it's tricky because you can get in trouble for anything these days, and it feels hard to take a risk on any messaging, or yeah, move forward at all. Renee: Oh, totally. And I feel like I even had conversations with my CEO about pulling entire catalog mailings, and just like these very, very huge changes that weren't just about the next couple of weeks, but longer-term stuff too. And what I think worked for my company is to just not stop, to keep moving in the dark room. There's that metaphor when the lights go off, and you just stop. Renee: And we just didn't do that. We forced ourselves to write the really hard email copy. And I think we used to have like me and my copywriter, and my CEO review copy. And instead, we invited the larger group to really help us think through what felt right. And that really helped. We started emailing more frequently. Renee: So, rather than sending emails two to three times a week, we started emailing four to five times a week. Just because it felt like rather than sending these huge, big, long stories, we could just tell these smaller-point-in-time stories, and just keep our finger on the pulse more often. And that seemed to really work for our customer. Renee: And then, I also think we just force ourselves to try new ideas that we've never tried before, and make them work. We ended up shooting a catalog entirely in studio because we couldn't get outside. And it actually is one of my favorite catalogs we've ever created. So, it got- Stephanie: Oh, that's great. Renee: ... May of this year. And I feel like it just forced our creative team to just think differently about everything we were doing. And it was really raw and vulnerable. But it's really awesome, and you see that it yields great content. And then, I'm also really proud for my company to speak up around Black Lives Matter. I think, as a company, we've definitely made it known that we're more of a progressive organization. Renee: But I think never made such a bold statement around an issue that we are passionate about. And I honestly think that going through March, and just learning how to be honest, and real with each other, and connecting with our customers in the way that we did, it really made us feel more empowered that we should be making bold statements across our platform about things that we believe in. Renee: Especially, when it has to do with human rights. And so, it really helped us guide how we responded to the Black Lives Matter movement in organic, social, and email, and just what we've been doing as a brand. Stephanie: Yeah. That's great. I like the idea of leaning into it not being scared to publish things. And just that we agree with that method of doing thing. So, are there any brands that you watched? Oh, go ahead. Renee: Oh, as I said, the other thing that I think we do now that we weren't doing beforehand is, well, one, we use Slack all the time, which I love Slack. It's funny to me that we are late to the game on that one. But the other thing I was going to say is that we actually have team meetings every single morning, and I feel like we over invite. Renee: When you're in the office, I feel like we have a tendency to try to limit meeting attendance because sometimes meetings just explode. And then, you feel like they are becoming unproductive. And I feel like we've been taking the opposite approach during COVID. We have a 30-minute meeting with my entire team. And that includes customer service, to eCommerce channel managers, to somebody on our brand creative team, and our copywriter. Renee: And it just helps to just connect really quickly in the beginning of the day, and make sure that everybody has the same information starting point for what's happening. I'm sure that there's a lot of people that don't need to be there, but I think it's replicating that like water cooler environment, or that you're walking, and making eye contact with somebody, or catching somebody in the bathroom. That's made a big difference too. Stephanie: Do you think that you all will continue doing larger meetings like that? Because I agree, having people onboard so you're not having to retell things, or having one person tell another person, tell another person, and the message is completely off. Do you think you're going to continue doing things like that even after when we can return to offices? Renee: I hope so. I'm going to force them to have a meeting every morning when we get in. I think there is something really nice. I think we've actually come together. We support each other more. I also think like role clarity has solidified itself in a really strong way. And I think there's not land grabbing around projects. Renee: Everyone is just super clear around who's doing what, and there is no like, "Oh, I wish I was working on that, or I wish I could contribute to that." It feels like there's more support across team members to get projects done. Stephanie: Yeah, very cool. So, earlier, we were talking about acquiring customers, and you mentioned that you had a scrappy marketing team, or your marketing efforts are scrappy. And I wanted to dive into that a bit about how you're acquiring your customers, and what channels you're finding the most success in, and what that looks like behind the scenes? Renee: Sure. So, like team structure, or more just channels that we're using or both? Stephanie: Yeah. I'd say channels, or marketing campaigns that are doing well, or how you think about setting that up to drive conversions, and new customers, and all that. Renee: Yeah. The last couple of months have been a weird time for everything. But I actually think for us, it's actually meant not really focusing on new channels. I'm starting to do that a little bit more now. Poke my head up, and think about what I want to test, and do in 2021. But for us, it's really been just focusing on things that we're already good at, and just being really, really thoughtful about brand creative. Renee: So, the channels that have been most successful are paid social, Facebook, and Instagram, and catalog continues to be really successful for us. Usually, retail is an awesome channel for us to introduce ourselves to a lot of people. But our stores were closed for three months. So, obviously, that had a big impact on our business. But yeah, so those channels have been working for us. Renee: And then, we have a pretty scrappy team. We do all of our own in-house creative, which again, I think has been really helpful, and iterative, and making sure that we feel all of our content is on brand. Yeah. Stephanie: All right, cool. For the retail stores closing, are all of them opening back up, or is it making you rethink your retail strategy at all, or what's your plans going forward with that? Renee: Yeah. I think, gosh, it changes every couple of days. I want to say 90% of our stores are opened. I think some of the stores in New York might still be closed, and I'm not sure when this air, so that might be different then. But for the most part, our stores are back open. We've been seeing that buyers are coming in, and even though our traffic is down, that buyers are coming in with a lot of intent. Renee: And we're seeing much higher basket sizes, and much higher conversion. So, overall, I think positively encouraged by what we're seeing in our retail channel around customer engagement through the pandemic. But I think what's been really exciting, and maybe that's the wrong word. I feel like nothing is really exciting. But when stores closed, I was nervous about how much we would lose the engagement from those buyers. Renee: Buyers that tend to participate in your retail channel, they do that for a reason. They're people that really like to touch the stuff before they buy it. And so, I wasn't really sure what to expect from those buyers in shifting their purchases to online, and how much, I call it retail migration, we would see. But for the most part, it's been a lot higher than what I was expecting. Renee: So, I feel good that our higher contact strategy that we've had in the web channel, or the web marketing tools has helped us engage with all of our buyers, even if they're traditionally retail buyers. Stephanie: Got it. Did you have different marketing strategies to keep those retail buyers engaged, and reaching out to them more, maybe not through email offerings, but direct mail or something like that? Renee: Not really. We talked about it a few times. But then I feel like, it's hard to create so many different creative iterations. I think we just came from like, "Hey, it's one customer out there. So, who are we talking to? We're talking to all these people." And I think what we've been talking about hasn't really been channel specific. It's more like Zeitgeist specific to everything that's happening in the world. So, I think that's worked for us. Stephanie: Cool. So, the one thing I was reading a bit about was something called the Re-Spun program. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that because I was trying to think about how that model works, and the operating cost behind it, and all of that, and I was hoping you could touch on that a bit? Renee: Sure, I would love to. Re-Spun is a program that Marine Layer launched in November 2018, where we actually recycle old customer t-shirts into new tees and sweatshirts. And what's cool about it is that we take any old shirt that our customers had, does not need to be a Marine Layer shirt. We give customers $5 per shirt of Marine Layer credit. Renee: And then, we'd take their old shirts, we'd break them down to pulpy fiber, and re-spin them into upcycled cotton. And we also blend that upcycled cotton with a little bit of recycled poly, and then use that new thread to make new shirts, and new sweatshirts that are still absurdly soft Marine Layer caliber product. But it's actually being made from 100% either upcycled or recycled materials. Renee: It's a cool program because I think it does a lot of things. One, it defers shirts from landfills. So, we've actually collected, this number is probably a little old Knox. It's from January of this year, but over 170,000 shirts from our customers. Stephanie: Oh, wow. Renee: I think it's fun that we get to reward them, and give them Marine Layer credit. But I also think it really solves a problem for a lot of people out there. If you go back to why Marine Layer was founded, it was because our CEO did not want to get rid of his old favorite shirt. He wanted to keep wearing it, and he loved it so much. And I think there really is an emotional attachment to your clothing. Renee: That's what we try to do in every single piece that we create. And when you have an emotional attachment to something, it feels very sad to throw it away, or give it to Goodwill, and not really know what's happening to it. So, I think when we introduced this program, we were honestly blown away by the interest in donating old shirts. Renee: And we've actually had a lot of fun even going through them because we processed them at our headquarters. But some of them are old sorority fun run shirts, but some of them are like, there's really incredible stories behind the shirt. Renee: We've even reached out to some customers and shared that on our Instagram. We also did a contest just sharing the funniest shirt that we've received through this program. So, it's a nice way to connect with our customers, and understand more about what their stories are behind their clothes. And then- Stephanie: That's really fun. Renee: Yeah. And then, lastly, because I know this is an ecommerce-driven podcast. In some ways, we think about Re-Spun like our loyalty program. So, it's our way of rewarding customers for sharing our values, and creating clothing in a more responsible way. Renee: I think overall, just the response to the program, that's been just so awesome. Renee: We're just trying to expand it in a much bigger way. So, I'm looking for ways to include recycled materials, not just in this small assortment of Re-Spun tees, and sweatshirts, but how do we include recycled materials in everything that we're making. So, it's been fun to focus on this value of making clothing more sustainably, and using more recycled materials, and applying it to our whole brand. Stephanie: Yeah. That's amazing. So, to take a little step back into the world of eCommerce a bit more, and building actual websites, and all that stuff. What tools do you love using right now, or are you testing out, and you see them really working well with either not just customer acquisition, but conversions, or website performance? Anything in the nitty gritty that you're like, "This is really working well for us?" Renee: I feel like it's nothing. Stephanie: Feel free to go into the weeds. Renee: Yeah, I know. I'm trying to think. I feel like it's nothing particularly new. Well, if we've been having more fun with email flows lately, and looking at the frequency at which we're sending those, because it does seem that there's just an overall appetite to hear from Marine Layer more often. So, we were not sending our abandoned cart emails until two days after. Renee: But now I think we've moved that up to a few hours later, trying to monitor and see what happens there. I think because we are sending emails more frequently too, looking for more ways to segment our email file so that we can tell, again, more specific messages to certain audiences. And yeah, I think it's not really been not a lot of new in the last couple of months, it's mostly been focused on looking what we're doing, and seeing what we can make better. Stephanie: Yeah. What content are you sending if you're sending emails more frequently? I'm guessing it can't just be more product emails, or just the abandoned cart ones. I'm sure you're sending some content that's keeping the subscriber happy and engaged. How do you think about that when you're sending more emails? Renee: Yeah. Some of it is just as simple as segmenting by product gender. So, focusing on sending men's focused emails to people that tend to buy men's product, and women's focus emails to women's product buyers. But then, I also think a lot of branded messages. I think one thing that I love that Marine Layer does, that I didn't see happening as much out there is sometimes, we just send emails with no performance expectations against them. Renee: We send a really fun email, fun might be the funny adjective for it, but in March, where we just profiled what our employees were wearing while they were working from home, and- Stephanie: That's fun. Renee: Yeah. It wasn't even product that we are currently selling. We tried to focus on Marine Layer products, but our employees tend to have stuff from two or three years ago. So, we more just wanted to tell a story of being comfortable, and trying to find ease, and optimism wherever you are. Yeah. We also send that email usually around Father's Day or Mother's Day where we just like, "Oh, I love the Mother's Day on this year actually." We all sent in images of Facetiming with our moms. Stephanie: Oh, that's cute. Renee: And just talked about like, "We miss you, mom, we love you." And then, I think the Father's Day when we did this year was just around taking vintage images of all of our super cool dad styles, and sharing them on our email, and through our Instagram. So, yeah, I think we've had more creative license, just send emails that are just fun, and emotional, and make us feel happy rather than feeling like they're performance driven. Stephanie: Yeah, I love that. That's really fun, and I will be signing up just to see those emails [inaudible 00:47:30]. Stephanie: All right, cool. So, the lightning round is where I'll ask a question, and you have a minute or less to answer, tan-tan-tan. Renee: Yes, I'm ready. Stephanie: So, this one I'm asking for our producer [Hilary] because she put it on the list. We heard you're a Bachelor fan. So, who's favorite bachelor or bachelorette? Renee: Oh, my God, that's so funny. I love Kaitlyn Bristowe. I just love Kaitlyn Bristowe. Stephanie: She is the best. Renee: Yeah. I feel like she ushered in a new era of Bachelor viewers, and I love The Bachelor. But then I also really love this funny podcast called Here To Make Friends. And it's like a feminist take on The Bachelor, and they rank episodes of things where feminist fails, and it's fun. I used to have a lot of roommates, and we would all watch it together. And then I got married, and I didn't have anyone else that would watch the show with me. So, now, I got to resort to podcasts. Stephanie: I love that. Well, then that's a good transition to what's your favorite podcast that you're listening to? Renee: Ooh, that's a really hard question. So, top of my head, I would say Radiolab and Fresh Air. Those are easy answers. But Fresh Air in particular, I love Terry Gross. I just think she asks such thoughtful questions. And I'm always surprised by the content that comes out of her interviews. And some of my favorite ones are with unexpected guests. If anyone hasn't listened to the Jay-Z interview with Terry Gross, go and find it. I think it's from 2013. It's so funny. It's so good. Stephanie: Oh, that sounds good. I have to check that one out. Renee: Yeah. Stephanie: What is your favorite learning tool or resource that you leverage along the way when it comes to running either marketing, or eCommerce, or something like that, where you're like, I constantly think about this book, or this article, or this person? Who do you look to, or what do you look to? Renee: Definitely my time Athleta. I would say it's more just the incredible coaches that I had at Athleta, and leaders that I had there that were just incredibly passionate about customer analytics, and customer health as a driver of long-term business health. I could list off folks, but Scott Key was our CEO. He's incredible. Renee: Mike O'Reilly was our leadership for marketing and eCommerce. And Irene Wong, my boss at the time, just a really, really powerful, thoughtful team that cared so much about the success of Athleta, and wanted to just try looking at a new way. They still inspire me all the time. Stephanie: That's amazing. What's up next on your Netflix queue? Renee: Ooh, this is embarrassing, but I'm going to say it anyways. How adorable is Baby-Sitters Club? Is anybody else watching that? Stephanie: I have not watched that yet, but I will have to check it out. I'm down to watch that. Not embarrassing at all. Renee: Okay, good. I have a three-year-old little girl, and I watched Baby-Sitters Club, and it just gave me a little spark of optimism that maybe the world is going to be okay if there's more 13-year-olds in the world that act like the Baby-Sitters Club. So, I'll throw that out there, and then also, Expecting Amy. We're two episodes in, and that's pretty good. Stephanie: Yep. Yeah. That's funny, too. What app do you have in your phone that you enjoy the most? Renee: This is going to be boring, but probably Google Analytics and Instagram. Stephanie: That's all right. Hey, those are not boring. I love Google Analytics and Instagram. Of course, is great. Renee: Yeah. I have to hand it to Google Analytics. Their app is very functional. I like that you can do different comparison periods real time stuff, it's helpful. Stephanie: Yeah. No, I completely agree. And then, the last one, if you were to create a Netflix original, what would it be about? Renee: Fun question. I have thought about this. Stephanie: Oh, wow. Okay. Renee: Well, I guess I feel I would like for there to be more stories about female professionals, and especially about female professionals that are comfortable being feminine and vulnerable, like Brene Brown take on what it's like to be in a workforce now. And I feel like there're podcasts that I think have done that really well that inspire me a lot. Renee: But I'd like to see that story told more. And I'm sick of stories about working mothers that are balancing their work life and their home. That's too complicated and too much to unpack there. But there is a lot to tell about just this new era of vulnerable women in the workforce. And I think a lot of them are moms, and I am very inspired by that. Stephanie: Yeah. I would definitely watch that. Renee, it's been such a fun interview. I loved how deep we get into a lot of things. And we will definitely have to have you back for round two. Where can people find out more about you and Marine Layer? Renee: marinelayer.com. So, that's a pretty straightforward one, and then definitely come and visit our stores. And for me, I don't know, send me a DM on Instagram. I'm @renielo, or you can send me an email at renee@marinelayer.com. Stephanie: Cool. It's been a blast. Yeah. Thanks for coming on the show. Renee: Okay. Thanks. It was great talking to you, too.
If you really stop to think about your clothing and the prices you pay for it, you might find that you’re left with a few questions. For example, how can a t-shirt cost less than your morning cup of coffee? Surely the materials and labor involved in designing, making, and shipping a t-shirt are more costly than a few coffee beans and some milk. That low-cost t-shirt is the result of the fast-fashion business model which has swept through the fashion industry. The result is that we may have more access to cheap clothes, but the quality is poor and the environmental and humanitarian cost could potentially be catastrophic. Zana Nanic is the Founder and CEO of Reclaim, a slow-fashion Ecommerce brand, and she is on a mission to change the way people buy clothes. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Zana explains how she started Reclaim after becoming fed up with the business casual, fast-fashion norms of Silicon Valley. Plus, she dives into what you have to learn from your customers during the initial launch of your business, and why she believes that an omnichannel approach is the best way to find success in the future. 3 Takeaways: First impressions matter. You have very little time to make a lasting impression when someone visits your page. Relaying the information that will get them to convert must be delivered in the first few seconds a potential customer visits your page. Returning customers is the holy grail metric for a small or start-up company, especially as it relates to the slow-fashion industry. When customers return to buy more, it tells you that they value you and your products and you can build a stronger relationship with them. Invest in pop-up shops and omnichannel strategies to help convey the quality of the clothing. These tactics yield a more valuable and loyal customer. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Hey, everyone, and welcome back to up next in commerce. This is your host Stephanie Postles and today, we have... Let me get the name right. Today, we have Zana Nanic on the show, the CEO and founder of Reclaim. Zana, welcome to the show. Zana: Thank you so much for having me. Stephanie: Yeah, I'm really excited. I'd love to hear a little bit about Reclaim. Zana: My story is not the typical story of she liked fashion and therefore she's super creative and wanted to do fashion. I am originally Croatian and I moved to Italy because Croatia was in the middle of a civil war. I grew up in Italy as a refugee and my parents, I remember, they were trying to get a job and they couldn't get any job because they didn't speak fluent Italian. Somehow, it was the early '90s them and fashion was the thing to do in Italy. Somehow, they started working in the fashion industry, very, very small and they were lucky enough to have a pretty successful run with it. Zana: But to me growing up, fashion was this amazing tool for empowerment. It was something that you could wear and forget a little bit of your identity. I had this very heavy label I was carrying with me, I'm a refugee, a foreigner, an immigrant, and as a child, sometime, it was pretty heavy. But when you had the right outfit and you look really nice, people just assume different things and admired you and were inspired by you. Zana: Fashion became a little bit my armor and then going into my adult life, it really became a tool I would leverage and use to present myself in a certain way. Giving you an example, when I was at Uber, I was one of the youngest people there and I was already managing. Having the appropriate dress code that made me look a little bit older than my age was essential for my confidence. Very much today as well. Zana: Reclaim really is this testament to how do I help women connect to themselves more and just open up opportunities so they don't have to worry about their outfit, but worry about much bigger and much more important things in their life. Zana: Reclaim is a fashion brand we started eight months ago and we focus on a very limited collection, all the wardrobe staples that every woman needs. But what we try to do is combine Italian craftsmanship and artisans. I'm Italian and my family is in Italian manufacturing. I literally grew up and made in Italy fashion. We tried to combine that aspect of fashion where beautiful aesthetic and a beautiful detail with love for practicality and function. Zana: I currently live in San Francisco, very Silicon Valley. Everybody's superefficient, super go getter. We try to incorporate those to [inaudible] and the clothes, and we have a very limited collection of things that are practical, functional but also extremely beautiful. Stephanie: Very cool. I was reading a little bit about your story of how you were in pencil skirts and heels and then you came to Silicon Valley and everyone was wearing hoodies and jeans and you're like, "I want something a little better." Zana: Yeah, that was a bit of a shocker because I grew up in Italy, where fashion is part of your identity, such a country that has a sensibility for beauty and art and culture, and fashion is a form of art. I was coming from a very corporate world. I wear pencil skirt, high heels, very formal wear was the day today. Zana: And then my first job at Silicon Valley was working for Google. I remember showing up there and everybody was wearing jeans and sneakers and T-shirts. I adapted to that lifestyle in the work outfit. But I also felt super underdressed. I'm like, "Ah, last time I wore this outfit, I was 15 and in high school." Is there anything a little bit more elevated? I feel like an adult and a woman with a career but still appropriate for business casual, and this is a little bit where Reclaim came from was how can we define a business casual aesthetic that is elevated but still very approachable and affordable Stephanie: Yeah, I love that. It's funny. I also worked at Google and if you would even get what would be considered maybe dressed up, they'd be like, "Oh, where are you going today? Do you have a date afterwards?" You're like, "No, I just want to wear a dress today. I just want to wear something cute." Zana: 100%. It will be, "Are you interviewing for a different job?" Stephanie: Yes, I would get that too. You're working at Google, what did your career look like before Reclaim at Google or some of the other corporations? Were you in eCommerce or was that a big shift for you? Zana: It was a little bit of a shift. I mentioned before my family's in fashion so they have boutiques on the Italian coast stuff but very old school. They barely have a website and they do a lot of manufacturing and older clientele hasn't been the same for 30 years. I grew up in commerce but not eCommerce, a different generation. Zana: When I graduated college, I didn't think about fashion as a career option to be honest. I was like, "I want to do something that is different." Everybody I knew was in fashion. I was like, "I want to do something completely different and break the path with what my family is doing." I ended up in consulting. I ended up in management consulting and I didn't work for some fashion clients, but mostly I did a lot of projects and hardcore heavy industry, and after that I worked at Uber. Zana: I was managing Uber Eats in Italy which is different than fashion but is related to commerce and how to get conversion and how to get people to purchase your products. Some of the themes were similar and then the Google role was a mix of the two. It's a little bit of strategy and a little bit of execution and was focused on growing this smart home business. Zana: I would say that the career path I took was not a fashion career path and then this shift happened in business school. When I went to business school, I realized actually I do want to embrace my roots and there is a lot I know and I can offer and I spotted this niche in the market and this gap that was really needed. Honestly, it was my pain point. I was like, "I really don't know where to shop and I want to wear beautiful clothes but I also don't ever want to go dry clean them." That was the perfect solution. Stephanie: Yeah, that's super important. I remember one time I had dresses to dry clean only I'm like, "I'm going to throw that dress away. I'm not going to do that. I don't do dry clean." Zana: I also have a lot of beautiful cashmere sweaters and I wear them once per season because they end up in my pile of stuff I need to bring to dry cleaning and it takes me months to go. Stephanie: When you're shifting into creating Reclaim, did you tap into your family say, "Hey, here's what I'm doing," and start brainstorming with them since they are the experts but not in eCommerce but maybe in the industry when it comes to high end retail? Zana: 100%. They were my first consultants, advisors, investors. They heard it all. My family business was a little bit like the sounding board for Reclaim and I spend a lot of time with the people in my family business and my family contacts. Like our pattern maker, for example, that we use in Reclaim she's a person that I met through my family. She's based in Florence. She's super, super talented and I designed with her most of the clothes that you see in the Reclaim collection because I would bring in the creative perspective and the vision, but then the nitty gritty manufacturing specs, somebody who's an expert has to do them. A lot of the concepts come from my family background. Stephanie: That network that seems a great way to start a company when you have different connections that you can tap into like that and different lessons that you can bring with you. That's awesome. What did the early days of Reclaim look like? Tell me a little bit about starting it up and building the website presence and how you were thinking about attracting your first few customers. Zana: The early days... We launched last summer. That was our first collection launch. I'd say the early day was a little bit like still discovery. I want to say that that lasted for the first few months. From launch to beginning of January was a discovery moment. You come in and you've done a lot... At least, when I launched the website, I talked with more than 2000 women at that point. I thought I know it all. I've talked to them. I understood what they want. Zana: I have a crystal clear picture what is needed, but then, when you have a website is when you start learning for real because one thing is the people that you have face to face what are they telling you and another thing is, "Oh, how are people interacting on my website? What products are they looking at? What are they purchasing? Which ones are asking questions? Which product are getting returned?" Zana: I would say the real learning starts when you are putting something in front of people's faces and you're asking them, "Put your credit card information and buy." That's when you're learning. Do you have product market fit? Or is there something you need to change? Zana: The early days were very, very busy. A lot of documentation and a lot of learning. We really cared about nailing it. Our first 300 to 400 customers, I would personally give them a call and just ask them, "How come you purchased? What convinced you? What did you like?" And just spend a lot of time learning and writing all that knowledge down and taking that feedback in. At the end of the day, we'd be like, "What did we learn today?" And just the bad thing and improving what you're doing. Zana: I wouldn't say that commerce is you have an idea, you put it out there and build it and they'll come. It doesn't really work like that. It's literally like take a lot of pride into changing things every day and iterating as fast as possible. Stephanie: I love that. You had a good point of a lot of people sometimes think build it and they'll come. But oftentimes, that's not the case even if you have an epic product or website or whatever it may be. How did you find your first couple of customers? How did they find your website? How did you get in front of people? Did you do some marketing? Zana: Marketing is a great way to attract people. Our first customers came from the Stanford network. I went to Stanford Business School. The first purchaser were people within my network. People that graduated from Stanford, Stanford alumni, or people that were affiliated with the university because we market it in the university network. And then following that, we had a lot of word of mouth. People who were wearing our products will tell their friends. We had a lot of referral. Our first batch of people that started using the product were referral, learned about us through referral, and then paid marketing. Zana: We did paid marketing on Instagram and Facebook. That is a channel that you use to raise awareness about your brand and your product. Our second wave was through paid marketing. Stephanie: Very cool. How often are you all launching products or new lines? Zana: We are a slow fashion company. Let's say, Zara. Zara would launch 20 collections a year, something that is not like fast fashion but still a high fashion. They would launch 14 collections a year which is a huge number. We're a slow fashion company so what we do we launch very, very few products, but we spent an enormous amount of time making sure that those products are amazing and they're done with the best material and the construction and fit are very well done. Zana: In total so far, we have launched one collection last summer and then we're coming up with our second one this coming August and it's a fall and winter collection and we're having just four products, four basic products, but they're done so much better than what's out in the market. Stephanie: Very cool. When you say four basic products, am I thinking like a T-shirt, a black dress like that kind of product? Zana: Yeah, I can tell you more. We're going to have white button down and the special thing about this white button down is that the front layer is actually made out of two different layers of fabric. You can 100% be sure that your white button down is not going to be see through which is a common problem every woman faces. And then material is the tencel material which is only produced in Germany, is highly sustainable, and it's one of the most ethically conscious materials. Zana: Another thing we're launching is two-piece jumpsuit and it's also made in tencel, so super nice fabric. We made it two-piece because, I don't know if that happens to you but it always happens to me, when you're wearing a jumpsuit and you're feeling amazing and then you go to the bathroom and you have this humbling moment where you're completely naked in your office bathroom. We're like, "No, it has to be practical." We made it look like it's only one piece but it's actually two pieces. Stephanie: That's awesome. I think every woman who's either tried on a jumpsuit or worn one you're like, "Oh, this is kind of awkward." Zana: Yeah, you look great and then the first moment where you actually have to live your life, you're like, "Oh, this is going to be difficult." Zana: And then the third product we're launching are... Those were our bestsellers in our first collection so we made some tweaks to them, but it's a pair of pants. They're made out of a super stretchy fabric but basically you're wearing a pair of black pants that look very nice and professional, but they're absurdly comfortable because the fabric is a 4-way stretch. You're feeling like you're wearing yoga pants but you look like you're wearing a really nice pair of black jeans. Stephanie: That's good. I need that. Zana: Our customers love them. We've got the most responses on those because they're such a good cheat. You're super comfortable but not inappropriate. Zana: And then the fourth product we're producing is going to be a camel coat. This one, the fabric is amazing. It's 30% cashmere and the rest is merino wool. It's super nice and soft. You literally want to sleep with the fabric, just the fabric price is $250 worth of fabric. It's super expensive but going direct to consumer, we will be able to price this product at a 350. It's one of the most affordable best quality materials that you'll be able to find. Stephanie: That's great. How are you conveying this quality and value to consumers or new customers when they're coming on your website? It's hard if you can't feel the fabric or try something on or know the backstory behind it that it's coming from Germany or Italy. How are you conveying that message on your website? Zana: That's a great question. Honestly, that is one of the hardest things to do because in a store, it's very easy. Somebody walks in, you touch it, you try it on, you talk with a store associate and you understand the message. In e commerce, you have roughly 10 seconds to make an impression. That's how much time people spend on one page before they decide. "Will I shop here?" Or they'll just bounce and go somewhere else. Zana: I think here is one of the areas where we did the most learning. Initially, we would have a lot of marketing language to be honest. The highlight or have some bullet points. Now, our learning is actually, no, like the women are coming on our website they really want to learn. We do exactly how I described them to you. We have lengthy copy, we go into the details, we give people the story. You don't have to read it. Zana: But if you're interested, there are pages into story of the material, what is the German fabric that is making this material. We provide all of that information out there and then we do big visual. Visuals and images is what converse the best and what people are resonating the most. We combine the text and the rich information with images, beautiful lifestyle images that people can see a zoomed in image of the fabric and reviews. Zana: We have also a lot of product reviews where every single customer that purchased with us we've reached back and asked them if they want to review the product if they loved it and oftentimes they do, which is great. Stephanie: That's awesome. How are you encouraging those reviews when a customer buys? Zana: We have an entire review post purchase encouragement system. The first attempt is always just to ask and usually... We have an email where I just introduce myself and tell them the story of our brand and how valuable their reviews are and that's where most of the people do their reviews. And then our second or third interaction is we provide them with a discount to a future purchase in exchange for a review. Stephanie: That's cool. Is there any split testing you do there that you've seen that worked better? I know we were speaking, I think, a couple weeks ago to the founder of Hous and she was talking about how she puts an image of her and her husband on a pamphlet every time they send a box or a thank you or something like that and that helps convert. Have you seen any best practices around that? Zana: The reason why we use my personal email for the reviews and I introduced myself is because people do like the personal touch. I'm sure that the founder of Hous was putting an image of her and her husband... People form a connection. My customers have the feeling that they know me and they're purchasing from an actual person. That is a real bond. Zana: I had one customer who bought a pair of pants from us and then she wore those pants on her family photo shoot with her newborn baby. She emailed me afterwards and she was like, "Oh, I want you to have the photos of our family photo shoot because I wore your pants and I look so great and the photos are beautiful." And I was just shocked. I was like, "This is so nice. This is amazing." Zana: I don't think I've ever emailed a brand to share like, "Oh, I wore this for an important moment of my life." I felt so attached. I remembered that made my day. The fact that something that I came up with and I designed and produced and spent time thinking up on, it's something that made her photo shoot more special and she felt prettier and more confident was very meaningful to me. Stephanie: That's really cool. That is a good customer to have. Hopefully, you can keep her long term. Zana: We have the craziest customer. We had one customer who purchased our perfect pants, the pants that are super comfy but they look professional. She purchased one pair. She loved them so much that she purchased 12 of the same size, the same... I remember seeing this order and I was like, "There must be a mistake." Zana: We email her because we thought there was a mistake or a glitch in the system and she was like, "No, I really love your pants. I want to have one for everyday of the week and I always want to have one ready because those are the pants I wore the most, so I just purchased 12." And I was just like, "I love you. You're amazing. Where do I find more customers like you?" Stephanie: Yeah, really. If you know, you know. That's great. Are you trying to also cross sell to a customer? I'm guessing when someone comes on your website and there's not a huge product catalog, it's probably beneficial to be able to say, "You're looking at this sweater. You should try this pair of pants with it too." How are you thinking about showing other products and are you personalizing at all? Zana: Yeah. The collection that we're launching is only four pieces and you're meant to have them all and they work as a capsule. All the colors are in the same color palette and they're all made to be mixed and matched. The idea is that you do purchase the entire catalog, and we're very mindful. Zana: The collection that we're coming up now is very much in line with the one we had before just a different cuts and different styles, but all the ones we are going to do in the future we're going to keep the same color palette and consistent materials so that people that decide to be Reclaim customers will have a trusted brand where they can have the entire wardrobe being a Reclaim wardrobe and it will always work for them because we're not going to have crazy fashion forward pieces that you buy once and they don't go with anything that you own. All the colors that we pick are very much neutral, creams, beige, black, and white. But it's a palette made to be mixed and matched and to do cross selling. Stephanie: Got it. Do you see people normally do buy multiple products at once? Or is there a little bit of convincing afterwards? If someone's like, "Oh, I'm just going to buy the button up and pants," are you then saying, "You forgot the sweater. You forgot the jumpsuit." Zana: Both. On average, people buy two products. That's our website average. But oftentimes people who bought and liked the products come back to the website and either buy more or just like fill their carts to try new products. Both things are true. Average first order is at least two items and then we have a lot of returning customers. Stephanie: Cool. Is there analytics that you're checking out to either see did they add something to their cart and removed it or were they hovering over something for a long time? Or is there any metrics that you look at behind the scenes to target those customers? Zana: 100%. We have an abandoned cart flow. We call them flow. When we see somebody put something in their cart and then they ended up not checking out, basically an email follows them and ad follows them for a few days just to remind them that they still have this product in their cart and if they want to purchase it, then people who do purchase get an introduction to every product of the collection. They will receive emails to learn about the different products. If somebody, for example, bought the camel coat and then the following weekend then email about the pants. They can go back and purchase the pants. Zana: But there are some Holy Grail metrics that we look at as a startup. For us, returning customer is super important, even more than customer acquisition, even more than value of the basket size. Returning customer is what we really care about because that's the metric that shows how do people like you and how do people trust you and how well do they like your product. Stephanie: How do you reengage a customer if you have your... I think you mentioned slow fashion is the industry that you're in. How do you reengage someone when you might not have another product launch for six months or a year? Zana: You don't. That is a little bit the tradeoff. You can either have customers who are going to buy lots of pieces with you and you're going to have a high lifetime value of that customer, but they might not like you that much. They might consider you as us. "I bought it because it was cheap and it was on sale and I keep it in my wardrobe." But then the first Marie Kondo moment you have and you go through your wardrobe that is the first item that doesn't give you joy. Zana: Our model is very different. Our model is we're going to do fewer much better pieces and a customer will wait for our collection to come because they know it's going to be superior quality and it's going to be a piece that they will buy and keep for years. Stephanie: That's a good idea. Is there any education that you give your customers around why they should move away from the idea of the fast fashion industry or how to think about that? Any education behind the scenes that you're also doing? Zana: We are vocal about it in our Instagram but we're also considering starting a blog just to educate about what is this little fashion movement. But I would say that in 2020, a lot of the people that we interact with are extremely conscious consumers especially the younger generation. They know if a product is sustainable. They care if a product has an impact on the environment. Zana: I would say that it's the age of information. If somebody wants to know how ethical a company is and how much they honored your commitment, it's very easy to learn that. I don't know. I remember 15 years ago when fashion companies were like, "Oh, everybody's telling us we're not green." And they all started doing marketing campaigns in the middle of the forest. Get away with that. Literally, it's a practice called greenwashing. Stephanie: I had never heard about that but I do remember seeing images of people in new outfits and whatnot marketing them while they were sitting on a tree branch or standing in a field. Zana: Yeah, literally. That is called greenwashing where you basically show some images that could make your customers think that you're greener or more ethical than you actually are. I despise that. I don't want to be that kind of company ever. Zana: For us, it's very important just the customer that we have care and we do too. I'm okay if somebody who is not our ideal customer doesn't want to shop with us. I'm okay with that. If our price point is too high or if being sustainable is too expensive, I'm happy to have a smaller market but be company that is worth having in this world, than compromising on my morals and having great profitability. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. It seems like your consumers would be interested in the community aspect of... You have a great personal story. You have a good story behind your company, a fun process, probably if they wanted to see behind the scenes of who's making what and how you're thinking about your designs and coming up with ideas and balancing all that out. How do you think about building a community around your brand? Zana: Our social media is our most powerful channel to share. We always post stories of behind the scenes and what's happening and what are we going through. That is the channel where the community is starting to mobilize. But in general, we do a lot of in person events. Not now because COVID changed that. But before COVID we would do brunch and browse, shop and sit. We would do events like this or and we target professional women in San Francisco because this is where we're based. We were very active on Facebook groups for professional women. Zana: We would have events where women can just come together and talk about their challenges and how they're advancing their career and simultaneously try on new great clothes. That is something that we help foster a lot. Stephanie: That's fun. I want to do one of the brunch and browses. That sounds awesome. Were you doing popup shops? Or how were people were they browsing? Online while in person or how do you think about the in person experience and retail locations? Zana: We have a partnership with a company like... We have multiple partnerships with companies that only have stores. We were in a Re:store in downtown San Francisco. They had our products on for six months. Now, they're close but they're reopening soon. And then we're opening our location in L.A. and one in New York with [inaudible 00:28:27]. We have partnerships with companies that basically bring URL brands and products in real life events. Stephanie: That's cool. How do you think about creating those partnerships and finding the right person, the right store? How would if someone was brand new go about finding a partnership like that? Zana: You have to make sure that is the right path you want to go on. I say that because retail distribution at this moment is not something that we could afford because we are a direct to consumer brand. We use premium materials and we make sure that our materials are done in an ethical and sustainable way. Our product cost is pretty high. We still keep prices as affordable as we can. Therefore, we don't have enough margin to pay a store or retailer and have a big distribution. Therefore, the partnership that we use we see them more as an opportunity to have a marketing presence in L.A. or New York. Zana: If somebody wants to touch our products and learn more about them, they can actually go and have a physical retail presence but it's more an exercise and a way to discover products rather than a sales channel for us. Our direct to consumer website is our number one channel for sure. It's the place that we use because that is the only way we can pass on as much price saving to the customer as we can. Stephanie: Yep. That makes sense. How have you seen conversions when it comes to people seeing something in person and then buying it online? Were you tracking that? Have you seen success in that model? Zana: What we noticed is that people who discover us in person are very loyal. The people who have had the chance to try on pieces and have had the chance to touch all the materials, they are the ones who end up buying. Most of the products have the highest basket size and they're the ones coming back just because they had the opportunity to discover everything and literally touch it with their own hands rather than seeing it on a website. There was definitely a benefit to that. Zana: But as I said, we are thinking about a model where in the future you can have a store where you discovered a product and touch and feel it but the growth will still come from eCommerce rather than opening stores across America. That's not something that we're thinking about at all. Stephanie: Got it. Maybe having like guide shops style where people can go in and look at it and then still go online and order to keep your margins down where you guys have now or close to it, I guess, not where they're at. Exactly. Very cool. To shift into more general eCommerce questions, what kind of trends are you most excited about over the next year or two around e commerce? Because a lot of things are shaking up right now, so I'm sure there's a lot on your mind. Zana: Yeah. Oh my God. eCommerce has been exploding. COVID definitely helped the eCommerce grow, but we're seeing multiple trends. One trend was definitely... Apparel did suffer a little bit. Zana: When COVID started in March, we saw an impact on our sales because everybody was scared. Most people are working from home. Our pieces are investment pieces to make you look great when you go to work or when you're out and about. It's not at leisure. And suddenly, the world is shopping for pajamas. We saw there was an impact to our sales. But the trend is quickly changing. Already in April, we saw a bump in sales and we think it's stimulus check giving an impetus to, "Let's buy nice beautiful clothes." We're seeing different trends. Zana: In terms of things I'm excited about, I'm very excited about sustainability. I'm very excited about slow fashion, the fact that consumers really care and want to purchase companies that our ethical. Zana: I'm most excited that customers are seeing that fast fashion and buying on sale and buying seasonal pieces is not something that they want to keep on doing. It's something that it's okay for your early 20s when you're broke and you want to be on trend, but the moment you're in your 30s or 40s, you want to have a more of a... They call it like a French lady aesthetic. Few pieces, very well done, super high quality, but not always make you look very chic rather than a bunch of things that do not make sense together. Stephanie: There's this one company that always targets me on Instagram and they drop new products, I think, it's every week and it got to a point where it's like, "Is this even quality? How can you drop new product lines every single week?" I started looking into it and you're like, "The reviews are pretty bad." "Oh, it's not..." Like you said there's no good ethical practices that are happening behind the scenes, but they're just very good at marketing. Zana: Ask yourself. If you see a T-shirt that is being priced six, $7, think about it. If the cost of Starbucks coffee is four or $5 and making your coffee is much easier than making a T-shirt that requires fabric, people sewing it, machines, transportation, it just makes you think. Somewhere in the supply chain, they must be taking some shortcuts. Stephanie: Yeah, I completely agree. It definitely is a good time too around apparel for a lot of people to rethink, like you said, what they're wearing, what's important because right now everyone's been in workout clothes and now even myself, it's like, "What do I really want to invest in going forward?" Because up until now, I've only had to worry about my top half and just have a nice looking shirt on maybe. Stephanie: But once it starts going back to work and going out into the world, I do think there will be a big shift in the consumers mind around, "What do I actually want to wear going forward and not just, like you said, for a season or a few weeks and then be done with it and clog up your closet space?" Zana: Exactly. That's definitely a trend that we want to participate in where if you already have a limited disposable income because the world is an uncertain place right now rather than spending it on things that are not going to last or that are questionable, spend a little bit more on fewer things which ends up being the same amount of money at the end of the day. But you're 100% happier with the premium pieces. Stephanie: All right. Let's move on to the lightning round brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. It's where I send a question your way and you have one minute or less to answer. Are you ready? Zana: Yeah. Stephanie: What's up next on your reading list? Zana: The Wheel of Time. It's a fantasy book. Stephanie: I haven't heard of it. I have to check it out. What's up next on your Netflix or Hulu queue? Zana: Oh my God, don't judge me for this but I think it's going to be The Bold Type or Selling Sunset. Don't hate me for this. I watch everything that was watchable on Netflix. Now I'm starting to trash watching. Stephanie: I actually can't judge you. It's funny because I was just watching Selling Sunset last night. I'm like, "This is so embarrassing but I'm going to keep watching it because it's really funny and I ran out of things to watch." No judgment coming from my side. Stephanie: Next on your travel destinations when you're able to travel again? Zana: I want to go to Italy. I know it's cheating but because I'm international in America, the recent visa immigration policies have been really difficult. I haven't seen my family in a year now and the moment this is all over, I'm going to Italy. I'm going to vacation for a month and I'm going to make all my friends jealous on Instagram. I don't care but I deserve it. Stephanie: I think I'm just going to come with you. You don't even have to worry about me. I'll just get behind the scenes. I'll be like, "Hey, mom and dad, where's my pasta?" Zana: We can go to Italy and watch Selling Sunset. I think we have a plan. Stephanie: Yeah, there we go. It'll be a perfect girls' trip. Stephanie: What's up next on your shopping list? Zana: I actually want to buy a nice desk. I'm eyeing this beautiful wood desk on AllModern. I think that's going to be my next purchase. Stephanie: Oh, that sounds great. If you were able to pick anyone to go to brunch with, other than me because that'd be a blast, who would you pick? It can be a celebrity or whoever you want. Zana: Oprah. I'll definitely go to brunch with Oprah or AOC, one of the two. I have a big girl crush on both of them so I should decide which one. Stephanie: You can bring them both. That sounds fun. And the last harder one, what one thing do you think will have the biggest impact on eCommerce in the next year? Zana: Next year? Stephanie: In the next year, yep. Zana: This one is a hard one. I don't know if under one minute it's answerable, but I think different forms of creative so Tik Tok is exploding. How to leverage different platforms like Tik Tok or just different forms of creating than the usual that we've been accustomed to see. Stephanie: Cool, great answer. It's been super fun having you on here. Where can people find out more about you and Reclaim? Zana: They can always shop and this is reclaim.com and follow us on our Instagram @thisisreclaim. Stephanie: Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on the show. It was really fun and we'll have to have you back in the future. Zana: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.
As Randy Goldberg says, ‘no one dreams of going into the sock business.’ But if there is one sock company you can name off the top of your head, it’s probably the one Randy built with co-founder Dave Heath. Bombas Socks has grown from a small Ecommerce company with a mission into a $100-million dollar enterprise, and the success they’ve had all boils down to remembering the fundamentals. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Randy takes us through his journey to Bombas. He details why founders need to avoid ‘shiny object syndrome’ and focus their sights on the basics if they want to succeed. Plus, he talks about Bombas’ culture of transparency and how to decide between leading with the company mission or the merits of the product when trying to attract customers. Key Takeaways: Bring in the Right People. Scaling requires people — employees, execs, investors, and mentors. Lean on your network, ask questions, hire carefully, and create a dialog with other D2C companies to learn from them. Pro tip: It’s time to bring someone else in when you start to ask questions that neither you nor anyone on your team can answer Ask Yourself, “What Matters More?” When it comes to getting better conversions, don’t let shiny objects distract you. For example, changing the copy or placement of a video matters a lot less than the speed of the site. The faster your site speed, the more conversions you will have. Stay focused on what investments really convert Transparency Impacts the Bottom Line. When employees feel invested in the company and comfortable in the environment you create, they begin to ask more questions, buy-in to the company mission, and work harder to achieve success for themselves and the company For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Today, I'm really excited to have Randy Goldberg on the show, the co-founder and Chief Brand Officer at Bombas. Randy, welcome. Randy: Thank you for having me. Happy to be here. Stephanie: Really excited to have you. Thanks for taking the time. I'd love to dive into your background a little bit before we get into Bombas, a little bit about what brought you into the world of Ecommerce and starting Bombas. Randy: Yeah, I guess, we have a sock company, an Ecommerce sock company. I say this a lot, but I don't think anybody ever really grows up dreaming of being in the sock business. It was kind of a winding path for me to arrive at Bombas and to think about this company. My background is in branding, so I was a copywriter and a strategist, and I worked for digital agencies and I worked for a lot of brands through the years. Writing brand books, trying to find out where they had gone astray, brands that were sort of struggling a little bit. I think through that work, I gained a perspective on what I thought a good company looked like, talked like, acted like. At some point, I moved from the agency side to the media side and I was working at a digital media company, and that's where I met Dave Heath, my co-founder in Bombas, and we sort of cooked up the idea when we were working together way back then in 2011. Stephanie: Cool. Why did you guys think, I want to start a sock company? Did you both want to start this or did one have to pitch to the other? Randy: Yeah. Well, I don't think we thought of it as a pitch. We were friends and we were both very entrepreneurial in our outlook. Our families were entrepreneurs. We just, I think, had that same point of view on the world, and we liked the idea of maybe starting a business one day. We weren't actively writing things on a whiteboard and crossing off a list, but we would just talk about things and the business landscape at the time. It wasn't, we need to get this done this year, we were just having a regular day, and Dave was on Facebook, and he saw a campaign that the Salvation Army had been doing with Hanes. Randy: The Salvation Army, they had a quote in there that said socks are the most requested clothing item in homeless shelters. We were having lunch, and Dave said, "I saw this quote, did you have any idea about socks and homeless shelters?" And I said, "No, and I don't even understand why." We started to call around to some shelters in New York, and we were talking to people and we just realized that there was a real problem here. If you're living on the streets, a fresh pair of socks, foot hygiene means a lot. You might be walking more and have less frequent opportunities to wash your clothing. And then, shelters don't accept used socks for donations. So they were always having a shortage and it was always a big need and people would have to buy new socks and then donate them. Randy: People just tended to donate the things that they had worn or gently used. We really just wanted to help solve the problem. So, we started thinking about that, we started buying socks and donating them. Then, I guess just the way our minds work, we started to think there's probably an opportunity here. We looked at the success that Toms had been having and saw their one-for-one business model, and Warby Parker had just launched at the time and they had a charitably inclined business. We thought, maybe this business model really works for this product. It really maps well to it. Just because this is a product that people really aren't allowed to donate on their own. Randy: Then we started to think about socks and we just got obsessed with socks. We were like, socks just haven't changed in 50 years. Athletic socks look the same. They're cardboard, they're white or they're black. Even if you're somebody who cares tremendously about the things that you wear, where they come from, what you're putting on your body, the last thing you get to generally is socks. We thought there was an opportunity to make something really great, to really improve on a product that people take for granted, and that are afterthought in the consumer market, to help solve a problem that's an afterthought sort of for shelters and organization. Randy: Just like, if we can make something really great, we'll sell a lot, and if we sell a lot, we can donate a lot, and if we donate a lot, we can help solve a problem in the community where we work and live. It's easy to look back and say that, but at the time, it just took a while for us to wrap our head around this and think about it as a business idea. Stephanie: Very cool. I will say that I'm definitely someone who had socks as an afterthought, but I will say when I tried on Bombas, I was like, this is a whole different level of socks. I didn't realize I cared about them at all. I would normally just get black ones and just be like, whatever, as long as they're short, I don't care. Then I tried them on, I'm like, oh, these are game changing. They're amazing. Randy: Thank you. I think that's what we're going for. We want to change the way people think about socks, and make it hard for you to go back once you put on a pair of Bombas. Stephanie: Oh yeah. You can't. In the early days, when you were starting out, how did you think through the economics of developing the one to one program? Randy: The early days for us, that meant making sure that we could, from the start, bake into the unit economics, the donation pair, so that no matter what anyone said along the path, if we were raising money, if we were building the business, that there's nothing anybody could do because we were ironclad around the donation model. We built it into the covenant of the business. We've codified it. It's just something no one could ever really take away, but just focusing on it from the beginning and making sure that we could afford to do it, as a for profit enterprise, was a big early step. We've grown and we've gotten smarter about it and we've built a big network of giving inside of the company. It's all gotten bigger and better, but it really started with that idea. Randy: I think that's the right question. Did you think about it from the beginning? Yes, or else we wouldn't have been able to do it and maybe somewhere along the road, we would have compromised, but it's been a big part of how we've talked about the business and the brand and a big part of the success of the company, and having a great product on the side for the consumer allows us to afford the development costs of the donation product, which is an important thing to make sure we're making a product for people who are experiencing homelessness or living on the street. All of these things have been really thought out from the start. Stephanie: It's amazing. I think I saw that you reached profitability by year three. What does your revenue look like now, annually? Randy: Well, we don't typically share exact revenues like numbers, but it's a multiple hundred million dollar a year company at this point and profitable. Stephanie: Very cool. Yeah, I think that's what I saw, but I wanted it to come from you instead of me saying what I think that I read. Randy: Yeah. You read correctly. Yeah, so profitability, I think you're seeing a lot of direct to consumer companies and Ecommerce companies now really starting to think about profitability in this moment. The way that people are raising money and what companies who are handing out money have been looking for, it's forcing a lot of companies who've raised a lot of money and had profitability as a down the road kind of goal, shift how they're operating and shift how they're thinking. I see that, and I've talked to founders who were dealing with this and it seems really painful. I think for us, it was a goal from the beginning. We wanted to have a really solid conservative financial outlook, get to profitability quickly, build a business for the long-term, for the long haul. Randy: We want our grandkids to be wearing Bombas. That's one of our core values. I think that plays into the way that we built the business from the unit economics and financial side of things as well, and the way that we approach marketing, which obviously as you know, as a direct to consumer company, is the hot topic, of course. Stephanie: Yep. Were there any issues that you ran into along the way? Because scaling to over a hundred million revenue is probably pretty tough. Is there any lessons you learned along the way or things that you're like, ooh, we did this great, or we maybe should have done this a bit different? Randy: I think the number one lesson is about focus. Know what you do really well, know why your company exists, why your product deserves to exist in the world, and then focus on doing that well, focus on telling the same story over and over and over again. Whenever we've been able to really focus on that product on the donation, on the sort of foundational elements of the business, that's when we've done the best, and that's when the company has grown really well. When we've gotten distracted by, hey, let's try this pop-up retail idea, or let's advertise in this new place that is unproven, but seems good for this one specific reason, and it's taken our focus away from the things that we do best, that's where we've had the most trouble. I think that's been the big theme for us in the early years, is just focus has really led to growth, and it's where we've had the most success as a company. Stephanie: Very cool. When thinking about the first conversion or a brand new customer, do you think the social good aspect of the business sells the product initially? Because it's pretty hard to convey how good the socks are on the website. Randy: Yeah, it is. It's hard until you, I guess, you try them on, and we just want to get as many socks on feet as possible. But yeah, there has been a constant debate at Bombas since day one about what comes first and the way we talk about the company. The quality of the product comfort or the mission, our commitment to give back to the community. Some people come for the product and stay for the mission, and some people will come for the mission and stay for the product. I don't think we've solved that debate. We poll our customers and we're surveying people and we're thinking about this a lot, but I think the thing that works the most in marketing for prospects, people who haven't heard about our company, is talking about comfort, is talking about the quality of the product. Randy: The mission definitely helps complete a sale, helps with the follow on sales, and our customers, people who've already made purchases, expect us to close the loop, report back on how we're doing with the donations that we promise we would do on their behalf. That storytelling element helps us with both sides of it. It's just about where we show up with the mission and where we show up with the product marketing, at what time in the life cycle. It's an ongoing debate and we stay nimble around it, but those are still the two elements, and they have been since the beginning that show up the most in our communication. Stephanie: Cool. The other thing I saw that you all had was the happiness guarantee, which I was like, how do they remain profitable? Because one of the things I think I saw in there was, if your kid outgrows a sock in a year, which I have three kids, so I'm like, that could happen quick, or if your dog chews up a sock, which our dog, [Tossy 00:11:14], does that every day, how do you make sure that people aren't abusing those rules? How did you come up with that happiness guarantee? Randy: I think for us, we think about the great companies that we all like to work with, or shop at, or interact with. A common theme is that they have great customer service and they stand by their products. We wanted to make that a hallmark of Bombas. In the early days, Dave would take all of the calls that would come in to our phone number on his cell phone. So we would be out talking about the business or in a bar, back when there were bars. He would get a phone call and go outside, and an hour later, he'd come back and he'd just talk to a customer. I think that idea of just making sure that we're taking care of the people who are spending money with us, that led to the idea of the happiness guarantee. Randy: We have our internal customer service team, they're called the customer happiness team, and we've also, just sort of connecting it back to the business, to get back to your question, people who interact with our customer service team have two times the lifetime value of customers who don't. We're trying to turn issues that people have into positive experiences, and that turns people into bigger longterm customers, because then they trust us, they trust that we take care of them. Sure, there are people who try and abuse the policy, but that's far outweighed by the number of people who are just trying to solve a problem, or get to the bottom of something and want things to be right and don't want to have to jump through a lot of hoops to get there. Randy: For us, the good of having that really strong internal team to deal with our customers and to respond to problems, and yes, to make sure that if your kid outgrows the sock that's expensive or that ... We'll be there to grow along with you. All those things are ... we just want peace of mind as people go through the process and think about, should I be making this purchase right now? Stephanie: That's great. How do you train your customer happiness team? Because I feel like it takes a certain kind of person to be peppy and to, like you said, have a higher lifetime value with the people who interact with that team. What kind of training process do they go through? Randy: It's pretty rigorous. I think Dave passed on the mentality of our customer happiness team to the person who originally ran the program, and he's still running that team. I think, like almost everything at Bombas, when we have something that we want to do and we feel like we've reached the limit of how we can handle it ourselves, we try and bring in people who are way smarter than we are and have the right skillset, and really focused on hiring great people. It also helps that, people who come to work at Bombas, tend to want to give back to the community and are inclined to support and work for a company that cares about that as well. Then, we in turn, care tremendously about our company and the company culture, and all of those things lead us to find, I think, the people who are right for the roles and write for the company and speak to those core values, and that's how it works with the happiness team. Randy: They're trained, not only on what to say in the situations that come up most often, but how to deal with Bombas customers, how to put the extra spin on it. It's about, I guess, just that level of care. Our whole team really appreciates that customer service team, and we make sure that they know how appreciated and important they are as the first line of defense for our customers internally as a team. I think giving them the support and love that they need as the team that has to deal with a lot, and has to clean up mistakes when they happen and make sure that everybody's happy, and then understanding how we want them to communicate with the world as a brand. The way that we talk in an ad versus a video, versus on the phone with the customer, versus internally, none of that should really be different, right? We're trying to be really consistent as a brand. Stephanie: How do you create that consistency? Because I can see as a company grows, and I've seen this happen before, where you start developing silos and the teams are kind of off doing their own thing, maybe trying their own marketing campaigns, and it starts getting a little bit chaotic. How have you kept a consistent culture and feel at Bombas? Randy: Yeah. We're not immune to some of the issues that you just brought up. But just recognizing it, being honest about it, trying to get ahead of those things, and focusing on that core messaging and communicating well internally. We're also at the stage where we're really thinking about planning and processes as a company as we've grown to 150 employees and being remote, how we interact and how we work cross departmentally. Those types of things are at the front of mind right now. We're hearing it from our team, we listen to ideas, we bring in people to help us. I think we're laser focused on making sure that some of those breakdowns and that siloed work doesn't get the best of us. We have seen that and we're working on it. Randy: I think any company that starts off operating like that, when you have five or 10 people, that would be overbearing, and I don't think the type of people who end up coming to a company that small would appreciate that, but as you grow, you have to adjust and you have to get ahead of it so that people keep that same feeling of freedom in terms of thought, in terms of how they can innovate in their work and get things done, and expectations around their jobs, all that stuff becomes really important to be more documented, to have tighter processes so that people feel freer to do the things that they love to do. That's what we're trying to work on, but it's not an easy thing. Stephanie: Yeah. It's definitely a tough juggle. If someone were to join and they're employee number five, and then all of a sudden, there's 150 employees, it's like, okay, well, I used to be able to do everything at the company, and now you want me to shrink my role. A tough thing to work through with employees. Randy: Yeah. It's a challenge. You want to retain the people who made Bombas, Bombas, but you also want to make sure that people are growing in the right way, and there are opportunities, and the new people who come in at certain levels understand what they're supposed to do and what everybody else is supposed to do. You just start to get into these things that maybe you thought you would never have to deal with if you started a company, but as it grows, this is what it looks like. Stephanie: Yup. Were there any resources that you leveraged along the way when you were growing quickly, when you were like, I need to learn this or I need to figure this out, or companies that you were watching to learn from? Randy: Yeah. I think that's been our mindset since the beginning. Just from our early advisory board, just to fill in the gaps, to hires that we've made, the things that we tend to lean on are people. Dave and I are like, we don't know the first thing about performance marketing, when we started this business. We need to bring in somebody who's an expert in that, or at least, have somebody on our advisory board who can help answer questions for us as we grow that until we have that right person, or to help us find the right person. That's been a big part of how we've grown this business, is leaning on our network to reach out to people, to ask questions, to make good hires, and then watching other D2C companies and having a good dialogue with the other D2C companies who have grown to our size and larger. That's been really helpful as well. Randy: Then you also think about companies like Toms. They've been really helpful to us, in terms of watching out for certain mistakes that they've made along the way with their donation aspects of their business. They've been really open with us about those things and helping us avoid them. We try and do the same with other companies who reach out and want advice from us as well. Stephanie: Very cool. How did you think about building out the website? What kind of things did you want to have on there to make sure that you kept with the brand story, but also, sold enough to be able to be profitable to keep the model working? Randy: It's a great question. The idea of what a website looks like when it's your only store is so important. You want to have that right blend of storytelling, but you want people to be able to breeze through the checkout process the right way. That's been a journey for us. I don't think it's anywhere near where we want it to be, but I would think that you would ask any direct to consumer company and they have a lot they want to do, and their technology roadmap is pretty long, and that's part of it. You're always building, you're always tweaking, you're always improving. You're looking at the data and you're making changes to just make it better. Randy: In the beginning, at some point we have to replatform. But just the processes along the way to get us from where we started to where we are now, to where we're heading, it takes a lot of care and attention. Like I said, when it's your only store, I think it's your job and your duty to make sure that it works and operates really well. Stephanie: Yeah, I completely agree. How did you know it was time to replatform and what was that experience like? Randy: I knew it was time when we just had so many issues with managing traffic or the backend or uploading content. It was wrong. We launched the business and the website in 2013. Since 2013, there've been a lot of changes in technology and the way that Ecommerce works and looks. If you went back to a site from 2013, as a 2020 consumer, you wouldn't last a minute. You'd be out. Stephanie: You'd bounce right away. Randy: You'd bounce. There was a lot more tolerance then, but less people using Ecommerce because the experience just wasn't great. I think, if you go back even further, and I think about this a lot, if you were starting a direct to consumer company in 2009 and you didn't have a lot of money that you would raise, building the website itself would have been prohibitively expensive for most brands, for most companies. But if you managed to get it up, the marketing was basically free. There was no algorithm that was holding your content back. If you had a Facebook page, whatever you posted, everyone who followed you with anyone who shared it, and anyone who got added to your page, not some of these early companies, resources to build a site were able to build huge businesses. Randy: But then, as it shifted, now, if you want to launch a direct to consumer company, the technology is basically free, getting that website up, but the marketing is prohibitively expensive. It's totally flipped. We just happened to launch, I think, in a sweet spot where the technology had gotten more affordable and the marketing was still affordable, but it was not free like it had been in 2009, and it wasn't very hard or challenging environment like it is now. We sort of had time to figure out both pieces, and we had runway to figure out the marketing and we could afford the technology. Then that got a lot better, and just have to stay on top of and ahead of all those things. Stephanie: That makes sense. To focus on the website piece first, and then we can jump into the marketing aspect, so the website, was there any like big fundamental changes that you made where you're like, this made the biggest difference when it came to sales and conversions and even getting traffic in the first place? Anything that you remember that you change where you're like this had the biggest improvement for us or a couple of things? Randy: Site speed, I think is the number one thing. As a person who comes from the creative side of the business, a copywriter or strategist, there's nothing that I could do from my previous job or as a brand person that would make the improvement of one second of site speed in terms of how something loads or how it acts. Just sort of getting over some of the sort of shiny objects into saying, oh, if we change the copy here, or what if we put this video here, or had this type of look on our site? If you make your site faster, it will convert better. Things like that, just understanding the fundamental way things move and what people want from you, layering the other stuff on top then becomes just sauce and becomes fun. Then you can start to have incremental changes and things that work. But I think, just looking at site speed, if you want one good thing, that's where I would start, as dry as that might be. Stephanie: Yeah. No, that's a great one. Was there anything affecting the site speed that you were surprised by? Randy: I think the way that you manage and load images, obviously has a big effect on that. Your product architecture and understanding Randy: I think some of these things you don't realize when you're starting out, but the way things are organized, hosted, served, there's sort of best in class ways of doing that now. But if you want to have your variants of your products perform a certain way, or if you want to create bundles in a different way than most companies do it, then all of a sudden, you're creating ... you could be creating extra things that are weighing your site down, even though you think ... it helps you organize the things that you want to sell the way that you see them in your mind. It doesn't always benefit you because maybe you're slowing things down. If people are bouncing before they're even seeing it, then what's the point? Again, this isn't my area of expertise, but these are the things that you learn along the road when you're doing everything in a business when there's five people. Stephanie: Yeah, I think that backend infrastructure piece is hard to focus on in the beginning because you're so excited about the product and the marketing, and like you said, getting good copywriting and telling your friends that you don't really think about how to set up, maybe the data and the backend piece to actually create a good performing website. Randy: Totally. Listen, like I said, my background was in branding. I was a copywriter. I think we built this business around the brand because it's, in many ways, a commodity that you turn into a brand. You do that by being really consistent and having good storytelling and build a moat through brand. But none of that exists if you don't get the infrastructure piece right, and you can't get to that. I talked to founders who were starting companies, and they're so focused on hiring the right creative agency or branding agency, they'll put together the right logo, and it's just not the right place to start in my mind, even though I love that work and I love thinking about that for companies and thinking about how you communicate to the world and understanding why your product exists, but without that fundamental infrastructure piece, no one's going to care about that other piece. It's just maybe a little bit of a sad truth for creative side of business people. Stephanie: That's okay. Got to hear it sometimes. Randy: That's right. Stephanie: One thing I saw that you guys were doing was that you were investing in a data science team and embedding more data elements into the customer journey. Can you tell me a little bit more about that and how you knew it was the right time to bring on a team like that? Randy: How will you know it's the right time is that when you start to ask questions that you can't answer, and nobody internally can answer it. That's the truth, and when one person ... Randy: You also know when you're having a debate about something in the business and somebody is able to pull out data or a statistic related to what you're talking about, and the conversation ends because it's hard to argue with the data. When you see that and you've thought about it the other way, and you're not trying ... You can't convince data, right? I know [crosstalk] manipulated. Stephanie: There's no argument there. Randy: That's right. Then you sort of think, this is really valuable, and rather than trying to think about something from the perspective of, I think it should work this way, you want something to show you how it should work, and you want to be able to interpret data the right way and be able to use it to your advantage to build out a strategy, rather than just making assumptions and going off of somebody who has the most experience or who has the most seniority. I think companies get in trouble when they just rely on the loudest voice in the room or somebody who's the most persuasive at arguing rather than bring data as a voice into the room for decision making. Randy: I think it started to creep in when we would understand a little bit what we don't know, and then have debates that were a little bit out of our depth and we didn't have the right people. We didn't really have that skill in the beginning. We knew that it would be a big part of this business, even back in 2013. We just knew that it wasn't the first thing we were going to invest in. It just sort of came naturally to the time. We were always excited about the idea of what a data science team could bring to the table for a sock company. There was a point where you almost can't operate without it anymore. Stephanie: Yeah. That's awesome. What does it look like now having that team, and what kind of metrics are you guys paying most attention to? Randy: A lot of the metrics are the same. You'll see a lot of Ecommerce companies paying attention to, but what the team looks like, and what's interesting is, now that we have the team in place, getting other teams to work with that team the right way is the key, and getting our directors and decision makers accustom to partnering with the data team, to help surface solutions to problems and present them and work, it goes back to some of the work that we're doing, trying to figure out the processes and cross departmental work and to avoid some of the siloed behavior that you brought up earlier. A big part of that is the data team and how they can help support. There's support teams within an organization, there's execution teams, and that's very much a support team, and they love answering questions for teams, and some teams use the data and analytics team more than others. Randy: We just try and be really loud about it at our all hands meetings and present back case studies so that people understand how they could better use that team. It's a process and something that was getting better all the time, but you just sort of have to make it central to how you operate as a company. That doesn't happen overnight. It's a big change. We've been working on that for the last six months to a year in a major way. I think it's really paying off for us. Stephanie: Very cool. Yeah, I definitely have seen business intelligence teams in the past struggle with being able to create a partnership with the product team or the engineers. I like the idea of showing a case study. So instead of pushing it on a team member, it's like, well, here's what another team did. Look how great this turned out, and encourage them to want to partner with that team even more. Randy: Yeah. You're making decisions, how many times a year should we ... We're not a promotional company. But if you wanted to ask a question, like how often should we do a sale? There's logical times of the year when you think that should happen, and the merchandising team might have a different perspective than the marketing team, and using the data team to think about the effect on customers or prospects. There's so much information that could help steer a decision like that, that is major to the business. Those are the types of things where you start to see a lot of power in the team like that. Stephanie: Yeah. We're talking about data. I want to also shift into the aspect of transparency. I read that you and your co-founder both had subpar experiences with transparency at previous companies you were at. I wanted to hear, how do you think about being ... Well, first tell me the story. I want to know all the nitty gritty details, and also how did that influence your culture now? Randy: Sure. I don't know, the cliff notes is that was a major influence on our culture now, but we had the experience together. Like I mentioned, we worked together at a previous company, and at that company, the person who ran the company brought amazing people together, and there was a great team, and the work was fulfilling and we learned a lot, but it was really hard to have conversations around career growth or compensation, or how well is the company doing? Or data. One person tended to hold on to decisions for so long that it was counterproductive and it was demotivating for people. You felt nervous to even ask a question, and nobody understood their stock options. You would ask questions about it and you'd get them response months later. Randy: That sort of fogginess around the things that people really care about when they're going to work at a smaller company, it was really hard for us. We knew no matter what company we started together, building a culture of transparency, where people really understood the why behind the business, the core values, the financial performance, what their ownership meant, and a culture of being able to ask questions, that was hallmark from the beginning. We just wanted to create the company that we would have loved to have worked at and centering our employees in the business, and thinking about them just as much as we do our bottom line. Our theory was that it would make the bottom line better. People would be more inclined to give something beyond their capacity or to continue to learn or to grow if they felt safe and supported at the company. Stephanie: Cool. Yeah, that definitely is a good way to build a company from the ground up, and maybe not fun to have that experience, but hey, you learn from the best people you work for and the worst people you work for. Randy: Absolutely. I wouldn't trade that experience because that's what led to the culture that we've built at Bombas. I think, if you talk to our employees and the way they think about it, we're maybe more proud of that than anything else that we built in this company. Did I give you enough nitty gritty details? Is that good enough? Stephanie: Yeah, I was hoping for a little more drama, but I'll take it. That was good. Randy: There was plenty of drama. We can talk about that offline. Yeah. Stephanie: That sounds good. Earlier, I mentioned, I also wanted to hit on your marketing a little bit. What kind of channels do you focus on? What are you seeing success in right now in any new channels that you're excited about? Randy: Yeah, for us, listen, we're a direct to consumer company that started in 2013. Can you guess what our number one marketing channel is? Stephanie: Facebook? Randy: Bingo. Right. Okay. I think we still see a lot of success there, and while it might've been a way larger percentage of our marketing mix in the early days, and we've diversified away from that a fair amount, it's still an important driver for us. In the beginning, in the early days, we would create a video that we didn't even intend to be an ad, just a thank you to our customers, and then eventually it gets turned into an ad on Facebook that's seen a hundred million times. Leaning into the trends and trying to see around the corner at Facebook. now working closely with that team. has really helped grow our business. Randy: One of the things that we have had since the beginning is ROI positive or breakeven on first purchase. We're not over our skis on Facebook spend, while lot of companies are to just to try and build up their customer base. For us, it was important to really be disciplined. We knew that if we were going to grow our budget and grow our company, and we were a really marketing led company, we'd have to diversify away. So, Hello Podcasts, radio, direct mail, TV. Those are all big parts of the business now, and they're all growing probably at a faster rate as a percentage at least of the business than our online ads on Facebook. But search has grown for us tremendously in the last year and a half as our brand has grown and recognition has grown. Randy: Some of that comes from broader marketing, like on TV, and then people are searching Bombas by name, and we can lean into search advertising and that works better. Some of these things are just about timing. Yeah, we still have a tremendous success sort of trialing things out online. We've never used a creative agency. Everything is internal at Bombas, so all of our creative direction and the marketing team and the partnership between the creative team and the brand teams and the marketing team operates as an internal agency. We like places where we can test things, test creative, test lines, test different cuts of videos, see what works, preview it, and then build it out into bigger campaigns that could work across all those different places that we talked about earlier that I mentioned. Randy: I don't know, that's sort of more of an overview than what's working now. But if I think about the last few months, when everyone's at home with COVID, people who were still able to afford to be buying things right now online are looking for comfort, and socks have done well in this moment. On the other side of things, we talk a lot about our efforts in the community and how we've adopted and been able to help out in this moment above and beyond how we normally do. That's also something that people want to hear about. For us, it's the combination of the product and the storytelling and the marketing mix, and making sure that we're nimble enough in all three of those places to make adjustments as we build and grow. Stephanie: That's awesome. Do you find that you have a community also, because it seems like with your story and your brand, you would have this community of people who want to lift you up and talk about you and spread the word organically without you really having to push too hard? Randy: Yeah, absolutely. Community is a big word at Bombas. Something that has been since the beginning. I think about the community of giving partners that we have. In the beginning, when we wanted to donate the socks, you buy a pair and we donate a pair on your behalf. We didn't know how to do that. We started with one giving partner that would accept socks from us, and we learned a lot from them. Then we built a specific sock that we donate, that's more tailored to the needs of the homeless community. Since then, now we have 3,500 giving partners across all 50 States. These are the people who are working really hard on the front lines helping out that community and doing what they can to serve their communities, and our job is to support them. Randy: That is a big community. We get a lot of feedback from them. Then you have our customers who really care tremendously about the product and the donation aspect of it, and they're telling our story on their behalf. You mentioned earlier about one of the keys, I think for us is consistency. The more you're telling the same story in different nuanced ways, the easier you make it for other people to tell your story on your behalf, and that word of mouth marketing, or letting people explain to somebody else when they're having dinner that, hey, they just got these socks and they're really excited about them. Randy: They donate for every pair they sell, and they also just happen to change the way they feel about putting on a pair of socks in the morning, and they feel more supported and comfortable in their daily life. That's a pretty amazing thing that you can get somebody talking about socks at dinner. I think all of this stuff is related, making sure the messaging is tight, keeping that internal, having a marketing team that's nimble and always trying new to new and different areas, and then having that product that's really high quality to support all of that, to give you the confidence to go out and sell something. Stephanie: That's great. How do you keep things organized? Because I'm thinking about, you have all these community organizations that you're mentioning to do the one to one program, then you've got your own product that you need to focus on. How do you make sure that you're spending the right amount of time with each area? Randy: You don't want to be playing whack-a-mole, I guess. You want to be seeing ahead of things a little bit. There's a certain element of making sure ... You start to see when some friction comes into a certain side of the business and you need to spend a little bit more effort getting your go-to-market process ironed out, or on the technology side, if we don't install an ERP process in the next X amount of time, we could see a lot of trouble. I think that starts with a leadership team that communicates really effectively, often open, and is really humble, and then syncing up on our company roadmap, and making sure that when something does seem like it needs a little bit more attention, that people spend their time on it. Randy: That's the idea. I guess some of that is also thinking about, and talking to companies that are a year or two ahead of us, and have been through some of these sort of growing pains at the same times, and looking for the pitfalls that they went through and trying to get ahead of it rather than to have to be reactionary. Stephanie: The D2C community, it seems like they're very helpful with each other, and you just mentioned, looking to someone who's maybe two to three years ahead of you, how have you utilized that community and leaned into it to get advice or build friendships or mentorship? Randy: Yeah, it's a great community. For us, we're a pretty open group. We talked about transparency and communication as pillars of Bombas from the beginning. We want to help out other companies who are coming up behind us, and then we've looked to other direct to consumer companies, and other, generally, just good companies to try and help us out. You ask the question and you find that people are generally willing to say like, yeah, this is how we did this, or connect with this person on our team. They know that at some point they'll have a question for you. We've always been just asking questions outside of the organization. It's the same approach with hiring. We want to bring in people who are smarter than we are. Randy: We want to ask the questions to the companies who are ahead of us. You don't get the answer if you don't ask the question. It's just an important thing, and I'm not sure why this group of companies especially is more open or collaborative, seeming than other groups that you've been in, but maybe it's this generation of founders and the way that we grew up and the interest in community, and the expectation from customers that our company just can't look the way it used to look or act the way it used to act, and it has to have more of a purpose. Maybe that just drives us all to be a little bit more open and a little bit more flexible and a little bit less guarded about some of the things that we're doing. Stephanie: Yeah, I agree. It also just seems like there's so many opportunities. It's not like you're going to be talking to someone who's doing exactly what you're doing. There's just so many opportunities and so many things to start and try that I'm sure that also helps with people wanting to share and show how they did things. Randy: Yeah. I don't really feel competitive with anyone in that space. In some ways, those companies, you could see them as more of our competition than another sock company, because we're competing for the attention of people online. It doesn't matter what you're selling. If somebody else is taking away time that somebody might spend thinking about Bombas, then I guess that's competition, but approaching it, from a lens of collaboration and like, if they can help us know we can help somebody else, it's just the way we've done it. I'm not sure it's right, or it does feel like it's helped us. It is nice to feel like there is a community around this. I like to think about these companies, I like the community of the businesses. Randy: I'd rather be lumped in with these companies, as a community of people that can help each other with the business side of things, than on the brand side of things. I'm wary of being one of the direct to consumer brands out there, because I don't feel like that set of companies always looks the best or the type of press that is out there is always positive. For me, it's just about the people running it and the people at these companies, and making sure that people in our teams are connecting to people who've done something that they maybe don't know how to do perfectly. Stephanie: All right. Before we jump into a few higher level Ecommerce themes, I wanted to hear what is the best day in the office look like for you? Randy: Oh, the office. Stephanie: How do you walk home when you're like snapped in and you're like, that was a good day. Randy: Remind me of what an office is. Stephanie: Okay. What's the best day from your bedroom look like? Randy: Well, okay. It is interesting to think about at home versus at the office. The office is a big part of who we were as a company and getting everybody together and that spirit of community that comes into it, and being able to sit down with someone face to face. We do miss that. Although the teams are really productive and risen to the challenge of working remotely. The best day feels like when something goes well beyond what you expected and teams are celebrating each other and recognizing each other. Also, when we have a speaker from one of our giving partners to give us perspective on what's happening in our work life and why maybe it's not the most important thing in our life and in our world. Randy: When all of those things are kind of clicking together, I think people remember why they work at this company, what's truly important, how they can impact it, and then the collaboration and the spirit that comes along with it. Those are the best days for me, when you're reminded of what's important and how that impacts the company. Stephanie: I think it's good to document those days too. I really like, there's a coffee shop, Philz, right up the street, and they have all these pictures of their employees and just having fun and team meetings they have. It's on the way when you're headed to the bathroom, but it's really fun. I would think as an employee, but also as a customer to see and remember like what it felt like that day and how excited this person looks when they're receiving this award. Because it seems like it could be easy to forget when something's moving so quick. Randy: Totally. I love that idea. I also think about the times when we all got to volunteer together. Now we tend to volunteer in smaller groups which is obviously still great. We have sign up sheets for all of our volunteer opportunities and you have to pounce on them to get the spots that you want. I think that speaks a lot about the culture of the company, but some of the photos you look back on from those moments, or those days when the team feels really connected, those are really exciting days. Stephanie: Yep. All right. A higher level Ecommerce question. What do you think the future of online shopping looks like, like in 2025? Randy: Ah, like when we're all driving around in flying cars, what does Ecommerce look like? Stephanie: Yup. I'm on Mars. Where are you? Randy: I might be on Mars too. Do you want to have a rival colony? I'm down or maybe we have a collaborative colony. Stephanie: Okay. Oh, I'm down. Maybe, we'll see. Randy: We'll see. Okay. All right. We'll see. We'll figure it out then. Stephanie: It depends if you accept my LinkedIn request, I guess, then I'll know. I'll be like, is it any cooler now? Randy: Wait, that's how we judge if you're cool, is if you accept our LinkedIn request? Stephanie: I just made it up, but we'll see. I might have higher criteria afterwards. Randy: Okay. All right. We'll put a pin in that. I don't know what the future of Ecommerce looks like, I got to tell you, I know the percentage of people who get comfortable shopping online, that's only going to go up. I know that companies are going to invent new ways to make it easier for people to buy their product, to review their product, to look at it. I think ease is the name of the game. In a world that's going to be more and more competitive, the way to stand out is going to change. All I know is it's not going to look like it looks right now, and having the attitude that, even if you're doing something right, that the way to succeed in a few years, it's going to be a different version of right, then you'll be okay. Stephanie: Yep. I love that. All right. Before I move into the lightning round, anything that you wanted to share that we missed, where you're like, I really wish you asked this, Stephanie, and you just didn't? Randy: No, like I said, I'm here for you guys. You want to talk about Mars and infrastructure, then great. Whatever you want to talk about. Stephanie: Mars and the moon, that'll be the next podcast. Anyone who wants to sponsor it, hit us up. I don't know what we're going to talk about, but we're going to need help to figure it out. All right. Lightning round brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer, Randy. Are you ready? Randy: I'm ready. Stephanie: All right. What's up next on your reading list? Randy: Can we just start that over? Sorry. Stephanie: Yep. What's next on your reading list? Randy: Up next on my reading list is the Mike Nichols book. I'm not sure what it's called, but I'm excited to read it. Stephanie: What's it about? Randy: Its about the director, Mike Nichols, and his life. Stephanie: Cool. We'll have our producer, Hillary, will find the link to that and everyone can go explore it there. Randy: I don't tend to read business books. I know that they could be helpful, but I'm more interested in people, humanity, fiction, novels. Stephanie: Yep. Cool. Any podcasts you listen to? Randy: Yeah. There's a great podcast I listened to about words called The Allusionist, Allusionist with an A. Love that podcast. I have a whole list, but let's just do one. Stephanie: Yeah. We'll check that out. Any hobbies that you're really getting into these days? Randy: Hobbies that I'm really getting into. I really like this sport called paddle tennis. It's not pickleball, it's not ping pong. It's called paddle tennis. If you look it up, it's like a fast version of tennis. You play with a paddle and a tennis ball, but you poke a hole in it. There's like a really small, but passionate community around the sport. It's really fun. Stephanie: Do you play on a tennis court? Randy: You play on a small tennis court. It's basically the service boxes and two-ish foot baseline, and a net. You serve under hand, and you can't serve [inaudible 00:52:55], and you poke a hole on the tennis ball so it doesn't fly everywhere, but it still bounces. It acts and feels like tennis, but like a faster version. It's really cool. You can play in New York. There's courts in New York in StuyTown and Peter Cooper Village, and there's courts in Venice Beach in California. Those are kind of the two centers in the US. It's not a very big popular sport. Stephanie: We will have to bring it up to Palo Alto. I will be the one do that. That would be my initiative over the next year. Randy: Do it. Stephanie: All right. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about, and who would your first guest be? Randy: Oh man. If I was going to have a podcast, wow, I don't know. Do we need another podcast? Do we need a podcast from me? Stephanie: Yes, we do. Randy: Maybe it would just be rants. Just do like a short rant every week. I don't know. Stephanie: I like that. Hey, that seem to do well sometimes. Stephanie: That's okay. All right, this one's slightly harder so you might have to think. What one thing will have the biggest impact on Ecommerce in the next year? Randy: I think the thing that will have the biggest impact on Ecommerce in the next year is the timing on reopening the economy and stores and retail. If people can't go to stores or don't feel comfortable going to stores, they're going to, inevitably, accelerate their comfort level with shopping online. We already see that happening. I think it's just going to push that trend line even further forward. I'm for one, excited about it. I think the biggest, biggest test for this will be this Q4 and the holiday season, and to see what percentage of shoppers are shopping on Ecommerce and what they're demanding of Ecommerce retailers that they weren't a year ago when the percentages were smaller. Stephanie: Yeah, I completely agree. Great answer. Randy, it's been a blast having you on the show. Where can people find out about you and Bombas? Randy: You can find out about Bombas at bombas.com, and everywhere else you would expect, B-O-M-B-A-S. That's it. Thank you for listening and thanks for having me. Stephanie: Yeah. Thanks so much. It's been fun. See you next time. Randy: All right. See you next time.
Everyone is excited about A.I. and the idea of using technology to improve business. But that excitement has also led to confusion. There are many definitions and applications of A.I., and few have been able to truly optimize their A.I. strategy. That’s where Ashwin Mittal comes in. Ashwin is the CEO of Course5, a transformative intelligence company helping companies improve their businesses using technology like A.I. and machine learning. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Ashwin explains where and how people have gone wrong with A.I. in the past, and the steps an Ecommerce company needs to take in order to be able to get the most out of A.I. It all starts with understanding and controlling your data, and includes retraining your employees to rely less on their guts, and more on the analysis A.I. provides. He reveals how to do exactly that on this podcast. 3 Takeaways: It’s important to build a structured data foundation from the start so you can move to a place of making decisions with data You must teach your employees how to interpret and analyze data and make sure they are comfortable using the data to make decisions. Individuals must be taught to lead with data and then let their gut take them the final 20% of the way toward a business decision Understanding the entire customer journey and where there are points of failure will help you create a strategy on optimizing your data and building an Ecommerce experience that is successful from start to finish For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Hey everyone, and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host Stephanie Postles, and today we're joined by Ashwin Mittal, the CEO of Course5 Intelligence. Ashwin, thanks for coming on the show. Ashwin: Thanks for having me, Stephanie. It's a pleasure to be here. Stephanie: Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on today because throughout a lot of our previous interviews that we've had so far, everyone has mentioned AI in some form or fashion, and when I saw that you were coming on the show and we were going to have a deep dive conversation into AI, I was very excited. Ashwin: It's a deep subject to talk about, so yeah, it should be fun, hopefully. Stephanie: It will be. So, what brought you into the world of AI? What got you excited about that and building a company around AI and analytics and all that? Ashwin: So, we've always been in the business of delivering insights for sales and marketing to customers from data and information. But about five or six years back, I realized that we're in this perhaps future technology wave of transformation because of the onset of artificial intelligence technology, and from a big picture perspective, if you look back the last 30 years, 40 years, we've perhaps seen two or three waves of substantial change value creation through technology. We've seen the PC wave, and we've seen the internet wave. You can say, okay, maybe there's a separate mobile internet and social media wave, but it's part of that. Both of these have completely changed our personal and professional lives, and one was built on the other. Because we had PCs, so the internet was [inaudible 00:02:03]. Ashwin: So, my belief is that with AI it's going to be pretty much the same. It will take 15-20 years to play out, but its impact is going to be as deep and profound as the internet. And it's going to be built on top of the fact that we all have computers, that we're all connected, all devices are connected, and for us being in the data business of driving insights from data, we're really in the eye of the storm. Because the root of AI comes from data science. So, on the one hand while this presents a challenge to our business, and possibilities of us getting disrupted, but at the same time, it presents even larger opportunities. Ashwin: So, at that time, I decided that we needed to really double down on the AI wave, and started to completely reorient the business and the company towards riding this wave. So, that's really how [inaudible 00:03:12]. Stephanie: That's great. So, how would you explain Course5 Intelligence? What do you all do? What kind of clients do you help? What problems do they come to you with? Ashwin: So, we help our clients make the best decisions from data and information for sales marketing customer-related problems. And within that, one of our largest focus areas is digital and Ecommerce. We typically work with large corporates, Fortune 500, Fortune 1,000 companies, and in some cases, we might be working with the Ecommerce group, their digital group, with the CMO's office, sometimes with IT or some combination of all of these. Stephanie: Very cool, and you guys have over 1,000 people that you employ, right? Ashwin: Yes, we have 1,200 people. Stephanie: Wow, that's crazy. When did you all start, and how long did it take to get to that 1,000-person mark, and what was the change like within your company? That's a lot of people to manage. Ashwin: Sure, sure. Yes. So, we've been in business for, what? 16, 17 years, and we've also changed and evolved along the way. The way you run a company that is 50 people doesn't really work when you're running a company that's 200 people, and you need to run a company differently when it's 500 people, and certainly when it's 1,000. So, we've also had to learn, change, evolve along the way. How we run the company, what kind of talent we bring in. How we set the organization structure, and today we're pretty much a global business. We're present in seven, eight different countries, have customers all over the world, so we're sort of a micro multinational on our own. Stephanie: That's great. Is there any struggles that you face when it comes to working with your teams around the world that you had to learn along the way? Ashwin: Sure. Yes, yes. No, absolutely. Absolutely. So, there's one challenge, which is a more difficult challenge, which is culture. There's a second challenge, which is also important, but perhaps not that difficult, which is regulation. Culture is a really tough one. It's not as tough today as it used to be maybe seven, eight years back. Today because of just the globalization and easy access to information everywhere, people are a lot more aware of different cultures, different people, and a lot more sensitive and things like that. Ashwin: But in our early years when we were globalizing ourselves, we had to learn about different approaches, different cultures. We had to be very open minded, and I think we managed okay. We're still learning, it's important to be sensitive. Culture is an important issue. In terms of regulation, that's somewhat easier. You just have to follow certain processes, protocols and make sure that they're completely compliant in every job that you're offering. And especially in a business like ours where you're dealing with data and information, and there's a lot of regulation around that, around data privacy and sensitivity around that and things like that. So, we need to just ensure that we are compliant in every geography that we operate. Stephanie: That makes sense. So, everyone talks about AI. Like I mentioned, a lot of people mentioned in our previous interviews, and oftentimes I think people if they're using AI or they're referring to something like it's AI and it's actually not. So, how would you describe AI? And specifically, how does AI help Ecommerce, or could it help Ecommerce if people aren't already looking into it? Ashwin: So, first point you made is spot on, right? What is AI? Stephanie: Yeah. Ashwin: So, this really means different things to different people, and honestly, there is no one perfect watertight definition. So, AI is essentially an umbrella term that covers a bunch of different technologies, which are all meant to convey computers getting intelligence, which is not typically expected from computers, and which is more human-like. Which is the common sense definition, which we would all accept. But then what falls in that bucket, and what doesn't fall in that bucket is different for different people, and I'll give you a simple example. Take a very old technology, something like OCR, optical character recognition. Nobody would call that AI today, but when it first came out, maybe some people thought it was actually computers becoming intelligent, and it was kind of AI. Ashwin: So, the definition is also keeping on evolving as our expectations from technology keep changing. But I would say that amongst the different technologies that encompass AI, the core one, the most important one, at least to me, is what you call learning or machine learning. And machine learning is essentially the ability of computers to learn, and that is really a game-changing technology. And then that supports all the other technologies that are typically and the umbrella term of AI. Where a computer can run a certain process or program and get better at it every time it runs, which is what humans are good at doing. Ashwin: So, that for me is one of the most important technologies. And sorry, you had a second question you asked about AI and Ecommerce? Stephanie: Yes. Yeah, how it impacts Ecommerce right now. Do you think people are using AI efficiently or what do you think the future could look like if they do start implementing this in a better way? Ashwin: So, it's already here. It is being used extensively, more by some companies, less so by some. Companies like Amazon are, of course, using it in a very, very mature and sophisticated manner. But various types of companies are using it, many of our clients are using it, and its footprint is increasing. It's used in automating various tasks, in virtualization, in campaigns, even at the back end in supply chain, inventory management. We all know that chat bots are used for customer support in A.I. In Ecommerce. Physical robots are used in warehouses, which also could have AI technology. If it helps, I can give you a couple of examples- Stephanie: Yeah, I think exactly. That'd be great. Ashwin: ... of a couple of our platforms- Stephanie: Yes, please. Ashwin: ... which truly you would consider as AI. So, we have this one platform called Compete. Now what Compete does is it enables our customers, our clients to gather competitive intelligence in the market, and respond in quick time. So, it has technologies and a bunch of bots that go out and search all competitive websites of a brand to collect and synthesize all the information on what the competitors are doing in terms of the five Ps. So, you traditionally have four Ps, product, placement, promotion and price, and we have a fifth, people reviews. Ashwin: And so, this keeps collecting this information in rapid time, and on different product SKUs and different combinations, how competitors are doing, what they're placing, how they're pricing. And then this is updated in a dashboard along with analytics to help the Ecommerce players monitor competitive moves and respond quickly so they can optimize their revenue, their profits. This platform's also used extensively during these major selling seasons, like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and brands expect to make substantial sales in a very short period of time. Ashwin: So, they have to be very responsive to what the competitors are doing and what's happening in the market. So, this is one example, one platform that we have. Another one, which we call Adomate, this is really taking it to the next level where we're using AI to optimize creativity? Stephanie: What? Ashwin: Creativity, exactly. So, AI is not getting creative, just to be clear, and I'll explain to you how it works. Stephanie: It's not going to take over the world, do all the artwork in the future, write all the books. Ashwin: No, no, no. Well, there's some of that talk going on, but I think that you'll always want to read the book written by the author, you'll always want to know about the author. You'll want to see the artwork, which you want to know the painter's story. While those things might happen, but I don't think that's going to... Robots can play sports, right? But you want to watch humans play a football match. You don't want to watch robots play, they might play better than the humans. So, it's the same thing with art. Ashwin: But in terms of this platform called Adomate, so what we're doing is we're actually optimizing the process of content creation for either campaigns or advertising. So, when companies typically do campaigns online for Ecommerce, they will create, let's say, 100 different creatives, 100 different images, and put them into a system. And then the system will do live optimization depending on who's responding to what. Change which creative is being shown to whom. But you might have missed something fundamental, right? You don't know why something is working, why something is not working. Maybe you missed something in those creatives. Maybe there's some combination of both that you didn't know about. Ashwin: So, what our AI system does is using computer vision it actually reads every creative. So, it actually looks at the creative and then distills it into structured data. Who are the protagonists in the creative or what's their ethnicity? What's their emotion? What the background colors? Is the brand shown? Is the logo shown? Where is it shown? If it's a video, then it will break it into frames and read each frame. And so, you've got now structured data against each creative, and then you have the data of how people responded to that. Who clicked, who bought which segment, and you can combine all of that and actually then get prescriptive. Ashwin: So, depending on what kind of campaign you want to run, what segment you want to target, you can actually advise, "Okay, use a dog in this or use a Latino woman or bring the brand in or use red color instead of purple or whatever." Stephanie: Wow, that's interesting. Are a lot of companies using that today where they're actually personalizing the image for the product based on who comes in using AI behind the scenes to come up with that in real time? Ashwin: So, this is an early stage platform. It doesn't change the image in real time, though that's also possible. And my AI head tells me that we should be doing that next. But it doesn't change the image right now, what it does is it prescribes. So, for the next campaign, when you want to create something, then you would enter into the system what you're trying to achieve and the system might advise you what to do. Or if you have a creative you can submit it to the system and it will give you a score of how successful it's likely to be. Ashwin: But even that is an early stage platform. This is one of our exciting newer products, and we have maybe three or four customers using it right now, but it's certainly something that we're betting on. Stephanie: Got it. So, when these customers come to you, one thing I think about is when you have a problem. Back in my old days at prior companies, the teams I worked with who were focused on machine learning always told you like, "Well, you can apply machine learning to a lot of things, you just have to know the problem and if it's worth solving with AI and machine learning." How would a company know if the problem that they're maybe encountering is something that could be tackled with AI? Or how do they start thinking about that, especially if they're a smaller company, maybe a B2C company right now, and they are feeling certain pinches in areas, but they're not really sure how to handle that? How do you tell someone to start thinking about this or how do you have a conversation with someone so they can get this on their radar? Ashwin: Sure, sure. No, great question. So, it has to go step by step. That's what we always tell them, and first, honestly, a data foundation needs to be in place before you should even be thinking and talking AI. In terms of technology, what data you're collecting, how your metadata is defined, what data sources you're using, what are the connections between all of those, and are you able to establish a single source of truth. You can't put the cart before the horse. You need to make sure you're collecting the right data and it's reliable data. Ashwin: Then the other, I would say, even more important piece than that is organization culture. So, technology is all available, and getting your people aligned to data and technology to drive their actions and decisions is very good. If you're not able to achieve that, then all else will fail. So, we tell people that even before you think about advanced analytics or you think about AI, first get your teams into the culture of making decisions through data. We've all made decisions through gut, and gut is nothing but some kind of big data swirling in our heads. How do we move from there to letting data take us 80% of the way, and then still the top 20% can come through our gut? Because there are things we know that we may not have put that data into that system. We may not have been able to capture everything which is in our heads. Ashwin: So, we need to first get that culture in place, otherwise the entire analytics and the agenda won't [inaudible 00:18:12]. Once we have that in place then we can start driving different types of analytics programs and business outcome led programs for higher sales, higher profits for customer. Getting better customer experience, and it's not necessary that every problem, as you said, needs AI. Depending on the size of the company, the complexity of the problem, sometimes you might just be able to use a prepackaged solution. And there are prepackaged solutions out there, which maybe can solve your problem instead of developing something custom. Ashwin: But yes, if your problem is complex, your data size is large, then yes, you can have substantial rewards by deploying an AI solution, which we've seen with many of our [inaudible] customers. Stephanie: Cool. Yeah, great answer. So, when it comes to the companies that are coming to you, there has to be a core theme that many companies are struggling with, where you keep hearing the same recurring problems or the same thing that they want help with. What is that theme or problem if you could kind of group it together, and what did it look like after they implemented some of your analytics and AI got assistance from you guys? Kind of like a case study if you have one. Ashwin: Sure, sure. So, yeah, it depends on the company and what stage of the data and analytics maturity they're at, and what their business objectives are. So, sometimes we're asked to help with foundational data issues of assessing data quality of living data infrastructure. We sometimes work with our customers to create access to data and to create across sources, and just provide them with reports they can consume to run their business. Ashwin: So, in these cases we might start with a discussion of their business, and what data and metrics they need to make decisions and on what frequency. Sometimes we might get asked to choose or implement a specific data technology. And then for customers who achieve data maturity around data and metrics, then we get asked to drive business outcomes, which in the Ecommerce world it could be conversion rate optimization, it could be upsell, cross-sell, customer churn reduction, personalization. Ashwin: Essentially for many clients, we work with them through this life cycle, and this typically takes years. We first build their data foundation, we provide them with key metrics and intelligence to run the business, and then start driving sophisticated analytics programs, and then start leveraging AI in a more sophisticated way. So, it's really a journey, and it keeps evolving. So, it's not something that you come in, you do and you finish. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative), makes sense. So, what are some of the metrics that you provide them. You said you provide metrics around the business. Is there a core set of metrics that you think are really important for every company to look at or how do you think about that? Ashwin: Sure. So, again, it depends on the way they view the business and their needs, and typically, this will start with a conversation between us and them of how they run their business, what are key metrics they want to look at? Maybe we might have a point of view what metrics they should look at. But on the tactical side, we might help people optimize metrics or measure metrics like basic things like nuclear revenue, margin, campaign incrementality, lift. So, lift is the extent to which a campaign drove sales over and above the regular run rate of the business. Ashwin: These high-level metrics could be broken down to... Within these metrics you might have some metrics like average order value, units per transaction and others like that. Conversion rate typically tends to be a metric of focus, and then these could be compared to past periods, could be segmented by channel, by device, by geo, by transaction Stephanie: When it comes to the metrics, have they ever led a company the wrong way where you saw someone look at a certain metric or data point and they were making decisions off that where it was actually giving them bad information? Or you had to advise them like, "You guys shouldn't be looking at this because this isn't helpful. Maybe you should be looking at this instead." Ashwin: No, absolutely. So, that happens all the time, and honestly, data if it's garbage in, it's garbage out. It's actually a great question because so often we've seen companies and very large sophisticated companies where different business units, geographies and departments have built their own data systems and their own infrastructure. And then in that process they've gone about defining their own data and their own way. They define a certain metric. Every metric needs to be defined what that metric essentially means, how it's calculated. Ashwin: And then if you have different geos, different views defining metrics in different ways and then when you put it all together and you're trying to look at it, it makes no sense. So, we've often seen that happen. It's very important for companies to really have a very clear data foundation and a data strategy, and to have a metadata layer, right? Define the data beforehand. And often sometimes we have to come in and just do that. Sometimes we'll end up just doing their house cleaning with our customers. Stephanie: So, if you were to start an Ecommerce company today, would you tell them getting the data aspect right from the start is a priority? Should they make sure they have their data dictionary, and they're talking about how they're actually putting their metrics and collecting the right data? How should someone think about this if they're brand new, and set themselves up for success? Ashwin: Absolutely. Absolutely spot on. So, what we call it is a data strategy. So, they need to have a clear data strategy in place as in what data they need to collect, how they're going to define that data, what technology they'll use to collect that data, and what business outcomes they'll drive from that data. How they'll use that data to drive certain business outcomes. And of course, that will evolve because business is dynamic, the business changes, the market changes, and what you track, how you think about things, it has already changed a lot in last few, and it will continue to change further. Ashwin: But it's very important to have a data strategy, and it's important to keep reviewing it and enhancing it as you go. Stephanie: Are there any data points that you recommend people to collect that maybe they're not already, because I'm sure a lot of platforms that especially newer brands are on probably collect some level of data, but I don't know if it's the right kind of data or what they really need to help them with that longer term data strategy. Are there any key data points where you're like, "Make sure you get this, this and this from the start to really be able to help build towards the future"? Ashwin: I mean, it's all these ones that I've mentioned like conversion rate. Obviously, traffic and obviously conversion rate. Different points of failure where drop-off has taken place. Campaign effectiveness, campaign effectiveness by segment. All of these definitely would recommend that people collect. One thing we've discovered is even in today's day and age, one of the biggest failure points which we've talked about for a long time in Ecommerce, but it still holds true even today, is just the checkout process. So, just the customer is willing to give the brand his or her money, but somewhere something doesn't work, something doesn't render, some option doesn't come up and there's drop-off. Ashwin: So, definitely collect data around the entire journey and where the drop-off and all of that happens if it does. We found that it's remarkable that even today that seems to be an area of [inaudible 00:27:17]. Stephanie: Gotcha. So, with all this data that you get access to when you're helping them build their data strategies and all that kind of stuff, is there any surprises that you've seen when going through some of the customers data and helping them organize it and build systems around it. Anything that you saw that you weren't expecting? Ashwin: Yeah, so actually we covered a couple of those challenges that we've seen, but the two main sort of surprises that we've seen are the two that we just covered. One is, just like we said, the checkout process. The page takes too long to load or it doesn't render on a particular device or particular browser. And then just the entire confusion around the data asset that the company has and how it's being measured, the metadata, and also there are opportunities for data sharing with partners and with vendors. These are really under leveraged, and if it's done in a thoughtful way it can yield real dividends. Ashwin: So, to give you an example, we have this major CPG customer, and we were helping them with their Ecommerce business and with their Ecommerce analytics. And then they said, "For our Ecommerce business we actually have a different supply chain because we have to compete with the needs of Ecommerce customers, which is very different. We need to have quicker deliver times and whatnot." So, they asked us to help them with their supply chain analytics. So, we started doing that, and then we realized these guys were buying their raw material product from farms, from various farms. And the farms actually have a wealth of data that can be combined by our customer across various farms to give them back valuable inputs to improve their efficiency, and also to improve product quality. Ashwin: Perhaps there wasn't enough advantage being taken of this opportunity, so I think there are opportunities that businesses just don't realize that they're sitting on, which they're able to leverage. Stephanie: Yeah, that's a really good example. We had a similar example when talking to Grubhub where they would share their data back with the restaurants to help them improve. Like hey, this person.... You'd get maybe a bad review whenever someone orders the nachos versus... Or they order at 5:00 PM, like what kind of chef do you have at 5:00 PM versus 9:00 PM when you get better reviews. Again, it's a really interesting point about how companies can partner with each other to share data to help each other. Stephanie: Do you think there's any hesitancy around that, because I could also see companies viewing even the farmer as maybe a potential competitor? If they were, I guess, worried about that, or worried about sharing data that could somehow come back and bite them later. Have you seen that hesitancy because I do see this as the way of the future, but I just don't know if I've seen enough people doing it yet? Ashwin: Sure. No, you're right. You're absolutely right, and that hesitancy is there, and it's fair concern that there could be competitive issues. So, for example, so many brands sell direct and sell to marketplaces. What information does the marketplace share with the brand, and what information does the brand share with the marketplace? There is a symbiotic benefit because when the brand has its own property that provides a certain richness of information about the product. And while they may still be doing a larger share of their revenue in the marketplace. But these kinds of concerns are there, competitive concerns are there. Ashwin: Then there are also concerns about data privacy because data privacy is a big issue and it can be done ensuring compliance, but one has to be careful of how one shares the data. What data is shared? Is it masked? Is it personally identifiable or not? And then the other issue is what we spoke about earlier is that they may be defining data in different ways. So, different entities that are defining their data in different ways, again, if it's shared, it may not lead to the right analysis because it may actually provide different perspective than what it's meant to provide if it's defined in different ways with [inaudible 00:34:10]. Stephanie: That makes sense. Is there any way that you think it would be best to set up a data sharing program that would also make sure that the company doesn't lose focus? Because like you said, it could be a pretty big process to make sure that you're putting the right data points in there, masking it, actually giving your supplier or whoever it might be insights. Then I could also see that turning into 50% of your day job. So, how do you advise a company to think about that if they are thinking about sharing data with a partner so that they also don't lose focus on their own product? Ashwin: Sure, sure. So, and some retailers are doing it today already. Amazon does it, Amazon has Amazon Marketing Services where it shares a fair amount of data with its brand partners. It has certain definitions and certain ways in which it makes it available, which is pretty standard. So, then it's up to the branch to take advantage of it and use it in the way that it makes sense for them. And then they might have the other marketplaces that may be sharing this data in a different way. Ashwin: So, that's where we really come in is that we know how the different formats work and the different definitions work, and we bring it together in, let's say a dashboard that makes sense for a brand to consume and process different sources. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. So, we keep talking about data definitions and how companies, oftentimes different teams will have different definitions for the data. I have personally experienced this in some of my old roles. And oftentimes, it's because maybe a team is very entrepreneurial where they're trying to start their own project and they're trying to create their own dashboards, and you just all of a sudden have funny different organizations using a different metric for, like you said, the conversions. Have you seen any best practices for large companies to be able to create a global spot for people to go and look into that dictionary to find what this data metric, if it already exists, what it means? Have you ever seen anything like that, that actually works well? Ashwin: Yeah, I think it's great question, and honestly there's no real silver bullet. Different companies are using different approaches and strategies, and the entire data and analytics journey is really evolving across companies. Different companies have different organization structures to [inaudible 00:36:45]. One thing that works, which has worked for some companies is having a chief data officer. Somebody who's really part of the CEO's office and who's empowered to drive that agenda throughout the entire business. Ashwin: But for certain other types of companies it doesn't work because they're so fairly diversified, they have different business units that have different needs, and they want that dynamism. So, in those cases there is a compromise where every business then goes ahead and sets up its own system and approach and uses that. So, then you typically have, on the one hand you have, let's say the core operation systems like your accounting and things, which work as a single source of truth. And then every business uses what we would call then multiple versions of the truth, which sit on top of a single source of truth and then they create their own logic and versions on top. Ashwin: So, we've seen both approaches, and both have their pros and cons. I don't think there's a definite answer. Stephanie: So, when it comes to having some versions of the truth in dashboards, I always get hesitant about dashboards because people can interpret them however they want. One person might be like, "Things look great." And the other one might be like... They might expand the time horizon and be like, "Things look horrible." It just depends on who's looking at it and what they want to see or what they think they see. So, how do you... You said that you are providing data a lot of times for these brands to make decisions, business decisions off of the data. How do you, or if you do this at all, guide them on maybe like, "Here's how you should think about this decision"? Or how do you make sure that dashboards are being read correctly? Stephanie: And this is not just for your company, but I'm thinking a lot of companies have dashboards that could potentially be advising people the wrong way. Well, not even advising. Providing data and people are reading it the wrong way. Ashwin: Sure, sure. No, absolutely. So, there, again, there's one very important is the people aspect and training aspect is very important. How to use that information, what it means, what it doesn't mean. As you said, you can look at something and interpret it in five different ways, and one person can say it's great and one person can say it's terrible. So, that training is very important, and along with that what we do is that we will set a baseline for expected performance for most key metrics. And then we have certain tools where we can actually append insights into those dashboards. Ashwin: So, we have this platform called Discovery, where along with dashboards, the system actually generates contextual insights. So, along with a number, it will explain what that number means, and why that number has moved from one point in time to another. So, then that helps people contextualize that information, and as they see that... And they can actually double click on that, so this allows people to interact with that information as well in a natural way. You can actually chat and receive information back on chat, or you can ask a question and the system will... A basic question, it doesn't do very, very deep questions, but basic or an analytical question and the system will understand your question and the calculation can come back and answer. So, things like this- Stephanie: That sounds helpful. Ashwin: Exactly, and then just on a very basic level, as we work with the business and we understand what they consider as good, not good, average, certain metrics, we can do things like color coding, highlighting into dashboards. Basic things like that can also help to just contextualize. Stephanie: Very cool. So, a couple times we've mentioned needing to train employees to have that data mindset and to actually know how to think about data and organize it. Is there any training tools that you recommend or courses or things that you've seen companies have success with by having employees go through them? Ashwin: Yeah, courses there are lots, and there are enough courses and there are lots of great trainers out there. But what is very important is you need to have a couple of internal evangelists within the company. There's this new term actually in the industry actually, which has become very popular, citizen data scientists. You have data scientists, which is like the kind of people they have. Technically people who can go deep in the data and who can drive the statistics modeling and all that. But citizen data scientists are essentially the translators. They're the guys who sit in between the executives who are making the decisions and the data scientists at our end. Ashwin: In some cases, the citizen data scientist may even sit in our organization, but mostly they sit in the client's organization. These people play a very important role of driving that awareness and culture within the company. It's highly recommended that every company either converts some of their existing resources into that or otherwise they hire some people [inaudible 00:42:20]. Stephanie: I like that chief data scientists, and I have heard that quite a bit. I think it'd be interesting to have a course depending on if you're in Ecommerce, it'd be nice if there was a certain path that employees could go down to then be well versed and know how to operate within their industry. Because it does seem like there's just so many courses, I don't even know where to begin sometimes with them. And oftentimes you don't know what you need to learn either. Seems like there needs to start being some tracks that you can go down. Ashwin: That's true. That's true, and because of AI technology and because of all this transformation, there are lots of new opportunities also, new roles that people can take up. And I do believe that going forward we should all plan to spend some percent of our time learning. Stephanie: Yeah, so when it comes to skills, do you see people headed in a direction where everyone's becoming a polymath where they're a jack of all trades with many things, or do you see people really focusing in on a specific skill like, "I am an expert in AI for retail, that's my lane that I swim in"? How do you see the future shaping up for skills? Ashwin: Sure. So, I think that there is always an increasing need of course right now for specialists. But there will also always be a need for good generalists because you need specialists who can be deep in a certain function or technology, especially disciplines like AI, but at the same time we need generalists who can make sense of all these different pieces and put them together. So, I think that both career tracks... Therefore, you should just be clear which one of the two you want to be. Trying to be both then you're setting yourself up for failure. Stephanie: So, for everyone listening you're good either way. Whatever one you are, you just have to choose. So, to zoom out a little bit into the general Ecommerce industry, what trends or patterns are you most excited about for digital commerce? Ashwin: So, well, now we are in the midst of a human crisis, right? So, a humanitarian crisis with the COVID pandemic, and of course, we are all very mindful of the human tragedy, the hardship, the economic hardship it's put on people all over the world. It is exciting that this crisis has presented to really accelerate digital transformation and the use of digital channels. So, we have seen companies that have had digital transformation plans that have been one year, two years, three years long. And then, now they're talking, "Okay, we're going to accelerate and do this in two weeks, in three weeks." And it's actually becoming possible. Ashwin: So, what was thought to be impossible is actually becoming possible. We're seeing that if people really want to get these things done, they can. So, that adoption is exciting. It has potential to be... Digital has a potential to be much more personalized, more predictive than brick and mortar commerce. So, it offers a better experience for the customer, and it is good in other ways. It is good for social good as well because you can argue that it will reduce to some extent the impact of climate change. Less traffic, less congestion, less travel. And people get more family time for exercise or hobbies or what have you. So, digital commerce brings with it a lot of benefits as well, which I'm quite excited about. Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, completely agree. It definitely seems like a lot of things have set up very quickly, and it's interesting watching the companies, there's a couple that I've been following, who just aren't moving to Ecommerce. How do you view companies like that who are taking a strong stance not to go online? Ashwin: It's interesting. While I do think that the industry at large is moving towards Ecommerce, and not just digital commerce, but digital everything, right? Digital entertainment, digital customer experience or digital communication. Most brands will need to do that to be successful. But sometimes there is always a market for those few contra players, right? Because there may be some consumers who may just want... Not want that new approach and new technology and who make the stand. They might have a spice boutique customer base who works with them. It won't last forever, but maybe it might help them for maybe the next seven, eight years, I don't know. Stephanie: Okay, so when it comes to everything that's been happening with the pandemic, how do you lead in times of change at your company or personally? Ashwin: So, a leader that has inspired me from his book was Satya Nadella at Microsoft. In his book, one quote that really stood out for me was he wrote that the C in CEO stands for culture. And he also talked about the importance of empathy in leadership. And so, I have taken it upon myself to foster the organization culture that we want to have. The culture that ties us together, and that is really helping us in these times. That culture that we fostered, which is bringing us all together. Ashwin: Along with that empathy, understanding of the challenges people are going through. It's not just being work from home, but anxiety about the disease, anxiety about the economic future, and along with that regular communication, transparency in communications. These are some of my key priorities, which are driving some of my actions in this crisis. Stephanie: That's great. Are there any challenges that you face when it comes to working remotely? Ashwin: So, it's actually been quite a surprise that when the pandemic hit and when we have to transition to work from home across all our different geographies, and 1,200 people moving to work from home, and I'm really surprised at how effective it's been. The work that we do is iterative, it requires collaboration and things like that, and it's working fine. And it seems like thankfully this happened at a time where all these technologies had evolved like Microsoft Teams and Zoom and others where it's still become very much possible. So, now I wonder why we used to be in offices all the time- Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative Ashwin: Exactly. And so, it's not just us. It's the whole industry just thinking these things. We still need offices for bonding for having certain hard conversations, for inducting new employees, for fostering our organization culture, but we don't need them all the time. We can have 60, 70, 80% work from home. I don't know what the right balance is, we'll discover. But more than- Stephanie: Are you changing that at your company? When you can go back, are you only having a certain portion of your employees go back? Or how are you thinking about that? Ashwin: So, we've not taken a clear decision yet, but it will be definitely at least 50% work from home, maybe more. Could be 60, 70%. And we'll just have to experiment and find the right answer. We also want to see how things change when the pandemic isn't there and then how that changes people's orientation. But at least 50% work from home, and maybe much more is very much doable. And it will give hopefully people a good balance of engagement in office, and at the same time better quality of life because of [inaudible] and things like that. Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, completely agree. Ashwin: But in terms of the pandemic, while work is not suffering, but the bigger issue is the emotional challenge. As I said earlier, people are not meeting their colleagues, not meeting their friends, so they have anxiety. Here we've tried to do a lot of things. We've tried to engage people through various activities like talent [inaudible] or talent contests and things like that. Yeah, so I'm amazed at the kind of talent we have in the company. People are singing and drawing and cooking. Ashwin: We've had different types of training. I rolled out a new skill learning challenge, where I challenged every employee to learn a new skill to enhance their career over the next 60 days. I said that I'll- Stephanie: How are you tracking that? Ashwin: So, it's not mandated. It's just a challenge, which is free for everyone to sign up for or not. But at the end of 60 days, if you have done it, you can report, and there'll be a prize for person or people who have enhanced their career prospects the most, and prizes for leaders who have helped their team members enhance their career prospects. Just to set an example, I said I'll learn how to program and write code in Python. Stephanie: Oh, man. Ashwin: It's been fun. I'm doing it with my daughter and it's been fun. And we also are providing some resources for things like mental health counseling and things like that if people are feeling anxiety and depression. Stephanie: That's great. Really good examples of things that other companies could take and implement on their own too. Especially the talent thing, that's really fun. Ashwin: Yeah. Stephanie: All right, you probably get this question a lot, but I have to end the interview. So, I'm sure a lot of people have asked you this or want to know this. Do you think that AI will replace jobs or will it just augment jobs and maybe some will not be around anymore, but it will also create new opportunities? What's your take on that? Ashwin: Sure, that's a great question, and that's a question that so many books have been written on it, and there's so much discussion in the industry. I'll just give you my point of view, and there are some people who think quite differently as well. But AI, what AI does is AI doesn't really automate jobs, it automates tasks. When you think of a job, any person's job is made up of a bunch of different tasks. Typically, what we've seen is the AI systems will automate some of those tasks, so that person is not becoming redundant, but some of their tasks are freed up. Ashwin: And so, then that gives the opportunity to use that individual to then do other things. To drive more personalized experiences, to take the businesses to the next level and things like that. But then that requires that right orientation in that individual, and then requires training. The company to provide that training to those people, or for the people to also take interest and train themselves through resources available. So, like I said, I think that now everybody in this new environment will have to consistently be training and upgrading their skills. Ashwin: But do I think that AI is going to come and replace other jobs? No, I don't think so. I think it will free us up from certain tasks and will enable us to widen the scope of [inaudible 00:57:19]. Stephanie: Well, that is a good positive way to end the interview. Before we move into the lightning round, are you ready Ashwin? Stephanie: So, the lightning round is where I ask a question, and you have one minute or less to answer. And we will start with some easier ones. Once you can travel again, what's up next in your travel destinations? Ashwin: Oh, wow. Okay, well, I'd love to go to the Maldives. Stephanie: Great. Ashwin: Yeah, I'd like to go and do some scuba diving. Stephanie: Sounds amazing. What's up next on your Netflix or Hulu or wherever you watch TV shows? What are you watching? Ashwin: So, I'm currently watching Money Heist on Netflix. I don't know if you've watched Money Heist- Stephanie: I haven't. Ashwin: ... know Money Heist on Netflix. Stephanie: No. Ashwin: That Spanish adapted English show, pretty cool. And I also like the historical genre, so I'm watching some shows like Last Kingdom and Vikings. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative), sounds good. I'll have to check those out. What's up next on your reading list, other than Python 101 manuals? Ashwin: So, that is taking up some of my reading time right now, and I'm trying to be disciplined about not wasting time consuming just unlimited amounts of coronavirus news and doing more productive things. So, right now I'm reading The Alliance by Reid Hoffman, and I'm also reading Why Should Anyone Be Led by You? Robert Goffee. Stephanie: Oh, I will have to check out that second one, I've heard of the first one. All right, the last harder question, what one thing will have the biggest impact on Ecommerce in the next year? Ashwin: Well, what's already had the biggest impact is the COVID crisis, but in the next one to two to three years, I think it's going to be AI. Stephanie: Well, that's a perfect way to sum up the interview. Ashwin, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a blast, and we'd love to talk again soon. Ashwin: Thank you so much Stephanie, it's been a pleasure. I look forward to talk to you soon.
You may only know Kellogg’s as the company that makes your favorite cereal. But there is so much more to the company than just delicious treats. Robert Birse is the Head of Global B2B Ecommerce at Kellogg’s, and he has been leading the charge to position Kellogg’s as one of the leaders in creating scalable B2B Ecommerce strategies. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Robert explains all the ways that Kellogg’s is upending traditional Ecommerce strategies in order to help customers find greater success. Using technology like A.I. and machine learning, and by developing a platform that all of their customers and partners can use, Kellogg’s has been pushing the ball forward on bringing small and large businesses into the world of Ecommerce and helping them get the most out of their Ecommerce strategies. 3 Takeaways: A brand like Kellogg’s has the power to up-end the typical Ecommerce strategy. Instead of asking how to get customers to buy more, they ask how they can help their customers sell more. In doing so, their customers and partners become more successful, and it’s a win-win for all parties Change management is important because many of the small businesses Kellogg’s works with have to fundamentally change the way they think about doing business.hey have to rely much more on technology than ever before. But the appetite is there because A.I. and predictive analytics are proving to be critical tools in helping businesses determine what to stock and how to look at consumer behavior B2B Ecommerce is still in its infancy, but there is an appetite for innovation across the board from brands to retailers to distributors. They’re eager to test, iterate and experiment with new technologies in order to create better one-to-one engagement at scale For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Stephanie: Welcome to Up Next in Commerce. This is Stephanie Postles, your host from Mission.org. Today I'm very excited, we have Robert Birse on the show, the head of Global B2B & B2B2C E-commerce at Kellogg. Rob, how's it going? Robert: It's going great. Thank you very much, from captivity. Stephanie: Yes, yes. How is life in captivity? Robert: Well, I'm thinking about calling Amnesty International, see if they can get me out of here. Stephanie: Well, we were just talking about what life looks like right now, just us eating lots of Cheese-Its on our bed at home, calling into Zoom calls, or maybe that's just me. Maybe that's not you. Robert: No, I think that's a typical picture across the world right now. Stephanie: Yeah, which is okay. Temporarily, it's okay. So, I saw you have a very long history in E-commerce. I think I saw dating back to even early 2000s, right? Robert: I'm afraid it was in the '90s. Stephanie: Oh nice, okay perfect. Well, I would love to hear a bit about your background and what led you into E-commerce. Robert: Sure. Well, I was working for a catalog distributor, so not a distributor of catalog. We use the catalog as our medium to communicate with our customers who were predominantly engineers in factories across Europe. The business that I was responsible for at the time was a small specialist distributor, and we were struggling a little bit to find our position as E-commerce was starting to take more of a role in the consumer engagement or the customer engagement in our case. So we were on the tube and this was the late '90s, and we took a digital transformation, even though digital still wasn't really a bonafide strategy because it was only emerging. The first task we undertook was to create a digital asset library from all the bromides and things that we'd cumulated to support the catalog production. Robert: So we partnered with a startup in London, a bunch of basically college graduates who were trying to create the first digital content management system. And that was more than 20 years ago. So we did that and we started to work to create a digital presence online, starting with static content and then moving into transactional capabilities. It helped transform that little business into something that had a much greater future. So that was my first introduction to digital and then never looked back since to be honest. Stephanie: Oh, that's great. What kind of transformations has your career seen since the starting point in the '90s to now? And what does your role look like now at Kellogg? Robert: Yeah, I mean, I've used digital disruption and innovation in all the roles I've had since that position in the UK to varying degrees of impact. When I joined Allied, and I moved to Texas, we transformed that business collectively from a couple of hundred million to 600 million in a very short period of time. Just really ensuring that we unified the sales channels with the digital channel. In the early '90s, or early 2000s was very popular to Ring-fence E-com as a separate channel, and I felt that was wrong. So when we moved to the US I tried to ensure that the unification happens, so it was the best one to punch we could possibly give our customers, we're always on capability with the human interaction. I have used that principle throughout my career to build success. Robert: Ultimately all the way to Kelloggs where now, I'm using technology to create value for our customers, changing the paradigm that was always traditional in sales engagement of how do I get my customers to buy more? Now the principle behind our E-commerce strategy from a B2B perspective, is how do we enable our customers to sell more? And then we will be the recipients of the downstream benefit in due course, and that's a big change in the approach. Stephanie: So what did your first, maybe like 90 days look like? When you came to Kellogg's and you saw the lay of the land, what were some of the initial things that you were like, we have to do this, or have to shift this? What did you do? Robert: Well, the train was leaving the station when I joined Kellogg and I decided to embark on a pilot, a B2B pilot, in Brazil of all markets, one of the hardest B2B markets in the world. So it was an interesting challenge to ramp up very quickly. Now, thankfully that we're using Salesforce Commerce Cloud as the technology platform, which I was very familiar with. So that was okay, but getting familiar with our business model in Brazil, which was a direct store delivery model was a different beast for me. And then obviously with Portuguese language challenges, it was an interesting 90 days, but it was certainly a massive. You know the saying, jump in the deep end and [inaudible] and that's where I found myself. Stephanie: Thankfully you're still swimming today, which we all are glad about. So what does your day to day look like now? And how would I think about B2B when it comes to Kellogg's? Because from a consumer perspective, I don't really think about what goes on behind the scenes. I just go to my local whole foods. I find my cereals and my RXbars, and I don't think about how it gets there or how maybe it gets to a smaller Mom-and-pop stops. So how do I think about Kellogg's B2B experience and B2B2C experience? Robert: Well, I hope the consumer will start to see how B2B is impacting the shopper experience, not directly but indirectly. So as part of our mission, we're trying to use technology B2B platforms to create a conduit where we can influence, educate, and inform and enable our retail, especially our independent small retailers. Not a frequency store or space in particular, to be better store owners and to create a better in store experience. As well as use some of the modern engagement tactics, such as social media engagement to bring more food traffic to their store from within their community. Therefore, strengthen their business and providing a jumping off point for them to become more successful in the future. Robert: So the consumer should recognize that when they go to the store, the store has always got the product they're expecting to find in the store, and if that product is displayed in a fashion that's compelling and it's positioned next to other products, they well, that would be the perfect combination. Then B2B commerce, modern B2B commerce is starting to have an impact on the buying experience. So that's what goes on behind the scenes, and that's what our vision is built around. Stephanie: Yeah. That is something I never think about, is this product positioned next to another one to make a better, maybe make me buy more. How do you figure out what products should be next to each other? And how do you work with the store owners to ensure that they abide by those rules? To make sure that, maybe not rules, but it'll also help them sell more as well. So how do you work with the store owners to creating a partnership? Robert: Well, in the past, it was always through traditional sales engagement. The Lucas success has always been a principle behind how we've engaged our retailers in using planograms and driving compliance around these planograms and the science behind them has been well understood, and the discipline has been in place for a long time. However, the cost of serving and maintain that relationship at a cadence that we need to continue has become ever more challenging. So digital is helping to change that paradigm and allowing us to go back to the long tail and really start to help our smaller retailers to really become stronger and more effective in their day to day life. So we see things like AI driving the intelligence around product recommendations for a store type, for instance. Robert: So if you are an independent store owner and you are in a rural environment where you are a 1,000 square feet and two the cash registers, that we would like to be able to cluster you with other retailers just like you, do the analysis and determine what you must stock, what you could stock and what you shouldn't stock. And then ensure that we're talking to the owner operator on a cadence that would allow us to then do more of that and offer and recommend as consumers trends change. So we're always ahead of demand, not buying demand in the long tail. Stephanie: How do you stay ahead of demand? What kind of tools and technologies are you using to ensure that you're able to quickly react to consumer buying behaviors or inventory levels for the store owner? How do you stay ahead of those things? Robert: Well, you're giving me way too much credit to say that we're actually ahead of those things, we're aiming to be ahead of these things. So let's make sure that's completely clear and we're being transparent, there's a lot of work to do here. So what we see is the ability to take all that historic purchasing information, and then combine it with social listening to see what consumers are talking about, then plugging in triggers like weather and other influences on buying patterns and then continue to feed machine learning and AI logic to build a picture that is constantly dynamic and changing so that we can then say to the customer, the retailer, "Hey, this product is starting to decline its popularity so we're recommending you start to reduce the inventory you carry. And by the way, this product is gaining popularity and we're going to drive a marketing campaign in your market to promote it. So now it'll become a hot commodity, please accept this recommendation and capitalize on that demand and it will happen in the coming weeks." That's what we're aiming for. Stephanie: Do you see the partners being ready to accept that and wanting to stock the products that you're recommending? Are they trusting your guidance or has it been an uphill battle when it comes to those recommendations? Robert: Well, first of all, the primary segment we're focused on is that high frequency store, independent retailer, a C-store, a convenience store that kind of customer segment, and they've been incredibly underserved for many years now. So any insight that we've given them so far, and the questions we've asked them about would it just be of interest, they've all unanimously said, this is what we've been asking for years, please help me grow my business. So I think the appetite is definitely there. Stephanie: Yeah, that's amazing. How do you set up platforms and systems for these different businesses? Because I could see each one needing something a little bit different. So how do you scale that model to provide the data to each company in a different way, or each, like you said, store in a different way? Robert: Right. It has to be done without human intervention to start with, we cannot be responsible for building an army to support such endeavor. So at Kellogg we're really focused on a single global platform, one ecosystem of applications that will scale globally across markets and channels and the customer segments within these channels, with a lower cost of ownership as we scale it out. So that's the first guiding principle. The second end is, if a machine can do it, we probably shouldn't do it. So everything is going to be machine driven. And then by rewarding the owner operators to complete their profiles, that allows us to capture information like, is your store rural, suburban, or urban, gives us another great data point to then create more effective costuming. Robert: And then in these clusters, the analytics can be very powerful and the machine can then start to communicate through marketing automation on a cadence that we could never possibly imagine before, and then touch them with relevant content that is absolutely pertinent to their business. So I would make a recommendation to you and your store that you're missing these two products, you should this and if you do stock these, we predict that you will make X number of dollars incrementally every year thereafter. And that's very powerful for comparison. Stephanie: Yeah, no, that's great. Are there any pitfalls or learnings when going about this partnership model and helping the retail stores that you saw along the way that you would find maybe other companies or brands will need to do this, where you're like, "Hey, we ran into this problem along the way, or this was a big hiccup that other people could probably avoid if you listen to this podcast." Any advice around that? Robert: Well, I think it's going to be the same answer that everybody gives, and that's really focused on education, change management. You're asking people to change their habits. So in emerging markets like Brazil, for us high growth markets, there's a full service that the reps provide to date. And so the store owners are accustomed to doing a particular style of business with us, we're asking them to change that and be more responsive from a digital perspective. Now corporate, for all the bad and sadness that's come with corporate, it has been the catalyst for changing the perspective of many retailers to how they should interact with their brands. So that's been that the silver lining of corporate is it's elevated the position of why B2B could be a very important tool in their growth strategy going forward. And that's changed the perspective of consumers considerably. Stephanie: Yeah, that's a good silver lining. So I saw that you also created a mobile app to reach some of the smaller retail clients. Can you tell me a bit about what problem you were facing and why you thought mobile was the best way to solve that problem? Robert: Well, that's a really easy one is the business tool of choice for small business owners. The internet and the mobile device and companies like Kellogg's are now developing solutions, online solutions that years ago would have been financially out of reach. Now they have all these tools that they can run their business, and that's why mobile is so important to us. Stephanie: Got it. Do you ever feel like you're encumbered by trying to meet your partner obligations or that the experiences maybe can't be what you want them to be because of certain obligations you have with partners? Robert: No, I feel more enabled to be honest, because it's a difficult market. The times are always challenging. So anything that might add value to a relationship, I think it goes a long way to creating a winning business scenario. So don't feel there's any barriers, maybe some adoption challenges that those would have been there regardless. So I feel that there's such a large opportunity to use Ecommerce to change our engagement model, that there're enough partners that have put their hand up and will put their hand up to say, "Yeah, I would love to be part of that because I can see that could create competitive advantage for me and alone I can't do it but in partnership with you, I feel that you could guide us and help us aspire to our own digital endeavors going forward." Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. How do these retail partners keep track of all their other brands? So I'm thinking, if Kellogg's has their website that you would log into and you would look at the recommendations and get your orders and your inventory and all that kind of stuff. How would a retailer keep track of everything else they have in their store too? Is there like a single source that they can rely on or how do they think about that? Robert: So that's a great question, and it's greatly misunderstood. There is no real lifespan for a single application to serve a single brand in a retail environment. Who in their right mind would manage 50 different applications from different brands? So for two different models, I foresee. So in a mature, disciplined distribution based market, such as North America where most of our distribution wholesale partners have a web presence to date with E-commerce capabilities, we will be looking to integrate into that, to improve the experience in that environment. So think about a store within a store concept, and that would be where I would see brands like Kellogg's and others prospering and allowing the retailer to buy across a broad selection of products available from the distributor, but also to technically punch out to reach my Kellogg experience, where they can see their performance plus with their peer group to get the recommendations that we're offering, being informed about trends and product demand and so forth. Robert: And then if they're inclined to confer upon a recommendation we've given them that product order will go back into the distributor environment to be processed in a normal fashion, thereby allowing them to continue to go about buying other products for the store. Now in markets where distribution isn't as well evolved from a digital perspective, then marketplaces become the answer to ensuring that a retailer can go to a marketplace designed for their customer segment, with brands that represent at least 40% of their shelf. So that there's enough for them to do in one execution to not create administration, but to reduce administration in the procurement of product. Stephanie: I got it, that makes sense. How do you think about working with different platforms? You just mentioned marketplaces and I saw when you go on Kellogg's website, you direct people to go on platforms like Amazon and then also CVS and Target. How do you balance working with bigger stores and retail partners, and then also platforms like Amazon within your Kellogg strategy for E-commerce? Robert: Well, there's a lot of room for improvement on both ends, so in the end you're referring to where the large platforms are in play, there's a ton of up side to improve content, to improved recommendations, to really get deeper integration, that we can take all that learning and insight and present it as a more refined offer list dynamic. Obviously the price part architecture element of ensuring that what we're presenting is something that's scalable and profitable for us, as well is a key factor in these relationships at both ends, of course. I would say that they're not mutually exclusive in the sense that, we can operate in two spectrums here. So in the large platform, but also taking that technology and applying it to enable the long tail to prosper. Robert: Monetizing the long tail is actually, a very worthy prize worth unlocking for every CPG company in the world. And I think that's where the glue on your food is to be honest, we do a great job in most cases with our Walmart's, and our Target's and our Amazon's. We don't do a tremendous job today with a smaller, high-frequency stores as an example. Stephanie: Yeah. That long tail does seem really important. How would you advise other CPG brands to engage with those? Like you said, the long tail? Robert: Do you know, I think partnerships are key. The synergistic product from more than one brand that you could curate into a collective offer, there is a lot of power in that. So strengthen in numbers has always been the case. So I think we could really team up better in the industry to make a more powerful proposition to our retailers, that creates greater value, greater economies of scale, and it's easier to adopt. And I think that's what's missing today because everybody is a little nervous about working together, trade secrets and what if the competition find out. But honestly in my entire career, I've always had a hard time just getting our innovation execution done, nevermind, stealing somebody else's in time. So in reality, it will never happen, but there's an insecurity, that's common to human nature, I guess. Stephanie: Yeah, I see the same thing in startup world where people don't want to share their ideas and you're like, "Trust me, I've got my own stuff to work on, I'm not trying to steal your idea and build a whole nother startup on top of the stuff that I'm working on. Don't worry." Robert: So true. Stephanie: Have you seen any successes when it comes to those partnerships that you would advise others to think about it this way, when it comes to letting people lower down their guards and allowing them to see this could have benefit for everyone, any successful case studies there? Robert: No, nothing is mature as a case study yet. We're still very much in the embryonic stage of developing this strategy. You can see it though in play from time to time when we do joint ventures with other brands targeting the consumer, to be honest. We did last year, we did a very exciting campaign with cheeses and house wine, that was the box wine company. Stephanie: Oh, tell me more about that? Robert: Well, this one is very interesting and very simple, it was a box wine. The box had to be extended to contain cheeses. Cheese and wine, as you know, is a perfect combination. I personally was just eager to get my hands on a box and, yeah, that morning it went live at nine o'clock and we sold everything in about 40 seconds, I believe. So none of us got any, so the power- Stephanie: You're still on the wait list. Robert: It's never coming back, I don't think. Stephanie: Oh, no. Robert: We have to recover from the demand. Yeah, cheeses doesn't need much help [inaudible] as I said, we can't make enough to meet consumer demand. That's a great example of when you can join forces and just make the proposition more compelling. So I see that playing out in the B2B space as well, as I said before, together we're stronger. Stephanie: Yeah. How do you think about what partnerships are advantageous to have? It seems like it'd be hard, and I could see a lot of brands maybe partnering randomly, and you're like, "Ah, that's not really even helpful to the consumer." So how would you think about striking up new partnerships in a way that's mutually beneficial to both brands and is good for a longer term strategy? Robert: Well, it depends what your ambition is, of course. So there'll be different solutions for different approaches. I mean, obviously, we wouldn't partner with a Benjamin Moore Paint brand, there's no correlation. So within the food industry taking snacks as an example, the beverage industry is the perfect partner, beer, wine, alcohol, Cheez-It and Pringles, it's a perfect combination. So the same as for cereal, milk and yogurt, it's a perfect combination. So there's definitely groupings of product where you can see which brands aspire to the same vision, it would be critically important as well. So just because the product has synergy doesn't mean that the strategy is there, you can't force a round peg into a square hole. Robert: So my first checkbox criteria would be, is the digital ambition the same? Do both companies, or do three or four companies aspire to own breakfast across all hospitality in the world? Well, if we do, then we've got a common objective. Now, how do we go about it together is the next step. Stephanie: That's great. It seems like the larger brands too, might have to give a little bit more, or provide a little bit more help to the smaller brands, if they're picking someone like ... If you were partnering with a smaller wine company or something, it seems like you might have to be ready to do maybe the 80% of the heavy lifting, because maybe they don't have the resources or the budget. Is that kind of how you're seeing things play out when you pick partners, that sometimes Kellogg's has to do the heavier lifting to create a partnership? Robert: Yeah. Even with partners with some of the bigger brands we're actually willing to do the heavy lifting. We made a decision with our leadership to own our destiny in this space. So it's from top to bottom, and I do see that small startups in an incubator fashion, we would be a great big brother to get products launched. And we have our own startup business within Kellogg's where we're giving grants to products like Leaf Jerky and so forth, which is a different plant-based product that challenges the status quo of what we felt like Jerky was in the past. So yeah, I could see that there could be a market verticals that we would go after, there might be health club awaited before we joined the Kohler, we were talking about RXbars and examples. Robert: So predominantly through health clubs and so forth, why not probiotic yogurts? Why not non-alcohol based beer? So why not the combination? All plays well to the health industry, so there might be some small companies in there that are pioneering excellent alternatives that we would be, I think, more than delighted to partner with them. Stephanie: Yeah. No, that's great. So Kellogg's is over, they've been around for over a 100 years, right? Since 1906, is that correct? Robert: Yeah, it's correct. Stephanie: Okay. Oh, good memory, Stephanie. So with a company that's been around for that long, how do you think about making sure that the company continues to innovate? Like you said, you have a startup within Kellogg's, what do you see within that startup? What kind of products do you see coming out of that? And would you advise a lot of other large companies to also put on their startup hat to compete with these B2C companies that are all popping up everywhere? Robert: Well, change has become the new norm. I mean, taking COVID aside, people want to taste new things, that is my impression, anyway. I think, there's an appetite for new and more challenging flavors and so forth. So in the food industry, I can see that the innovation around our product offers is actually critical for success. But the innovation doesn't stop there though, we have to be more innovative in how we present these products, how we ensure these products create value other than just in flavor, but in health and wellbeing as well. So Kellogg has always been a very health driven business right from its inception, that continues to be an underpinning philosophy of our company. I see a great deal of passion in our business and investment for innovation. It's not just digital, it's all down to food, not innovation kitchens and the chefs we have, they're inspired to really go find new products. Robert: We do a great job of creating an incubator within our business by constantly searching for ideas within our employee base around what we could do with Kellogg products. So I think you look inwards and outwards there's no stone not worth turning over to find out an idea about a new product. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. When you mentioned marketing earlier, it seems like you would have to market to two different audiences. You have to market to your retail partners and then also to the consumers, how do you go about, maybe within your platform where you're selling to retailers, do you market differently than how you do to consumers? Or how do you think about that? Robert: Well, so now you bring up an interesting subject in the sense that direct to consumer, which could in sense be side by side be B2B, does provide you with an awesome channel to test the appeal of new product, and affordable cost if you engineered it appropriately so that you've got something you can stand up and tear it down quite quickly without major investment. So I don't know if you would really want to continually be knocking on the door of your retailers with new products without having some good market data behind it, to say that this will sell. And so testing that product in market that becomes a critical part of the evolution of the go to market strategy. So I see traffic consumer testing being interesting proposition for companies like Kellogg's going forward. Stephanie: Got it. So you test the product with a market first, and then you go to your partners and say, "Hey, a lot of people like this, you should also put this in your store?" Robert: Absolutely, because that's where we get the scale, and then we can then turn on all of our abilities to cross sale and use some of the capabilities we talked to earlier about in the B2B platform, ensuring that our retailers know how to create success with new product. There's another interesting aspect of that too, so if you'd go back to the conversation around the long tail of retail, these companies, these business owners don't have sophisticated inventory management tool. So one of the biggest challenges we're solving for is ensuring that new products, our products we've recommended for that retail when they're placed that they stay. Because we see a lot of occasions where a new product is being placed or our product from the portfolio that they should be adopting, has been taken. Robert: And then a week later has been sold and never replaced because somebody in the evening has just redistributed product on the shelf to complete the look and that position be lost. And so making sure that these products are reordered and reordered again, until they become habitual, their presence is habitual on the shelf is a massive opportunity so it's not about just new product and innovation, it's also about ensuring the stickiness of product they are placing on a shelf. Stephanie: What ways do you engage with your partners to make sure that they, like you say, keep reordering, have you seen any best practices to stay top of mind with these people even if they do excellent and lose a spot in the shelf. They're like, "Oh, hey, this product actually belongs there." How do you go about building those patterns? Robert: Well, there's also technology becoming available from scanning to just constant recognition. So there are solutions coming, they're not particularly affordable today for the segment we've been addressing, which is the high frequency stores segment. So the challenge has been resolved by manpower up until now, and of course, that's not very affordable. It's interesting when you go to markets like India, if you don't show up something else will steal your space. Stephanie: [inaudible 00:32:09]. Robert: I know, so there's a whole bunch of, I must run ... Making sure that you hold onto the shelf space that you've worked so hard to attain. So we're looking at tools like, asking our retailers to take shelfies using the robot cameras and uploading- Stephanie: Shelfie? Tell me more about a shelfie. Robert: So a shelfie is just, the shelf equivalent of your selfie, in the sense that, we're to set challenges for our retailers and say, "Listen, take a shelf of your cereal display." And then we'll match that image to the planet ground that the AI has in its memory, and then give them a score, and that score will then be translated into points, Kellogg points that they can use for purchasing everything from a discount to cleaning services, say for instance, in the future. So one thing happens in this process, is we ask them to do a challenge, before the actually did their pictures there is a pretty good chance they're going to address any gaps on their shelf. So we see it being a little self serving and helping us get a better position in the store, but also then just educating the retail around best practice and reinforcing that practice. So the look of success is getting closer and closer in the package stores within their reach. So that's just one example, I guess. Stephanie: Yeah, no, that's awesome. That's a really fun example. Have you seen the rewards program that you have actually really incentivize these retailers to, like you said, take these shelfies and engage with your brand more? Robert: No, again, you gave far too much justice. I talk with authority, but we're still very much in the theory and the testing, the technology is still catching up, but we see rewards and we have a rewards engine built into our platform to date. We haven't really turned it on to its full force yet, but it will be a cornerstone of our strategy. We're looking at gamification rewards and recognition as being a key driver of behavior going forward, and creating the path to best practice. So it will be a constant in our engagement strategy, so at eight o'clock, nine o'clock at night, we'll be connecting with an owner operator of a store through WhatsApp or email or text to say, listen, we have a challenge for you, and this challenge is worth a 1,000 Kellogg points. If you go and take that shelfie or if you can tell us, answer this question about the new product you recently stocked, did it sell out, did customers come back and repurchase? Did you get any feedback in any shape or fashion about the flavor? What did they think, and reward them for that first party data insight. Robert: Now, all of a sudden you've got this incredible ability to harvest information that could be invaluable to your R and D teams. At the same time, you've got the opportunity to influence best practice and take the customer on a journey, the customer being the retail owner operator on a journey to become better at their craft, which is super exciting to us. Stephanie: No, that's really awesome. It seems like there'd be room to build a community among these store owners, to all do the challenges together and to talk about best practices. Have you all explored that? Robert: We're exploring it. We're definitely exploring it. So it came from, when we looked at one of our customer's segments being a K through 12 schools starting here in North America, there's a lot of schools that are rural. They're isolated, they don't have large school communities to support them, and there's so many challenges that they face from allergies and health and nutrition, taking food and making education subject matter. All of these things we're looking into to say, okay, so our community together would be again stronger. So connect schools that are similar together and then connect schools that are not similar and let them use our product as a teaching aid. So we aspire, this is long away from happening. Robert: So please don't take this as something that's been executed today, but we can see that sometime in the future, we'll create a syllabus around corn and our cornflakes and how it changes the flavor of patterns in Japan compared to Idaho, and then to schools when their kids are having their breakfast, they can share the differences in the sweetness and so forth because the [inaudible 00:36:46], the climate is different so that the plant takes on a different flavor. So that's a subject that you could turn into a syllabus and education and bring kids together. Yeah, it is a very exciting proposition for us and different from anything we've ever done before. Stephanie: Yeah, that's awesome. And I did not know that flavors around the world would be different. So you definitely taught me something brand new here. Robert: Yeah. We've done a few things at Kellogg's in the office in Chicago where they've taken five or six or seven different sources of cornflakes and put them all in independent bowls unmarked, and then tasted them and people were convinced that sugar had been applied and so forth. And it actually hadn't, it was just that the different produce, produce different flavors and it was quite an epiphany for many of the folks tasting them. Stephanie: Yeah, no, that's really interesting. So when it comes to your B2B platform, what are some of the best capabilities that you're using today that maybe you weren't using a year or two ago? Robert: Again, cornerstone of what I'm trying to do with the B2B platform is create efficiency, and so to create efficiency, the first thing I'm trying to tackle is preventing any waste of time as it pertains to identifying a product. So we are integrating scan into the mobile device, using the mobile device camera, quickly scan that barcode it will take you straight to the product in our platform. So no need to key in, no need to type in the barcode or any keywords that are associated, just quick scan within less than a second you're on the product detail page, and you got a path to purchase with one click. You've got a path to understand your performance versus your peer group with one click. And you've got a path to understand how to sell more by accessing the tools that give you the toolkits that will help you do that. So that's, that's one aspect. Robert: The second aspect is to create value around ensuring that big data is conferred into some form of exportable logic that says that, hey, you are not creating the optimal product assortment. Companies, businesses, stores, like you sell these products successfully, and you're missing revenue as a result of not taking them. So here's a recommendation for these products. Here's the stocking quantity that we believe you should take. And here's a revenue projection based on MSRP from the class that you belong to that. That to me is transformational in so many ways. Stephanie: So are you using AI behind the scenes to create a lot of these recommendations? And do you think a lot of brands are also doing this or is there a lot of room for them to adopt to this technology? Robert: Yeah. AI is the key to success. So we've talked about AI for several years now, and it has really not delivered what it says in the box as of yet, but I am a 100% confident we're getting closer and closer all the time. Anybody that's been getting with AI knows that a lot of teaching into the logic that supports the output, but we're definitely getting closer to being able to use it at scale. What I see in the next year to 24 months will be the ability to then turn on that dynamic, self-sustaining logic that continues to morph as it reads more data and continue to present very tailored recommendations to all of our retailers worldwide, simultaneously because the computing power, obviously, continues to scale at an exponential rate. So it doesn't do necessarily what it needs to do today, but the path is now clear, and I think it's just around the corner, to be honest. Stephanie: Yeah, no, I completely agree. Are you all training your own models for AI? Are you relying on a platform to help you with that? How would you recommend another brand or a larger or smaller brands to start adopting this technology or start experimenting with it? Robert: Well, there's a lot of data scientists that they're all better actor than I am for sure. Stephanie: Sure? Robert: Yeah, I'm absolutely positive. So we've been looking outward to smaller businesses, as well as some of our larger partners to use their experience. Because clearly they see the opportunity too, so I would continue to just make sure that you're using a blend of traditional partnerships and innovative new businesses that come up with some left-field idea about how to resolve one of the challenges. Constantly looking for new ideas from the marketplace, from the periphery where there's new startups starting and looking for an agent, they might have a great concept that we can use. I often equate it to something you might see in a Paris fashion show where coming in the the runway is a presentation that could be quite outrageous, but some form of it we'll get to the high street that will be very popular with the consumer. So a really wild idea can really translate and be boiled down to something that can be a game changer in reality. So never assume that it has to be something that's already in place, but to be open to suggestion and I try and work on a daily basis to be that way. Stephanie: Yeah. I think that's a really good lesson too, to look at tangental markets and industries that could also help influence not only new products, but also E-commerce strategies and just like keeping tabs on what other people are doing, especially startups who are moving quickly and experimenting quickly. How do you keep tabs on companies like that stay up to date with what other people are trying? Robert: Well in prior lives, working for brands that were less recognized, it was on me to continue to search and find, and encourage my team to continue to look for these innovations. Working for a brand like Kellogg's, there's a lot of people come calling. So I'm obviously in a fortunate position to be exposed to a lot of these ideas on a day by day basis from various entrepreneurs. I feel that Kellogg's could prosper from taking on the idea so that role has changed. So I'm very fortunate in that regard to be exposed to great ideas across the industry and not just from within the food and beverage industry as an example but from sending an upturn to, you name it aerospace, there's a lot of innovation going on. Stephanie: What is definition of success for E-commerce? What kind of metrics do you look at? What do you think is successful? Robert: Yes. Okay, so none of the traditional metrics are really going to be of any interest. So for me, the success has moved upstream. So when I think about what does success look like from a digital perspective in B2B, it's very much around ensuring that the retailer is selling more products more effectively and more efficiently, and putting more money in their pocket. So if I can look back and say that all the retailers that we supply our products are prospering as a result of our E-commerce engagement, because we're delivering not just the fundamentals of E-commerce, which is about auto management and everything else that comes with it. That's just table stakes, whatever else comes with it, where we create the value through AI recommendations, access to toolkits, marketing campaigns, guidance on how to create the perfect store. If that's translating into more dollars at the point of sale, then that's what success looks like to B2B commerce going forward, in my opinion. Stephanie: Yeah. It seems like that partnership and education is really important in B2B, have you guys seen success with doing that? Robert: Well, again, I wish I had something much more tangible to give you in terms of the successful metrics. This is still ground zero, we're still very much in day one of our B2B engagement. I think you will find that modern B2B is still in day one globally across both industries. So there's still a lot of learning, a lot of testing, a lot of refinement to do, but the appetite is there. When I talk to other brands, they feel the same way about how we can harness technology to create value. The retailers I've talked to they are hungry, and so is our distributor and wholesaler partners too, to participate in this new era of one-on-one engagement at a scale that's affordable and on a cadence that has never been achievable before. Just that combination of menu items is really driving the hunger to get to that point quicker. Robert: I wish I had to go quicker, we're definitely trying to get there quicker, but it just takes time to build. And so ask me again in six or 12 months, and I'll be in a far stronger position to give you a better answer. Stephanie: Oh, you've just invited yourself around two. So with things changing so quickly, are there any new or emerging digital channels that you all are focused on or trying out? Robert: Again, comes back to just watching and keeping an eye on how things are changing, an example would be, for instance, say WhatsApp for instance. So WhatsApp starts life as a messaging tool, becomes incredibly popular worldwide, supplanting email, phone, texting everything. Now WhatsApp is developing your online ordering capability that will potentially change the trajectory of B2B commerce. So we're watching it very, very carefully, but there's a caveat, there's so much low hanging fruit in just doing what we already know, we can do better in B2B commerce. The WhatsApp example would be a very shiny object while we still need to continue to look to shop opportunities, we need to temper our enthusiasm to be distracted, it can be a distraction. We know that there's enough revenue potential just executing our primary mission without chasing rabbits down holes. Robert: I don't want to be the anti-innovator, but there's got to be a balance. So I use three words to caution myself, stop, better and clever. Stop doing things that create no value. Identify what you do well, but do it better. And say Friday afternoon is for the clever things. So Friday afternoons are dedicated to it, but don't let it become all consuming and that's how I approach this. Stephanie: That's great. That's a really good lesson, Friday afternoons with a beer maybe then you're even more creative, right? Robert: Why not? Yeah, certainly, my wine consumption during COVID is gone up tremendously. Stephanie: I think everyone else. So are there any B2B commerce trends that you're excited about that are coming down over the next couple, well, maybe even in the next year? Robert: Well, I just think the fact that the chatter around B2B has climbed exponentially in the last three or four months, is exciting. I'm super excited about what machine learning can do for scale in just enabling us to do the value added services that we've aspire to do, but couldn't execute because of the cost. So these two elements that B2B is becoming a cornerstone of business strategy, and it's not seeming to be as a poor cousin of B2C, B2B can be sexy. We're taking all of the goodness from the user experience and applying it, but then with this logic, that's data driven it's hard to turn down when we recommend products to a particular owner operator that I've got a revenue projection associated with them, that's a hard proposition. Plus we're giving them an award for accepting the recommendation. If that recommendation comes and was close to our prediction, then I think conversion could be a 100% going forward. Robert: Now in digital, we usually have 2% conversion and an action was great, a 100% conversion, wow, that's perfect execution. What does that do to the industry? Truly transformational. Stephanie: Yeah, I completely agree. So when it comes to implementing technology and stuff, because I think, like you said, a lot of people and a lot of platforms are focusing on B2B now, it is a new player to look at where B2C was maybe the sexier area before. How would you advise other companies to think about onboarding new tech technologies and tools in a way that sets them up for longterm success? Robert: Well, first of all, think scrappy. You can't innovate with the mindset of perfection. Large companies, I think suffer more than small companies, of course, there's a procedure and there's an ROI calculation, and there's a certain set of expectations. Especially when you're dealing with technology that can't quite deliver on the initial promise, but you have a fairly competent perspective on it, we'll get there. So you have to be a little ashamed of what you take into market, because quite frankly, in my experience, you see the flaws, whereas the target audience does not. They see something different, something value added, they know it's a work in progress, and they can see it resolves a pain point. It removes all of the inadequacies of what you didn't do as a result of getting to market quicker and testing a reaction. So that would be my recommendation. Feel a little ashamed, to be a little ashamed about what you go to market with initially. Stephanie: So is there anything that we didn't cover that you want to cover before we move on to the lightning round? Robert: Oh, no, I didn't know there was going to be a lightning round. Stephanie: Yes. There's a lightening round. Robert: That's a little scary. Stephanie: Yeah, anything high level, E-commerce trends, the industry that you're like, "Man, I really wish Stephanie asked this question and she just didn't." Robert: No, I don't think so. I think we've covered off the fact that, I think the biggest thing that's missing in the industry is that more collaboration. I think collaboration is going to be a game changer in terms of driving success. So that's what I'm seeking to build through networking and working with other brands to try and find some common ground we can explore in. So if anybody is interested, please reach out to me and I'll be happy to partner. Stephanie: Yeah. I completely agree. That's great. All right. So the lightning round brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud is where I ask a question and you have one minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Rob? Robert: No. Okay, I am. Stephanie: All right. You're ready. What's up next in your cereal bowl? Robert: Oh my God. No, Scott's, it should be porridge, but it isn't. I like porridge, I'm a diehard Frosties guy. I don't know, there's not a bad time in a day to consume Frosties, so that's what's always in my cereal bowl. Stephanie: I agree. It's a delicious choice. What's up next on your Netflix queue? Robert: Netflix, I just finished watching Altered Carbon and it was a book that I'd read, three books I'd read many, many years ago. And it was actually a really good rendition of the novel. So I thought it's Sci-fi is very forward looking, it's probably what you'd expect me to watch, but I thought I enjoyed that series. Stephanie: Yeah, that sounds great. What's up next on your podcast list or audible? Robert: Yeah, so podcast, during COVID, I mean, I listen to a lot of podcasts, especially at nighttime and I've started to rediscover Vinyl. So I've become a bit of a pseudo audio file or want to be, at least I fought the big stuff, but I'm working my way into. So I started to listen to Vinyl's audio file podcasts, which have been fantastically interesting, but suddenly they're talking about technology I can't afford or justify. My wife keeps a very close eye on me, so sorry- Stephanie: Oh, man, so rude of her. Robert: I know terrible, isn't? But logical, she saves me from myself. Stephanie: That's good. Yeah, that's really fun. Well, if you were to have a guest on a podcast of your own, so if you were to have The Robert's podcast and you want to bring on your first guest, who would you bring and why? Robert: Oh, that's easy. That's easy. I am a big soccer fan from the UK. And one of my idols is Alex Ferguson. I would love him to be my first case on a podcast. He has such great insight into leadership, management, the stories he has. He would be, there's an entire encyclopedia of subjects we could discuss, and he's an idol of mine. Stephanie: That'd be a fun one. I would listen to your podcast. All right. The last hard question. What one thing will have the biggest impact on E-commerce in the next year? Robert: One thing, I think, changing the culture within companies to really embrace innovation, not to necessarily wipe the investment and make a net positive operating gain in the short term but to be more risk orientated. I see a lot of challenges around investment strategies and payback periods and so forth, and it really does slow down our ability to go to market. So if we can get to a point where there's an acceptable investment tolerance, and that will obviously vary by company size and profitability, then I'd like to see more about an entrepreneurial approach to taking that startup fund internally, and going to market with it, improving success or a failure. In Kellogg's we've done a tremendous job recently of celebrating failures. Robert: We've even have an award, for the peace of the award for failure. So it's a transformation that's underway, but we still have to get more comfortable with capital investment that can be used to experiment rather than the business case that supports it longterm, which will come, that will come when we determine what the metrics are or what the levers that work that can be expanded upon and so forth. So that's what I'm looking for. Stephanie: I love it. You are a lightning round expert, so nice job. Well, it's been a blast having you on the show, where can people learn more about you and Kellogg's? Robert: Well, they can see my profile on LinkedIn, obviously, I'm not a big social media user today. So reach out to me through LinkedIn and I'll be happy to engage. Stephanie: Awesome. Thanks for coming on the show, Rob, it's been a blast and we will have to bring you back since we have an invitation now for round two, we'll have to bring you back in the future. Robert: That was a mistake, wasn't it? Stephanie: No mistake, we'll have even more fun then. Robert: I look forward to it. Thank you very much for having me on. It's a great pleasure. Stephanie: Thanks.
You may not know exactly what Soft-Tex is, but chances are you’ve seen or even own a Soft-Tex product. That’s because Soft-Tex is a B2B2C company that provides products to retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Bed Bath & Beyond, Macy’s, and many more. The company specializes in sleep products, like pillows, mattress toppers, mattresses, mattress pads, or anything else you might need in your bedroom to help you get a good night’s sleep. But Soft-Tex doesn’t only ship to their retail partners. In recent years the company has upped its Ecommerce and drop-shipping capabilities in an effort to get even more in the lives of consumers. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Taylor Jones, the Vice President of Marketing for Soft-Tex explains how the company is creating a collaborative partnership with retailers while also exploring and consulting in the world of Ecommerce. He explains the ways in which Soft-Tex goes about ensuring successful product launches — including the exact number of reviews he thinks is the sweet spot — why SEO and product-usage videos are the ultimate keys to success, and the need for an Amazon strategy and what that looks like. 3 Takeaways: There is a delicate balance you have to strike when working with retail partners and also selling products D2C. You have to work collaboratively and across multiple channels to ensure that you have the products selling where you want them and not competing against themselves Amazon is a price-leader, and in order to get any market share, you need to have an Amazon strategy that allows you to live there, while also ensuring that other partners have exclusive access to other products Product reviews and product-usage videos are absolutely essential to achieving a high conversion rate. Generating about 15 reviews and placing a usage video front and center are two strategies to implement to help grow conversions For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Hey everyone. And welcome back to your number one show on all things eCommerce, I'm your host, Stephanie Postles. And today we have Taylor Jones on the show, the VP of marketing and eCommerce at Soft-Tex International. Taylor. Welcome. Taylor: Hey Stephanie, thanks so much for having me. Stephanie: I'm excited to have you here. I'm feeling a little bit sleepy now, thinking about all the nice products you guys have, that are centered around sleep. I'd love for you to dive a bit into what is Soft-Tex International and how did you come to the company? Taylor: We'd love to hook you up first off. Stephanie: Yes, please. Taylor: So at Soft-Tex, we're really serious about sleep and home comfort products. I think for a long time, the company has been a leader in memory foam and cooling technologies and just everything to help you get a better night's sleep and live a comfortable and better life. I came to the company about three years ago. I have deep digital experience, worked for a company called Red Ventures here in Charlotte. Maybe you've heard of them. Then for another company in the call center space, Arise Virtual Solutions, and from some mutual connections found this role at Soft-Tex and started, really owning the eCommerce business for them. And it's blossomed into a larger marketing role, including e-commerce still. Stephanie: That's great. So how do I think about Soft-Tex? Because maybe a normal consumer, maybe hasn't heard of them. So how do I think about, how big the company is, who their partners are, how you guys sell? Tell me a bit about that. Taylor: Soft-Tex is really a B2B, to C company, and Soft-Tex is the entity that would be known to our retail partners. So think about Macy's, Bed Bath & Beyond, J.C. Penney, Walmart, Amazon, the whole gamut of retail, we supply with bedding, pillows, toppers, mattresses, mattress pads, protection, anything that is in the bedroom that you'd sleep on, it would probably make it. Taylor: We have a direct to consumer presence that we work with, bedpillows.com. We also have a robust, drop ship capability. So it's not just, we sell in bulk to a retailer. We do that absolutely, but we do, as a core capability, have drop ship to over 50 partners. Stephanie: Wow. So it seems like there's an interesting mix where, you're trying to market for yourself, you're doing direct to consumer, you have your retail partners. How do you think about managing these relationships and also not cannibalizing yourself at the same time? Taylor: Right. So I would say, our partnership with bedpillows.com, is emerging. It's a delicate balance for folks in our position, because we supply, our retail partners, we absolutely don't want to compete with them. Ultimately those relationships are very important to us and we build custom products. It's a very collaborative process with our brick and mortar retail partners and the branding that that goes into all of our different channels. Soft-Tex we have about five or six national or licensed brands that we supply product under or, or we'll develop product under a private label, to mitigate some of the brand conflicts or sales channel conflicts that may arise with selling our products. Stephanie: Very cool. And are you helping your partners when it comes to digitally marketing, the mattresses, pillows, are you helping improve their eCommerce strategy? Because I could see you having a lot of insights into different brands and their strategies and what they're doing to maybe share that knowledge and help each other out. Taylor: Absolutely. So the role we play on with the eCommerce team is a consultative role in that aspect, in that, we're able to see over the wall, we supply our products to the 50 different partners that I mentioned. So we can see some really interesting things that, maybe somebody over here is doing, in merchandising, assortment, with features, attributes, something cool on the product description page. And we can make that suggestion to someone else who maybe has not done that yet. Stephanie: That's great. So what are some learnings or key things that you see happening on these eCommerce sites where your like, here's some good best practices that anyone could implement or I see this working really well right now, or maybe it wasn't working six months ago. What lessons are you seeing through all these brands that you work with? Taylor: I think the concept of reviews syndication and review seeding is very important. Obviously, authenticity is critical and you don't want to see fake reviews, but when you have a new product, accelerating the process through which consumers can experience the product and write a review and leave a review, such that it exists is social proof, for other customers who see that product, is so important to getting a product off on the good foot. We've seen, in the home comfort space, 10 to 15 reviews, seems to be a sweet spot for a new product introduction to really help accelerate its growth. Stephanie: Completely agree on there. How do you encourage reviews? Taylor: There are review seeding partners out there, those companies that you can do seeding programs with, Bazaarvoice is a big one in our space. They have a really interesting service where you can collect reviews if you have a direct to consumer presence and syndicate those reviews. And they also have a network of folks that exists to, you can nominate your products and folks order it to sample your product. And those reviews can get syndicated out to retailers that, on the flip side are members of the Bazaarvoice syndication network. So we've seen retailers who participate in that, really scale up quickly on our products. Stephanie: Very cool. So they're not really having to do as much of the heavy lifting because essentially a consumer would review a product and that review can be used multiple times. Is that how to think about it? Taylor: Through a seeded review, say we did 10 reviews, those same 10 reviews would appear on Macy's, on J.C. Penney, on Kohl's, all at the same time, versus, if someone visited Macy's and bought the product and reviewed it, obviously that review would be owned by Macy's, and it will show there. So, as much as we can do to help reviews go as many places as possible, that's been very helpful. Stephanie: That makes sense. So when it comes to, I'm thinking about mattresses and buying mattresses, for a while, everyone wanted to lay on them and sit on them and see how they feel. And now with the market evolving, especially with the pandemic and everyone being a little bit more comfortable with ordering online, what shifts have you seen? Do you see consumer expectations increasing, consumer demands increasing on the sellers? What are you seeing happening behind the scenes right now? Taylor: For our products, from basic bedding, so everything non-mattress and the mattress, it's been through the roof. I think, folks want a fresh and clean sleeping environment, especially cleanliness is top of mind. With COVID in fact, Soft-Tex, my company announced a deeper partnership with Thomson Research Associates. They make an anti-microbial technology called Ultra-Fresh, the market is hot right now for all bedding products. And I think, from the customer experience point that you're hitting at, do you need to touch and feel the product in order to feel confident in purchasing it? Certainly bedding is a very tactile and personal experience and the same pillow or mattress that's great for me may not, may not work for you. Right. Taylor: I think we've seen folks through warranties and trial periods that the industry has, particularly on the mattresses, pretty much a hundred nights sleep trial guarantee, in some form or the other is a standard now. But from a pillow or top or other product standpoint, maybe there's not that trial period, but being as descriptive as possible, the images, the copy, using enhanced content and the importance of video is so important. Batched attributes, iconography, to really recreate that story and experience, doing everything you can without the consumer touching the product, and that way, I joke with folks at my company that I have the hardest job, right. I have to convince people to buy something that's highly personal and tactile, that they have never touched prior to receiving it. Stephanie: That's pretty tough. What best practices have you seen around creating videos? Because that's something that a lot of companies are leaning into right now, but especially for, a mattress or something, what are you seeing work when it comes to videos for the products? Taylor: I think the concept of video can take a number of forms. YouTube is the second largest search engine. So, you can do a ton of explainer videos or keyword optimized videos, to try and drum up search traffic to your products. But you can also leverage video, in particular the 30-second to a minute product video, to help drive conversion. And I think, that's been a huge thing that we've seen. The addition of video to product pages has scaled our conversion rate by an incremental 10 or 20%. It's hard to fathom, because typically most retailers merchandise video is the last piece in an image carousel, right? People don't like to read, they want to be told, and be surprised and delighted. Taylor: And so, leveraging that video format in a short, condensing it to 30 seconds, has been really big for us. And I think, stylistically, it's very on brand for us, the videos that we've done. As I mentioned at the top of the podcast, Soft-Tex is a very innovative company with emphasizing technology, cooling, I mentioned antimicrobial. So our videos come off as very techie, with graphics, lower thirds that pop up. So I think, making sure your videos are on brand and authentic to your brand voice, clearly and concisely conveying the product value proposition. In our space, it's really, how are we different than everybody else selling a mattress or a pillow? There's thousands of options. Stephanie: Yep. Are you making the videos for your brand partners, or are they all are using the same one, or are you customizing them where you're like Bed Bath & Beyond, this video works better versus Macy's they have a different clientele and we're going to make a different video for them or are they making their own? Taylor: Absolutely great question, Stephanie. For private label products, or we have some national brands that we offer exclusively to certain retailers, obviously those are customized, and we work with retail partners like Bed Bath & Beyond, and Macy's, on art direction, model considerations, we work with them on developing a storyboard and get it approved by them before we film it. Stephanie: Got it. That makes sense. So the one thing I was thinking about when we were mentioning direct to consumer, how you guys were going about that route right now. I was thinking about a very large mattress brand who I think recently IPOed and a lot of people are talking about their negative unit costs. And I was wondering, how are you guys thinking about that with your direct to consumer strategy? Are you willing to have negative margins to add a new customer, or how do you think about the digital growth around them? Taylor: I think the way we've thought about it in a lot of ways, is in the concept of, getting reviews on Amazon is so critical to helping ramp up. If you're giving a discount or something, that you may be selling your product at a loss initially to help gain those reviews, gain some initial sales traction initially. I think it has to be for a finite period of time, right? That you turn the corner and have a clear path to profitability. You can't just do it indefinitely. Right. But I think that there are definitely values to doing it, in that, you get your brand out there, you get some exposure, user generated content is so powerful right now. I think if the world is telling us anything, the power of social media and viral media, the same can be true for user generated content and reviews. If you get a really good review or a really bad one, people can upload them, they're always going to be there. Right. It's so important. Stephanie: That makes sense. Is there any model that you developed around we're going to, we're okay with going in the negative for this amount of time with this campaign, or is there any models that you build to influences these decisions, around adding new customers? Taylor: In terms of the review thing, it's still an algorithm that we're working out, what's the right quantity of review that moves the needle towards a product being successful. That's mostly in our space, right? When you're syndicating in a retail environment, so products sold across many retailers, because really the review is a key way to optimize, each retailer has its own search engine, right? Now, if you're your own brand, right? Selling direct to the consumer. I think it's a different calculus, you have your own tolerance with whoever's providing your investment. Taylor: If you're going to go negative for a time. What is the strategy? How do you become cashflow positive? In the industry, a lot of these, just e-commerce mattress in a box guys, is really, they're marketing companies if you think about it. There's a lot of articles, a lot of them are made by the same folks in terms of manufacturers and who pours the foam, et cetera. So it's interesting. Stephanie: That's really interesting to think about. I think I have three different brands of mattresses in our house, but I'm pretty sure they're probably all the same or made from the same people. Taylor: Or from the same cloth. Stephanie: I think so. They all feel pretty similar. How do you think about returns, for something as large as a mattress or, I'm thinking about furniture companies and stuff, how have you seen some brands lower their return rates? What are some best practices around them? Taylor: I think for the industry, for the mattress in a box, we've seen return rates average out between 10 and 15%. I would include basically everything in that, including the comfort trials and everything. Right. So, when you're a direct to consumer mattress in a box guy, that has to be factored into your pricing. Some other things that we've seen creative ways to save the sale, a lot of, one of the big complaints with sleep products is, maybe the bed is too firm. Maybe you'd send a topper or something to make the mattress more plush, as a method to save recouping, returning the mattress. Because ultimately, right, wrong or indifferent, in the mattress industry once somebody slept on a bed, you can't resell it. It's just one of those things. People don't don't buy used mattress. Stephanie: Good. All the things I'd never really thought about. So you were just mentioning how... I'm glad that you have to deal with that and not me. So we were talking about how a lot of the brands that maybe we think are unique, maybe are utilizing the same types of underlying materials and things like that. So they're kind similar. I saw that you guys sell on Amazon. Are you ever worried that Amazon could just knock you off and just make a mattress that's so similar, that it's maybe not beneficial to be on there, or what's your reason for selling products on there? Taylor: Well, I think, so many things nowadays, if you're searching for a product, folks don't just begin on Google anymore. There's a large contingent of the population that are Prime subscribers and really begin the product search phase on Amazon. I think you pretty much have to be there to have the share of voice, whether you like it or not. I think, for us, Amazon's a growing partner. Certainly it's hard, we have a lot of rebates and allowances with them, from a margin standpoint and I'm sure you've heard this from many folks. It's hard to find products that, you can be profitable. But, I think brands have to make a decision to have an Amazon strategy. Taylor: It is delicate. Obviously, retailers are very sensitive to being comped on Amazon. So it's a very nuanced delicate road that we walk. We have an assortment that we have on Amazon, but we also offer exclusive products to other channels, that we don't offer to Amazon. Stephanie: Got it. Is there any other advice that you would give when it comes to selling on Amazon, but making sure that it's beneficial, like you said, one idea is keeping exclusive content to where not everything you offer is all on Amazon, but is there anything else that you all do, where you're like, this works well? Taylor: I think, really it's ensuring that you're being thoughtful about your assortment, if you're selling on multiple outlets. We've learned in our experience that Amazon is a price follower. Well, we're a first party vendor. Obviously many of your listeners, maybe third party sellers were there. They set the retail price, but as a first party vendor, we have a wholesale price that we give to Amazon and there are, like I mentioned, rebates and allowances. But ultimately, they then retail it to make a profit or not, in some cases. Taylor: They're pretty aggressive in price scraping and seeing what others are doing and commanding the market share to come to them, if they see a lower price out in the market, they will likely try and beat it. So I think, you just have to be prepared, before you open that flood gate, if that's your strategy, making sure that you're ready to enforce, map or, D inventory Amazon as needed. I think, certainly if you're a third party seller on Amazon, you're in much more control of your destiny in that respect, as you can, you set the retail yourself. Stephanie: That completely make sense. In terms of SEO, I'm thinking it's pretty tricky for you guys to, you want your brands to be seen as leaders, but then you also want yourself to be seen as leaders. What SEO tactics do you all use for yourself and your brands? Taylor: Great question. I totally think, in our space in particular, features and attributes are more important than the brand overall, in terms of the search volume. Obviously, if you build a brand, which obviously we all are in the business of doing, you can build search volume that way, but, most of our SEO strategy exists around, trying to optimize and rank for generic keywords, based on the features and benefits of each product. For us, the brand story and value proposition is more of a conversion factor rather than a volume driver, if you will. We as a company have invested more in building a robust e-commerce interface, to target that non-branded search term versus building, paying money for our brands to be the most searched today. Taylor: That's not to say that, our brands don't have an impressive story and value proposition, but I think, part of that comes into cost, right. A brand that spends a lot in marketing, a direct to consumer mattress that may retail for $1000, queen size, roughly, you have a very similar product that we offer under one of our brands, through Macy's or J.C. Penney, or Walmart, Amazon, that retails for 350 to $400. Is there much difference in the product? I would say they're very similar in terms of features and attributes, but it comes down to advertising and price point, right? Stephanie: So what have you seen works? How do you win? Taylor: I think, again, each retailer is its own search engine and each retailer's algorithm for the sort that they show, when somebody types in a pillow, I'm searching for memory foam pillows or pillows or mattresses, is a little different. They take into effect or into account different factors, all of them leverage the trailing sales history, review quality. So, is your product good? Four stars or better? Are you getting reviews recently? So review count and frequency and recency. And then how does it relate to the query that was searched? Taylor: So, for example, there's a lot of backend keywords that we look to put with our products and we've really gone through and looked to optimize those to make sure that we're calling out things like, if a product is antimicrobial, it is tagged appropriately, or if it's got some certifications or whatever it is, such that, when you're searching on a retailer, if you're typing in the keyword or leveraging a checkbox menu, faceted navigation, that we're optimized to show as much as we can. Stephanie: Got it. So how are you finding new brands who would be willing to work with you on selling your product? Are you marketing to them? Are you approaching them directly, cold email? How do you find new partners in your space? Taylor: It's a great question. A lot of our business is, if you put it into two buckets, hunting and farming, it is farming. You bring new ideas and new product and new concepts to the same folks you've been dealing with. But we absolutely have hunting strategies as well. Honestly, I think Soft-Tex has taken a position as an industry leader of research. We've undertaken bedding industry research initiative, both of bedding buyer trends. We work with, many, many retail partners, and especially during COVID times, we've been able to survey our partners on what they're seeing and aggregate the results and provide that as a free service, that I think has been really valuable to folks in the industry. And then also not just industry or retailer, B2C information, but what the consumer is looking for in bedding today. We've actually just completed a large scale research initiative for bedding consumer tastes and preferences in 2020. Stephanie: Very cool. And are you plugging in some of your products, because consumers are very interested in cleanliness going forward and what do you know? We have an antimicrobial, I'm saying that wrong, but you know what I mean, product? Taylor: It's absolutely the type of a feedback loop that fuels our product development cycle. So in our bedding buyer survey, we just got the results back on that. As you might imagine, anything with fresh and clean attributes has been on a positive sales trend and we've for a long time had anti-microbial infusions and treatments in our products, but obviously we're ramping that up now, given the favorable sales trend that it's seeing. We're looking forward to, seeing the full landscape of what consumers are shopping for, how they shop, as that's in constant flux, especially with COVID and beyond. I think, consumers are more comfortable shopping online, increasingly daily, more and more orders, for all of eCommerce, not just bedding are taking place digitally. Stephanie: Do you think this is a longer term trend? And if so, how have you guys shifted your strategy? What things are you planning on doing differently or changing going forward? Taylor: I think, like I mentioned, we've done a great job at Soft-Tex in optimizing our product pages and the end retailer optimization. We are making the investment now, in that top of funnel or off of retailers sites discoverability. So we want people to have our brands, enter the consideration phase earlier in the process versus, just see them on a retailer site and click on them. So we're definitely investing there, because we do see the shift towards e-commerce, increasingly as a longterm trend, just rough numbers that I had looked at before this podcast. When I started at Soft-Tex, e-commerce was, just under 10% of the total business. Stephanie: That's four years ago, right? Taylor: That was in 2017. And I think, ultimately even then we were under-indexed as a company. This year, I think, just given how the trends are going and how we're pacing, it's looking, 35 to 40%. And that's not to say that the brick and mortar piece or other channels of business have shrunk terribly either. It's just grown that much, just organically as well. Stephanie: The pie has increased. Taylor: Exactly. Stephanie: With that much growth, I'm thinking about your tech stack now. And I saw a quote on some article, where you said, our approach is working, and we believe that the tech stack we've built is well positioned for continued growth. So what does your tech stack look like? What are you guys investing in? What platform are you using? What does it look behind the scenes? Taylor: I think, product information management and taxonomy, and really taking control of your data as the expert of whatever product you make, is so critical. Before I started, all of our product data was in, 50 million Excel sheets, right. Now it's much more systematized. And also, not to mention, different retail partners require different fields and everybody's set up processes a little different, whereas, before that, was institutional knowledge and it lived with a person, now that lives with platform. So that's a huge process improvement that we've made. Taylor: Digital asset management is so critical, particularly from being able to rapidly get new images out to different syndication platforms, but also tests. We've done a lot in push the envelope on image standards. We talked about how we can play a consultative role with retail partners. We'd seen some really nice boosts when we added some batches to images, as trust symbols, like if something was featured on, Better Homes & Gardens, sticking that, in the bottom right hand corner. Sometimes that's been a little tough, because certainly main images get picked up in Google shopping and there's some rules against how much text can be in the image. Taylor: That worked well for a time, when we were able to get it approved. From a text tech standpoint, email marketing, that's super important, leveraging, and also of course social, being able to leverage all of our digital assets and brand voice and value, getting it out there consistently to the customer as well, has been really important. Stephanie: What metrics do you look at for success around, whether it's your B2B type of backend or your eCommerce platform, what metrics are you reviewing to see if things are going well? Taylor: An early indication, skew count. So how many skews do we have in our assortment and how many places are they set up? Obviously if we have a thousand skews, they should all be 50 places, ideally, right? For full skew syndication. Certainly not every retailer is going to take every skew that we have. A lot of retailers still have more of a curated assortment versus an endless aisle. Certainly I think, we see a value in an endless aisle, because of how we differentiate our products. Literally we try to create every product to be a little different, to have a little bit of unique feature and value proposition. So that concept that, there's something for everyone, right. Taylor: So skew count, a very important metric, ultimately total sales obviously, unit sales and how are retailers trending, particularly ramping up impression volume, how many people are getting to a product page and certainly for folks listening, they're probably like, well, how do you get that? Not every retailer provides that information. But you certainly can leverage tools out there, on Amazon, there's intelligence tools to look at, how many views your products are getting and other things of that nature. I think that, being able to just check that and see the demand for your product over time is very important. Taylor: Other metrics that we really look at, sale, when we give discounts, how things perform, because ultimately a lot of things come back to the law of supply and demand, right. We might have a price in our mind where we think something should be, but that's not the price that the consumer wants to pay for a product. Finding that right price that moves the volume, through discounts, just finding that equilibrium is interesting. And then obviously we talked about reviews a lot, review count and quality. The quality is a big feedback loop that we take very seriously, in terms of work with our quality assurance and customer service teams, to make sure that, we don't have an issue. And we're very proud, that our products have about a 4.7, 4.8 aggregate rating. Stephanie: That's great. Taylor: It's huge. I said at the top of the call, what works for one person doesn't for another. So you might think that a pillow, if left long enough to its own devices might net out around a three. So the fact that, we're at a 4.8 overall, is really encouraging. Stephanie: That's awesome. Do any of your partners right now, not having an eCommerce platform? I'm thinking there must be some people who don't, how do you work differently with them if they only have a retail location versus your eCommerce partners? Taylor: There are, sometimes e-commerce is challenging to jump into. It can seem daunting for folks that aren't doing it, because you're talking about things at the each level versus, big old fat POS, the way you retail used to run, right. You order a bunch to a warehouse and it gets distributed. There's a lot of implications to that, especially when you're talking about commitments for product, with e-commerce and drop ship the risk is inherently on the supplier or the vendor. There's no risk for the retailer, right. The retailers is like, Oh, sure, I'll put it up on my website, but you're inventorying it. Right. You're going to ship it for me, just when I sell it. Taylor: A lot of companies, that's their biggest objection, I think, is, without a hard commitment or a retailer to commit to bulk units upfront, if they don't have that, they won't offer it for e-commerce. They won't bring it in, because they don't have that driver to pull them into it. Because it's very easy, if a retailer's ordering 10,000 units of something, pepper and a few thousand more free commerce while we're at it. But if e-commerce is the first channel you're thinking about, it can be a riskier equation. Stephanie: Do you see that changing going forward? Do you see a lot of these brands thinking about now going online? Taylor: Yeah. I mean, even within Soft-Tex it's changing, right. We have now for, within the past couple of years, now digital first product, whereas, not saying that my e-commerce department was a recycling bin before, but pulling off of the success of things in brick and mortar initially, was really what drove eCommerce previously, which is not necessarily a bad strategy. But I think today, for innovation and new product, more and more stuff, if you're confident in it, you have to commit and leverage on e-commerce. Stephanie: I completely agree. So I saw you guys had some showrooms, I think, for your product. How are you all thinking about that? Taylor: We have permanent showrooms in New York and Las Vegas, and participate in market events where we host, the buyers from many different retail partners, so much of that. The importance of an in person event, has been blown up now through COVID. We went through a virtual market in March, which, obviously is hard to convey everything through a video, but, we had fun doing it and a lot of people really enjoyed it. That whole concept has been a challenge. Right? Being able to find that dedicated time to get in front of your customers and have them, if anything, particularly for stores, it's all about creating an experience to surprise and delight. Taylor: Those buyers really want to feel the product and experience it, to ensure that it's worth, that it will monetize that floor space, that it will take up. With the first touch point being a virtual video, that can be a challenge sometimes, but, we're adapting through virtual markets, mailing samples for, Zoom calls to review them. But it certainly has been different, it looks like, the Las Vegas market furniture show was pushed back.It's likely that, at least for us, it's virtual still, just given everything that's going on. And many of our customers are, you've seen probably the announcements, a lot of travel moratoriums. Some through the end of the year, they've already come out and said so. It's been interesting from that standpoint. I guess from that point- Stephanie: I can imagine. Taylor: I think home products, more folks will spend money, through e-commerce on home and other products, that they're not spending on travel. So, positives for us and for many others. Stephanie: That could be a good opportunity. I'm thinking of, these virtual events right now to sell to buyers. I think, I would just run and jump on the mattress and then just go to sleep and then people would just be interested to see if I'd wake up, that might pull people in. That's how I would sell it. Taylor: That's a very attention grabbing headline, for sure. Stephanie: It'd be like, is she asleep or is she dead, what happened or is she frozen? I don't know. Taylor: That's all right. Maybe we'll use that in our next market video. Stephanie: Great. I can be the star of it, I'm pretty good at sleeping and internet freezing, all of the above I'm good at. Are you thinking about incorporating these virtual strategies going forward? Is it something even when the pandemics over, that you're like, this is working well, we might try this out in the future and use it for, our initial targeting effort to then retarget them to an in person event afterwards. Or how are you thinking about that marketing strategy going forward? Taylor: I think it's something that, we're definitely going to do. It's something that we had been doing, I guess, even before. We would do video walk throughs of our showroom and our virtual experience with an industry publication called, Home Textiles Today. But for the most recent market, we produced the virtual market video ourselves. So, leveraging, either internal or partner capabilities, we still think it's very important to address that. There's always going to be people that can't come to an event, even forget COVID times. So it's always good to have that digital touch point to be able to send to them. And also, to your point, it absolutely can sit on our website and exist as a lead generation tool as well, for people to sign up, to see our latest innovation and then fill out a lead form and then go watch the video. Stephanie: There is definitely a lot of opportunity there, for content that is being created now that maybe wouldn't have been thought of before everything that was going on. Taylor: Right. It's a delicate situation, because a lot of what we produce for a trade show like that, and our competitors, is very future looking and conceptual. There is a level of security. Most of what we sell at a trade show is not yet fully commercialized. Sometimes it is, but in many cases it's like, this is new brand new technology and we're introducing it here. So, there's also a dimension of, yes, we want people to see it, but no, we don't want everyone to see it. Stephanie: That's got to be a little bit, get a little FOMO there and make it a secret. Taylor: That's right. Stephanie: So you have an interesting intersection between B2B and B2C. Is there anything that you wish existed right now in the eCommerce space or technology wise, or you're like, we're struggling with this right now, that you could see getting better in the future or that you hope to get better? Taylor: We have some partners now that help us provide really high quality CGI imagery. Obviously that's been around, but, making that process easier, it takes a lot of work to stage a live photo and video shoot, especially for our product class. That's something that we're looking to get better at, such that we can, as we commercialize new products, we don't have to have crazy processes to stage a photo and video shoot. Certainly there's value to that, and we will continue to use it. We have to use live folks for a lot of things, and models and videos, but for the static, just e-commerce imagery, getting those images up front can really increase our speed to market. Taylor: I would think the other thing, that perhaps we're missing today, is really seeing an aggregation of reviews across platforms. So obviously we see reviews that are syndicated. But we don't always see every review out there. So getting notified when there's a negative review in particular, such that we can see, is it just a one off? Somebody just didn't like it, or, is it the start of a trend of some sort. That happens very seldom with us fortunately, but it's always good to be on the forefront. Taylor: If you think about it, I'm sure we're not alone. A company like Kraft, they have millions of skews probably, having that feedback loop automated is so important. You can't have a person, tracking every review manually, right? So the more automation that's out there, the better. And we've done a really good job, I think, building out partners with the scraping capability to monitor our product pages and also, with advertising as well. Stephanie: Very cool. That's two very useful things. I'm sure a lot of people will be looking for, going forward as well. So we have a couple of minutes left and I do not want to let you get out of the lightning round. So let me know if you're ready and we can start that, Taylor. Taylor: Let's do it. Stephanie: All right. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. It's where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready? Taylor: Yes. Stephanie: All right. First one. What's the next sleep product that you're excited about buying or what are you most excited about right now? Taylor: CBD pillows. Stephanie: Tell me more about that. Taylor: Our CBD, we're really proud of the chemistry. It's microencapsulated into the cover. So with body pressure and as you toss and turn, as you sleep, the capsules break open and release the CBD up through the fabric and it's absorbed in the CBD receptors in the skin. Stephanie: Oh my gosh. That sounds very interesting. I have to check that out. Taylor: Coming, next quarter. Stephanie: Cool. I'll be on the lookout for that. What's up next on your reading list or audible? Taylor: That's a really great question. I don't read as much as I should. Mostly, I'm reader of the news. I would love a good mystery. I don't read enough fiction, sometimes it's good for diversion, especially during COVID times, right? Stephanie: Yep. We'll have to find one for you then. I'll source one and let you know. Taylor: Yes, please. Stephanie: What's up next on your Netflix queue? Taylor: Ozark. We just started, it's been really intense. So my wife as a mental health counselor, and I have some stressful days at work, so we both agreed, it's pretty much a weekend thing, because it's so intense, we can't watch it. Stephanie: Yes. I agree. You got to balance that out, put on a Disney movie or something. Taylor: Exactly. Stephanie: And the last one, what one thing, will have the biggest impact on e-commerce in the next year? Taylor: I am going to say, voice search, I think more and more people will leverage, Siri or Alexa or the Google voice piece, for searching on stuff. I think, particularly, so much of our population is aging. For whatever reason, when I see somebody have a question, I see them using the voice search the most, like my grandparents, that demographic. As it gets better, we'll see it used more and more. Stephanie: I completely agree [inaudible 00:57:15]. To take anymore, too much work. Taylor: I know. That's all right. Stephanie: I like that. Well, Taylor, it's been a blast having you on. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Where can people find out more about you and Soft-Tex International? Taylor: You can check us out on the web at, soft-tex.com. We're also on Facebook and Instagram. You can also check out any of our brands, like SensorPedic, SensorGel or BioPEDIC. For me personally, I'm on LinkedIn and Twitter, Taylor Jones. There's a lot of Taylor Jones's, but I'm out there. Stephanie: We'll link you up. We will find you, don't worry. All right. Thanks so much, Taylor. And we will talk to you soon. Taylor: Okay. Thanks so much, Stephanie. This is great.
Sometimes an opportunity comes along that’s too good to pass up. For Matt Hulett, that happened when a friend approached him about a job at Rosetta Stone. The famous language-learning company was stuck in the analog world and they wanted Matt to be the guy to bring them into the digital future. It was no small feat, but Rosetta Stone has made progress on the digital transformation and Ecommerce journey, including introducing a subscription model and overhauling its tech stack and app. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Matt discusses the challenges of transforming a world-famous brand, including how he chose a free-trial subscription model over going freemium, what it was like to achieve buy-in from investors, and the future of Ecommerce and why he thinks social selling still hasn’t reached its full potential. 3 Takeaways: Even the most well-known brands need to earn their stripes when entering a new space. When a previously offline product starts playing in the digital world, it has to prove to customers that their investment in this new space is worth it AR and VR are tools that Ecommerce platforms will be exploring more in the coming years. If you can provide a more immersive experience, you differentiate yourself from the competition and create more value to your customers Stay true to the brand and don’t try to compete on business models that don’t fit For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome back to Up Next In Commerce, this is Stephanie Postles, co-founder of Mission.org and your host. Today, we're going on a digital transformation journey. Matt, how's it going? Matt: Oh, really good. A little cooped up here like we all are, but I'm hanging in there. How are you doing? Stephanie: I'm doing well. Yeah, same hot, very hot. It's 92 here and the places in Silicon Valley usually don't have air conditioning so just a little sweaty in the studio. Stephanie: So I must admit, I have not checked in on Rosetta Stone in a while and when I started browsing through you guys' website, I was like, "Whoa, you all have come a long way from CD-ROMs and everything that I was used to when I was growing up and thought of Rosetta Stone." So I'd love to hear a little bit about what brought you to Rosetta Stone and your background before you joined. Matt: Yeah. It's interesting, just before I dive in, it's rare to join a company where everyone knows your brand and your product like just about everyone in the United States does Rosetta Stone. Matt: And so actually, it's an interesting story because there's not many ed tech companies that are a public companies, you could count them on your hand and the company has been a public company for over 10 years. Matt: It's been around for 27 years and it's a really interesting backstory on how the company was founded and so some of that came into play with what got me attracted to the business. Matt: So a friend of mine who's a recruiter talked to me about this opportunity and I typically do restarts, pivots as they are [crosstalk] for startups. Matt: And even the startups that I join are typically pivots. So there's kind of this pivot transformation story that typically is a draw for me for whatever weird reason why I attracted to these things and when he said, "Oh, it's Rosetta Stone." Matt: I was like, "Oh, the CD-ROM company, the yellow box." I was like, "Yeah, but they're trying to be digital." I'm like, "They're not digital yet?" Matt: And so the draw for me was typically, I take on jobs and assignments that are very difficult where I have to either completely change the strategy or get new financing on a new idea. Matt: There's generally something really, really wrong and Rosetta Stone was so intriguing to me on the surface for the intellectual reasons why they brand the product, people love it. Matt: It's not one of those iconic brands that people are afraid of. It's not like saying, "Matt, do you want to restart Myspace? I was like, "Oh my God, it's Rosetta Stone, of course." Stephanie: That's your next project. Myspace. Matt: Yeah. Stephanie: Just bring it back. Matt: Making it great again. Too soon. But what personally drew me, that's kind of the intellectual business level, what personally drew me into the company was and is the fact that I'm dyslexic, and a third of the revenue for Rosetta Stone is actually one of the fastest growing. Matt: We sell software into K-12 schools primarily in United States that help kids learn how to read, better learn how to read which is a problem. I've seen my own youngest son struggle with his dyslexia as well. Matt: And so on a personal level, it's very emotional when you can kind of tie that emotional tie to a company to its mission and vision. It's really intriguing. So it's been one of the best career decisions I've ever made. Stephanie: Yeah, that's great. Were there any universal truth that you discovered as you are kind of pivoting from different companies and trying out different roles and turning them around? Was there anything like yeah, universal truths that you saw while doing that? Matt: Well, that's a great question. Yeah, a couple things. One is it's so crazy to me, when I step into a company how basically from week one, maybe day one, no one really understands how the business works, like truly understands it. Matt: The key insight, what makes the business special, what can you do to apply capital or a time or attention to improve your strategy or your outcomes? It's just so, it's so weird when you go to a business that's operating, and maybe these are the only businesses I look at where it's not quite tight inside around the strategy and what makes the kind of the economic engine run. I think that's the biggest one that I see off the top of my head. Stephanie: Yeah, that's interesting. I can definitely see a lot of companies struggling there especially as they grow bigger and they have many business units and everyone's kind of chasing a different path, I can see people losing sight of what's important and what's actually driving this business like you're talking about and making it profitable or maybe it's not, but it's the lost leader, something that we still need. So yeah, that's really interesting. Stephanie: So when you joined Rosetta Stone, it hadn't been digital. I mean, only a few years, right? I think it stopped, maybe it didn't stop doing CDs, but it went online. Wasn't it in 2013? Matt: Yeah, I would say it was like half digital. What that means is we were selling one of the most expensive products in the App Store at the time and we didn't really have the concept of really effective sales funnels, a well thought out pricing and packaging strategy based on the type of customers that we're going after. Matt: We didn't have a lot of mobile native features and capability. So I would say it was kind of a port of the CD product in the mobile environment and that was kind of the approach. Matt: And also the approach was really not to focus on the consumer business. So not only did we make this kind of business model and digital transformation move, but also when I came into the business, the big focus was for the language side of the business was to focus on enterprise customers. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Matt: I thought that was actually the wrong move because enterprise is difficult, it's a smaller market, yet consumers where everyone knows Rosetta Stone, everyone likes the product. They actually remember the CD products in many cases and want to use them again, but they want to use them on your phone. Matt: So I thought, "Well heck, everyone knows who I am from a brand awareness perspective, I'll have an easier time deploying less capital against the consumer space and enterprise space." So there was not only just a business model shift, but also a strategy shift. Stephanie: Did you end up sticking with that business model shift to focus on enterprises or did you kind of make it a mix of 50/50? Matt: Oh, good question. So it is about 50/50 today, although consumers now are growing fast. I mean, we're a public company so I can only speak to our public company numbers, but in Q4 of last year, we grew the consumer business about 20% year over year and this is from a business step was growing at single digit. Matt: And then our last reporting earnings quarter, we grew the consumer business around 40% year to year and the enterprise business has struggled more primarily because of the C-19 impacts this year because obviously, we're in a never before seen macro economic headwind, but generally, it's the right decision to make and I view the enterprise business as more of an extension of what we want to do for all adult learners versus creating as a separate entity. Matt: That's a long answer to say consumer turned out to be the right move. It was not clear when I joined the company that even joining Rosetta Stone was a smart move. Matt: I had a lot of folks that I know, acquaintances more so than friends say, "Good luck. There's a lot of error in this company." And I just think it's just a really exciting problem and it's a ... Sorry to keep going because I've had maybe 80 cups of coffee today and just, I don't know. Stephanie: No, keep it up. Matt: It's like the two big verticals that are the most expensive that increased their prices to consumers over the last 50 years are healthcare and education and they have the lowest penetration of digital, and like, "Well, those are hard problems to solve. Why wouldn't you want to be involved?" So anyways, I think it's really fun. Stephanie: Yeah, that's fascinating. So when you came in, what were expectations for your role? What did people want you to do? Did you have a 90-day plan? How did that look? Matt: Oh yeah, if anyone thinks these are scripted questions, these are not scripted questions. These are very good questions. So during the interview process and I'm sure you've had this experience before, when you meet with somebody in a company, you're like, "I'm going to do whatever it takes to get this job." Stephanie: Yup. Matt: And I had one of those experiences with Rosetta Stone. I knew I wanted this job and so I came into maybe the first or second interview with a 90-day plan before I even started, this is the first or second interview. Matt: And the 90-day plan did change slightly because then I knew a little something, but I've done enough of these transformation projects, these pivots where I knew there's these basic building blocks in a format, I have a toolbox of things that I do that really didn't change. Matt: The inevitable strategy didn't know before I started, I didn't know the team members, were they the right fit or not, I didn't know any of that, but the basic building blocks I definitely put together. Stephanie: Got it. So what was on your roadmap, did you have to think about how to re-platform to support your commerce journey and shifting into enterprise and then consumer? What was on that plan that you laid out? Matt: Yeah, and I kind of learned some of this years ago when I was ... Sometimes I think my best work, I can't speak for you or anybody else, but my best work is when I'm completely ignorant of the challenges in front of me and so when I was younger, I worked for ... Well, actually, we sold our company to Macromedia and they had a division called Shockwave. Matt: And Macromedia at that point was not bought by Adobe, and this is Web 1.0 bubble, so I'm dating myself which is not legal in Washington State and these jokes have all jail time. Stephanie: [crosstalk] get us in trouble. Matt: I know. And so we step back through that experience and I learned a lot from the Macromedia Adobe kind of M&A folks about how to approach a problem. And that plus some other work experience over time really got me to the point of thinking through things from I call it the insight, the math in the heart. Matt: And no one framed it that way to me, but that's kind of how I framed it and so when I think about the insight, I think about the addressable market, the position that we are in the marketplace, so supplier's demand competitors. Matt: Then I think about what value we're driving to consumers, what value are you driving to your suppliers if you have them. And then what are the decisions you're going to make based on the strategy that you're laying out for the best outcome? Matt: So you want to grow market share, you want to grow revenue share. Do you not have enough capital? Do you actually need to raise capital and buy companies in order to get size and scale that's the outcome? Matt: So it's kind of a process that I've done over time and I want you to figure all that out, and it takes a while, maybe 90 days, maybe a little bit more, then it's really like how do you put a process together and dashboard is a little trite, but how do you actually run the business so you understand what things are working, the unit economics, what key layers of the business are you looking at, and then figure out an organization to support that and then you find the right team. Matt: And it sounds kind of exhaustive in terms of an answer, but I think too many people come in situations and they say, "Okay, I started this job, I got to restart it. What's my team look like?" Matt: And it's always I think the tail wagging the proverbial pivot dog and I typically, you can find startup people that are good at startups and sometimes, you find startup people that are good at later stage. Matt: You can find every dynamic possible, but until you do the work on, "I need this type of person for this type of growth stage, it's the right person the right time." Matt: If you don't do the work upfront, then you end up having a team that isn't the right team for the outcome that you want. Stephanie: Yup. Yeah, I've heard ... I forgot who said that startup advice where a lot of startups especially around here, are looking to hire that VIP level person, you have to pay a bunch of money to and someone was making the point of like, "Well, will they help you right now where you're at?" Stephanie: And it's okay to kind of grow out of people, but it's not okay to hire someone who's way above that actually can't get their hands dirty and do the work of what needs to be done right now. Matt: That's right. There's lots of people that have different approaches. I actually like to be pretty data driven in terms of how I think about people so I use like employee satisfaction studies and I use different personality profile tests. Matt: Obviously, you're not trying to like ... Hopefully, no one is like applying an AI filter looking at my reactions on this live video, but you can go overboard with data, but I do feel like you need to get the right alchemy talent for your team. Matt: And I've made mistakes where you have that senior person that doesn't want to get their hands dirty when you're like, "Look, I'm in build mode, I'm painting the fence, and I'm the CEO and I'm painting the fence and then I'm talking to the neighbors and driving Uber ..." Matt: The alchemy of that is hard to do, but that's a long winded answer to say there's there's a process and I think it's figuring out what's special about your company, how do you improve it, how do you run it? How did the inputs become the outputs and then what team is required for that? Stephanie: Yeah, very cool. So with the company having to shift as they did to go online and create mobile experiences, what kind of challenges did you see come up when you guys were going through that shift? Matt: Yeah, so there's multiple. So I always think about kind of the four constituents in most businesses, its investors, its customers, it's your internal employees and society. Matt: Not in that order. The order depends on lots of different things and so when I kind of checked down all those boxes, I think the big one, the first one I pick is investors because you're having to explain a model where the CD is purchased up front, it's very expensive versus you don't get all the revenue upfront, you amateurize that revenue and recognize it over 12, 24 whatever terms of the span of the subscription. Matt: So it's a change in terms of how you're reporting revenue, explain it in a consistent way, explaining the new metrics of subscription is challenged one I think from an investor perspective explaining why we have a language business, the Lexia business that I mentioned that focused on literacy is a 20 to 25% growth business, it's growing pretty nicely and language was declining. Matt: So then explaining to investors why do you still have this business and why are you changing the direction from enterprise to consumer, I think for employees. Matt: I always like to think through the employee piece, get the employee piece right, you can do anything and so getting the employees reason to believe, I was the first president to actually run the language business. Matt: It had multiple owners of the P&L and I was the first person probably since the CEO, we had one CEO that that started Rosetta Stone and took it public 20 plus years ago. Matt: I was the first single leader to ... I also tried creating a reason to believe a compelling vision, mission and culture and then when I think through kind of the customer piece, it wasn't as hard to be honest because there was so much brand equity that was good brand equity that doing little bit of things in a way that was kind of planful and data driven actually generated a lot of great outpouring of support. Matt: So the customer side of what we were doing wasn't as difficult as I would have thought and we also had an enterprise business that had already integrated things like digital tutoring with the software and demanding Fortune 500 companies. Matt: So there was some DNA in the company where we knew, "Boy, you can earn every interaction with every interaction." So that was that piece and then later, I started building more hooks into society as part of that and so I kind of view it as a self-fulfilling positive effect of you take care of your employees, they take care of your customers, the investors get great outcomes, and society benefits and you keep kind of turning this crank and you start getting much more reflective about it. Matt: And it does have, it does pay off. It takes I think, in general, I think people brag about how fast they can turn around companies. I don't know why people brag about that. Matt: I don't know, my experience is two years and taking a business from bad to like growing, at least, believing in itself is very hard and so I look at those four factors and I think the society piece is one that's super important that a lot of companies pay lip service to and there's a lot of discussion especially in Silicon Valley about some large companies that are controversial there. Matt: But I'll give you a for instance why if you can tie together the vision, mission, culture values to society, how that's self-reinforcing, we had a obviously horrible global pandemic that we're still pulling ourselves out of and everyone's kind of living through this experience at the same time. Matt: And we basically took just two days to decide that we're going to give away our software for free for three months for students. And we run a current business and selling software to enterprises and adults and we said, "You know what? We know that parents are actually going through hell because there's kind of a make your own adventure right now and schooling." Matt: [crosstalk] and I can feel it myself and we are like, "Oh my God, this is so stressful and the anxiety I heard from our own employees about it was overwhelming and I'm asking them to work harder." Matt: And so we said, "You know what? We're going to give away three months subscription and we're going to just do it and you just have to ... The parents have to put their email address in the school and that's it." Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That's awesome. Matt: And we're not a free ... We're a paid subscription product. We're not, there are other competitors that have a freemium model and as you know, changing models or mixed models generally don't have a long history of working and we said, "You know what? We're just going to do it." Matt: And so the team decided to do it, I just said, "Yeah, let's do something." They said, "Here's exactly what we're going to do." And it was live, and then the amount of positive benefits, we got that from pure impressions. Matt: It actually helped our adult business to ... Adult language learning business. That's just one quick example of when those things all start working together. Matt: It's transparent, it's engaged and it's consistent. It becomes kind of operating leverage as well. So it's fun. It's fun to see how that work. Stephanie: Yeah, that's great. It's definitely a good reminder of do good things and good things will come back to you. Did you have any struggles with maybe like surges and people logging in and trying to get on the platform that maybe you hadn't experienced in the past? Because it was maybe a bit more predictable since it wasn't free? Matt: That's a really good question. Not on the system, the system's basis, but certainly from a support basis because we had a lot of, we outsource most of our customer support, and we debated for a while whether we we're going to continue phone support, we still do and I still debate that one, but a lot of our service providers were in outside United States and they all of a sudden had to work from home and then some facilities shut down and so we are just constantly playing whack-a-mole with our support organizations. Matt: And then also, I would say to our frontline heroes were our tutors and we employ a lot of highly educated tutors that have degrees in language learning and they all work from home primarily, they're part-time employees. Matt: And they turn out to be like our heroes because they took some support calls in addition to one-on-one digital tutoring. And so there was unique ways in which we had to adapt with the demand, but I would say more on the demand side regarding the support elements and we definitely saw a surge do the work from home trend as well, but that didn't impact kind of service levels and general software. Stephanie: Okay, cool. And I could see it being a bit tricky to develop and maintain a platform that has so many different layers to the business. I'm thinking about the enterprises who are going on there and buying seats for employees, and I'm thinking about the school is going on there for students, and then the individual consumer like me who's maybe like, "Hey, I'm going to Italy and I want to learn Italian." Stephanie: I don't know, but like it seems like it would be pretty tricky creating a platform that does all of that. How do you think about creating that so everyone gets a good experience and also being able to monitor and measure it in a successful way? Matt: Yeah, I've never seen the complexity Rosetta Stone before at the smallest scale, but what I mean by that is we have three businesses and we're a small cap public company. So that's unusual and the business was run on the language side ... Well, let me step back. Matt: So the literacy business is a business that was acquired seven, eight years ago and that's a 30-year-old company that was acquired, it's called Lexia and it works as a distinct operating unit from my business and is run by an awesome gentleman. Matt: And I use that word loosely and if he's listening, sorry Nick, he's a great guy and so passionate and his team is so good and it's ... I've never seen before a product that's built with like academic research combined with awesome data product engineering that gets results. Matt: It's just, I've never seen anything like it and they had the time to build this product over these many years, it was always digital first and so they're run separately. Matt: My language business was run on two different tech stacks. Actually, it was like five and when I started, I was like, "Well, wait a minute, why is this product that looks the same running off this underlying architecture? Why don't we move everything to react?" Matt: As I kind of went through this morass of tech stacks, it was a lot of M&A that generate a lot of complexity and a lot of tech debt. And so I would say majority of our innovation was not innovation, it was just keeping these old tech stacks up. Matt: So from an R&D perspective, in addition to all the other complexities we just talked about in this interview, I was trying to grow the consumer business, trying to change the business model, swapping out new team members for more growth orientation and doing a huge tech migration. Matt: And the complexity around that is mind boggling. We finished that late last year like de-flashing like old weird services, moving to a services architecture. All that stuff we end up doing and inevitably, the goal is to have one learner experience, just like you use Google, Google Mail for your enterprise, or personal. Matt: There were some admin privileges and other things that are associated in the back end, but in general, the product kind of looks and feels the same and that's, the inevitable goal which we're very close to execute on. Stephanie: Got it. Were there any pitfalls that you experienced when going through all those different pieces to the business or anything where you're like, "When we implemented this, or we move to this type of tech stack, this is when we saw a lot of improvements with conversions or anything around the consumer or enterprise business." Matt: Yeah, just on conversions, yeah, one thing on that is interesting is the amount of improvement we saw just with like putting different team members with specific goals and this is going to sound kind of crazy because everyone is going to like, "Yeah, he's talking about agile." Matt: Just getting very specific about areas in the funnel to improve and how to adjust the trial experience at certain times, and experiencing and showing customers different things at different times. Matt: That had like a crazy amount of upside for us. And I would say less architecturally that we see an improvement other than we had just less stuff that wasn't moving the innovation forward, but just these small things have big impacts and get and I must say like if any one of my team members is listening to this and say, "You haven't solved all that yet is." Matt: It's very difficult to take a business that is so complex, and then all sudden kind of say, "Look, we're going to reduce all the complexity, networks are innovating again." I think there's still a challenge of like, faster, smaller teams, we use a safe framework which is kind of scrum like. Matt: I don't think we figured all that out yet, but it's way different than when I came in and felt very waterfally to me. We're going to issue a press release, what this release is going to look like in one year and we're going to work back from that, I'm like, "Yeah, that's very Amazon." Stephanie: Yeah, yup. Matt: I'm like, "Well, how do you even know this is the right thing if you don't have any customer?" So there was there's a whole evolution of trying things, validating them, making sure that you're deploying enough capital against that makes sure it gets a fair shake, but not too much where you're, you're in over your head and we've had some public black eyes on some of our tests, and I don't care. Matt: We were trying some things internationally with tutoring, it didn't work out, it didn't have the capital honestly to support some of it and I kind of feel like those are good experiences to understand whether you're going to invest more in something or not. Matt: And so I think the fact that we can start doing those things now because we simplified the platform or if possible. Yeah, I think it's hard to say no to things and yes to things. And some of that discipline is easier when you're a startup because you just don't have people to outsource to. Stephanie: Yup. There's always an excuse. Nope, no one else can help us with that. Can't do it. Matt: Yeah. There's never like I'm a product manager by training and I've used every product manager tool under the sun and now I've kind of just resulted in my using Google Sheets again and what I'm trying to triage like epics and themes and stories, and I still like to play around with those types of planning elements, I just always look at all these people in these points available. I'm like, "You guys have no idea the luxury we have." Stephanie: I'm sure they like hearing that. Matt: Yeah, there's nothing more pure than a startup and it's like five people, five engineers and like a product manager that codes and the seat goes, doing UI, UX and it's ... Stephanie: Yeah, that's really fun. So you mentioned earlier a free trial which I actually went on Rosetta's website and I ended up going through the entire trial of learning Spanish. How did you all think about creating that free trial and actually convincing people to do it? Stephanie: Because a lot of times, I think I would see something like that and I'd be like, "Oh, that's too much time and I don't want to start that process right now." Stephanie: And I eagerly jumped in and started doing the lesson plan because it was engaging and fun, and it kind of felt like the real world with the person walking around and you're stopping and talking to them. How did you think about creating that? So it actually converted users into paying customers? Matt: Oh, thanks for saying that. Yeah, I think we have a long ways to go. I think in terms of what we could be doing is we're just, I just feel like we're sprinting to the start line because of the late start, but I think the core piece is for most companies and they think about like what business do you want to be in a lot of people will default to like whatever their venture capitalists said they should do from their other companies they manage or whether they read on TechCrunch or whatever, or listen to on this program is I think you have to be very specific once you figure it out the approach to the product that you're going after. Matt: Are you going to be freemium? Are you going to be paid trial? Or are you going to be for lack of a better term I call it force-trial or upfront trial and there's elements of this that change, there's kind of nuances. Because that's more of a nuanced discussion is the freemium players in the language space for instance would be Duolingo. Matt: How do you get the most amount of MAUs, Monthly Active Users and get enough of them to convert? Or the Spotify example, and you're using basically cap ex as cap, you're using your R&D to drive user and usage and that's kind of Slack-like. Matt: Slack is slightly different obviously. Then the paid trial is, "Well, I have enough of something that's good that I want a lot of people to use it, but I want the conversion to be pretty good." Matt: And so for the first one with freemium, you have to say, "Okay, it's going to be so fun and compelling and I'm going to actually invest in growth that isn't there yet because I think I have scale effects —I can crowd out everyone else." Matt: The second one is I actually have a pretty good product, I need enough people to use it and then feel like I use it enough to want to use more of it. And that's what I decided to do and I'll explain why. Matt: And then on the upfront paid thing is typical like for low ACV, Annual Contract Value SaaS companies you'd see, please just call my ... Just call us and we'll walk you through it with one of my sales reps. Matt: And we'll do a guided tour through the demo or whatever and the decision why we did the second one was it was a good decision and is people knew enough about what the Rosetta Stone brand was like that we knew people would want to try it and that for people that remember what it was like, they definitely would want to use it again and we felt like the pinch was more compelling if we gave everyone a little taste of that. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Matt: We could have said, "Please pay up front." And we're the gold standard and giddy up, but we felt like we needed to earn our stripes a little bit into proving to people that we weren't just like a port of a CD product. Matt: And so that's why we decided to do that and we've played along different roads before. We've never done full freemium and I would argue at this point in the market, we would not be better served to do that because Duolingo has done a really good job of growing their monthly active users and have built some advantages there and we're not trying to play that game. Matt: I'm trying to play the game of being a really good, effective language learning product and I'm trying to set the tone in the trial experience that when you're using the product, it's not going to be like a game. Matt: It's not going to be like Clash of Clans. I guess Clash of Clans is a bad example, or the jewel or like Candy Crush I guess is what I was thinking of. Matt: Every day, I collect coins and I'm collecting coins to benefit my gameplay. It's kind of how I think about Duolingo a little bit and it's ... I think they're masterful of what they do, but I think they're designed to do something different than what I'm trying to do. Matt: And if you're serious about learning a language, and you stick to what I'm doing and you do a couple tutor sessions that we offer, you're going to get there. Matt: And so the business model and what we're trying to do in terms of posture, not market share, but revenue share really drove kind of the philosophy on the trial experience. Stephanie: Yeah, it definitely, it felt more serious especially where you could speak in the language and it would tell you I guess if the tonality was right, and if you were saying it correctly, and it would keep kind of advising you on it, once I saw it had that feature, that to me was when I was like, "Whoa, this is really serious, and I better be ready to learn this language because it's not like a game, it's not just saying random words." Stephanie: You're actually kind of conversating and having to hear yourself which I think is really important. That seems like a big first step to getting people to try it. Matt: It's an interesting observation because we are very oral first in our pedagogy. We want people to engage with the product and speaking is actually just in general a really good way to learn and then the key outcome of speaking well is not sounding stupid. Matt: And so if you're trying to learn a language, you want to sound somewhat authentic. So for Rosetta Stone, I would say, for anyone that really wants to learn a language, we'll get you there, but if you're just kind of trying to build like, it's like counting your calories kind of. Matt: If you wanted to do something like that, then I would say, pick a freemium product over ours and yeah, it's not like super intense scary, but it's like, "Yeah, you better do your lessons before you do your group tutoring session." Stephanie: Yeah. No, that's, I mean, that's great to incentivize people like you're paying for this, you might as well get the best out of it. Is there, so one thing I was thinking when I was interacting with the free trial was, "Wow, this would be really cool if there was like a virtual world where you could be walking around and talking to other students who are learning." Stephanie: Are you all thinking about any technologies like that to implement or is there anything on your radar where you're like, "We're moving in this direction or planning on trying this tech out or this digital platform out?" Matt: Yeah, we've played with VR in the past. I've been kind of like bearish every time someone says, "Let's go into VR." I'm like, "This is [crosstalk 00:39:27]." Stephanie: It's a hot word for a while. VR everything, it doesn't matter to the problem. Matt: Yeah, I know and I have a lot of friends. One really good friend of ours, she has a pretty successful, his definition of success and I think it is honestly successful VR games company, but like I have a lot of other friends that went into VR that gaming or especially verticals that just had a hell of a time just because there's not enough handsets that are available. Matt: Well, we have dabbled in in terms of immersive experience. I think what you're saying is is there a way to since we're immersive, use technology to make it even more immersive and what I really want to do is enable more AR in our experience. Matt: And we have like a little feature called seek and speak where you can ... It's like an almost a sample app where you can use your phone, we use ARKit to do a treasure hunt for things around your house like fruits, objects around your house and incorporate that in your speech practice. Matt: And I always thought that was like a really cool thing for us to expand into and if we ever get the Apple visor, some AR HoloLens or whatever, it'd be cool to start interacting with your world around you, not just with translation, but also to see if you can actually interact with folks that are kind of ambient around that experience. Matt: I personally and maybe this we're going too deep here, but I always thought it'd be cool if like I can visit another country and just decide how much of the spoken language am I going to generate myself, how much am I going to have my device do it because I'm not going to spend the time. Matt: And then how can I phone a friend? How could I have my tutor or my guide integrated experience where I'm going to sound really authentic if I do this or here's an experience that I could do here. Matt: I think the goal for language learning inevitably is different based on where you are in the world, but if you're from the United States or one of ... Maybe some European countries like the UK, it's kind of like this is a cool way to get engaged with a culture. Matt: If you're not in those countries, learning English primarily is a necessity and so I think some of these AR ideas that you just mentioned would be really good and speaking more frequently to other folks that are even not native speakers, but just trying to generate language is a very good way to teach. Matt: We have a product coming out called Rosetta Stone English this summer, literally like a couple months and it is a version of Rosetta Stone for EL kids or English Learners K through six. Matt: And this product is an oral first product and this blew me away. The stat if you're trying to teach a kid English primarily from lots of different countries is written communication. Matt: It's like 20% spoken and so our product is like 70, 80% spoken because this ... And so it's just really interesting. What could you do that's more immersive using AR or VR? Matt: I think there's, I'm with you. I think there's a lot of cool things you could do and I think you could enhance the travel experience quite a bit. I think you could enhance the young learner experience quite a bit. I think there's so many cool things you could do. Stephanie: Yeah, I completely agree and there seems like a lot of opportunities there. So what kind of disruptions do you see coming to the world of ecommerce and online learning? Matt: Yeah, it's a weird market and it's weird because like depending on what we're talking about in terms of overall commerce, it's like a $6 trillion education market, 6 trillion. Matt: Consumer is probably the largest out of that and then obviously, there's higher ed, there's middle school, high school, there's elementary, and then there's adult education and then where it's coming from, is the consumer paying, is the government paying. Matt: And so take all this aside, less than 10% is digital right now and I think there's going to be this massive realization and awakening because of the C-19 pandemic of everything that I do has to be digital. Matt: And it's not that we're replacing teachers, it's how do we integrate digital curriculum and conductivity between the teacher and the student, how do I build a data layer that personalized that experience. Matt: I think that can happen between, language learning, it can happen in lots of different curriculum like reading and writing. And not having a digital enabled kind of curriculum I think is going to be like if you don't have a solution for that, if you're an education system, if you're a college, if you're whatever, and if you don't offer these types of products in the future, you're going to go the way the dodo bird. Matt: I think higher education has a wake up call. J.Crew, I like J.Crew, they're in bankruptcy now. Hertz, I used Hertz. They're in bankruptcy now and I think there's this massive pull forward right now that's happening because the product that we've been using in education hasn't changed in like 40, 50 years. Stephanie: Yup. Matt: It's the same problem. If I time warp myself from 50 years ago into most classrooms, it would look the same. Stephanie: Yup. Yeah, I've always kind of thought that a disruption was definitely coming around higher education, but this seems to have moved everything forward by many years and especially around K through 12 where that felt like it would be much harder to change. Stephanie: For colleges, it's like, "Okay, now it's changing pretty quickly with all the boot camps coming out and company's not really always requiring degrees, at least in this area." Stephanie: But K through 12 felt hard to change and it feels like this is going to be an interesting forcing function now that like you said, a lot of kids are home and parents are figuring out how to be a part of their education more in the online learning process. Stephanie: It just seems like there's going to be a lot of opportunities that come up because of this. Matt: Yeah, I agree. And I also think that now I'm sounding like the tech utilitarian, but I would say that ed tech and I'm not from the ed tech space, but I am in it now. Matt: I would say that the ed tech providers that ... We're now entering the third wave I guess is how I think about it. The second wave which is typical of most other businesses that you and I have seen before, like ecommerce or sales ops tools, now you can talk about those and go, "Remember Omniture and it was badass?" Matt: Yes, it's now part of Adobe Cloud Matt is when you talk about these generational shifts in how we think about things, I think a lot of the ed tech players, people who are selling software to schools or directly to the parents or kids or whomever, they've definitely oversold or oversold the efficacy of some of those products. Matt: And when I talk about digital transformation, I'm not talking about the ability to do things self serve, and have the teacher look at some flat experience. Matt: Right now and this is not against teachers. Teachers, they're like little mini MacGyvers to me. I mean, they're like doing amazing things streaming together curriculum on the fly. Stephanie: Yeah, both my sister and my mom are teachers and I do not know how they're doing it and how they had to pivot so quickly to being in the classroom and my sister is actually a ESL, English as a Second Language teacher. Yeah. Matt: Oh my gosh, okay. Stephanie: Yup, because I have a twin sister and she always tells me about the difficulties that she's experiencing right now trying to bring her students online and develop curriculums online and a lot of them don't have internet access and it's just very interesting seeing how they kind of develop workarounds to make it work for their students. Matt: Yeah, my criticism of education isn't the teacher clearly, a lot of it is kind of the cost basis in the bureaucracy and when I talk about ed tech, it's like I think it comes down to and this is not a Matt Hulett Rosetta Stone specific thing is educating a group of young individuals or even old individuals, it doesn't matter the same way at the same time makes zero sense. Matt: And so building in the ability for the student to do some things themselves, having a data layer so that a teacher understands the areas in which that student is struggling, and so that the instruction becomes very personalized. Matt: It is generally what I'm talking about and it's right now, I think we have a billion and a half young kids around the world that don't have access to computers. Matt: And if they do have access to computers, they're scanning in their Math homework and sending it to a teacher. Well, who knows if I struggle for five minutes on this problem versus long division versus multiplication? The teacher doesn't know. Matt: And so I think the ed tech software that I'm more in favor of what I'm speaking about is how do you build curriculum-based, efficacy-based software, not unlike what your mom and your sister think about because they have degrees and know how to actually educate someone, they're not software [inaudible 00:49:10]. Matt: And if they're wanting to provide very explicit instruction, my guess is they're really swamped. They've got other things they need to do, they're probably paying for materials that are [crosstalk 00:49:22]. Stephanie: Yup. Matt: And so I think about all these stresses and we're asking them to provide excellent education, it's just, it's too much. And so I really feel like this third wave of technology, and I think it's going to happen is it's going to integrate this we call AI and HI, how do you integrate the best of what software can do and integrate that into the lesson planning of the teacher versus let's try to create AI for the sake of AI and disintermediate teachers which I think is ridiculous is and that's what I'm talking about. Matt: Because I see a lot of tech companies playing the game of ed tech versus education companies that are actually trying to be technology companies. Matt: I think the latter will be the software and the providers that will end up actually being the most successful and the most adopted, but obviously, I'm passionate about this because I've seen this with our Lexia software. Matt: And we have like 16 plus academic studies that show that the software works and I'm like, "How is this possible that two-thirds of kids still today by the time they're a third grade or reading below their grade level that continues through eighth grade?" Matt: Two-thirds are reading below level. How is this possible? And I'm not here to tell my own software. I'm just like, "Why is this possible?" Well, it turns out we don't train teachers to teach kids how to read. Matt: There's an approach to it, and we don't do real time assessments of kids struggling, the teachers swamped, they don't know what's going on. Matt: Anyways, I could talk about this for hours, but I do think there's this world where at some point, the $6 trillion business of educating all these kids and adults and young adults will be digitized. Matt: And I think that will be an interesting space. Ed tech is that one space where most VCs wouldn't want to touch. Stephanie: Yup. Yeah, I know. It's a hard ... I mean, health care and education. It's a hard space. So yeah, I completely agree. I know we're running into time and I want to make sure we can jump into the lightning round. Matt: Okay. Stephanie: Is there any other high level thoughts that you want to share before we jump into that? Matt: Nope. I think I hit the verbose button when I answered that question, but I didn't realize you have some familiar background on education which got me going so I [crosstalk] Stephanie: Yeah, no, yeah. Matt: I will be [crosstalk] lightning round. Stephanie: Yeah, we need a whole other podcasts where we can just talk education stuff and I can have my family be the call-ins and they can give us a little advice and ideas. Stephanie: All right, so the lightning round brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud is where I ask a few questions and you have one minute or less Matt to answer. Are you ready? Matt: I'm ready. Stephanie: All right. What's up next on your reading list? Matt: Words that matter. I don't know the author. Stephanie: Cool. What's up next on your podcast list? Matt: This podcast of course. Stephanie: Hey, good. That's the right answer. Matt: And then Masters of Scale. There's a new podcast actually with one of my competitors from Duolingo. Stephanie: Oh-oh. Very cool. Yeah, that's a good one. What's up next on your Netflix queue? Matt: God, it is embarrassing. Do I have to say it? Stephanie: Yes you do. Matt: Too Hot to Handle. Stephanie: Oh my gosh. I can't believe you're watching that. I'm judging a little bit, but I've also seen a few episodes. So if you were to choose a company right now to turn around, not Rosetta Stone, some brand new company, not a brand new one, but maybe one that's in the industry right now where you're like, "I could jump in and help." What company would you choose? Matt: That's a great question. WeWork. Stephanie: Woo, that would be an interesting one to try and turn around. Matt: Yeah. Stephanie: All right, next one. What app are you using on your phone right now that's most helpful? Matt: I listen to a lot of podcast, I love Overcast. I don't know if anyone ever mentions that. I just love it because I listen to things 2x. Stephanie: Yup, yeah, I know. I agree. I like that app as well. What language are you or your family working on right now to learn? Matt: Well, it's funny. I'm kind of barely competent in Spanish. My 16-year-old is actually I would say pretty intermediate level Spanish and my 10-year-old is oddly learning Japanese. Stephanie: Oh, go. Go him. A boy, right? Yeah, that's great. All right and our last, a little bit more difficult question. What's up next for ecommerce professionals? Matt: Oh boy, ecommerce professionals. I think to me it's a lot of the same topics in ecommerce have been discussed for so many years and I think that the interesting one is how do we actually make social commerce really good. Matt: And I think I spend a lot of time just, I'm not serious with it, but playing with like, TikTok and Twitch, and I think there's some elements to the social selling piece that I think are super interesting that no one's really figured out and I buy actually a lot of products off Instagram, and it's still too much friction and it's not quite working right for me. Matt: So I think there's some ... How do you integrate ecomm and then TikTok in a way that's native to that audience? I think there's some things there. Stephanie: Oh, that's a good answer. Well, Matt, this has been yeah, such a fun interview. Where can people find out more about you and Rosetta Stone? Matt: Rosettastone.com for the company and I'm matt_hulett on Twitter and it was a pleasure to talk to you today. Stephanie: All right, thanks so much. Matt: Thank you.
If you think back to just a few years ago, when someone asked you to name a company that delivered food, you’d probably only be able to name a few pizza joints or the local Chinese food place. But today, the world has shifted and online food delivery is a booming business. Last year alone, Grubhub sold $6 billion worth of food, and the company delivers more than 500,000 meals per day. So how did Grubhub enable this massive shift to digital meal purchasing? On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, we welcomed Alex Weinstein, the SVP of Growth at Grubhub, and he explained to us exactly how the company has been able to become a market mover. From the initial education process to then focusing on customer retention, Alex and his team have been deep in the weeds of it all, and they have built a culture of experimentation, data analytics and a focus on ROI to stay ahead of the curve. Alex explains it all here. 3 Takeaways: Measurement and incrementality are important. You have to understand whether or not where you’re putting your dollars is making a difference, and sometimes the answer will surprise you True experimentation is necessary to create new methods of measurement, marketing strategies and growth opportunities. So the question you have to ask as a leader is how can you create incentives to allow people to take risks and learn? The time is now to learn about the newly-online customers that have trickled into your business due to COVID-19. In understanding their needs, you will be able to ensure retention and set yourself up for the new reality we live in For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome to Up Next in Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Today, my stomach is rumbling, because we're talking all things Grubhub. Alex, welcome. Alex: Thank you for having me. Stephanie: Yeah, thanks so much for coming on the show. I just pulled up the app earlier to be like, "What should I have for lunch today?" Because it's 12:00, and it's time to order something. Alex: What did you end up ordering? Stephanie: I'm looking at pad Thai right now, we have a really good Thai place down the street. That's usually my go-to, but I started to get influenced by sushi, so if you have any advice, let me know. Alex: I don't know the restaurants in the area, but look for those that are well-rated, and look for deals. We have a ton of deals going on right now. Stephanie: Ooh, nice, that's perfect. You are the SVP of Growth at Grubhub, correct? Alex: That's right. Stephanie: I'd love to hear a little bit about your role there, and what brought you to Grubhub. Alex: Sure, sure, thank you. I've been at Grubhub for a little bit over three years. My responsibility is for the consumer business. That is, how do we get more new customers to try us out for the first time, and how do we get existing ones to order with us a little more often? And hopefully they'll return. Alex: This spans all aspects of marketing. We do a whole bunch of stuff in-house. I'd love to explore that a little bit later. But it also involves a lot of work cross-functionally, across the product. When I say product, I don't just mean our apps, but the totality of the experience that the customer has, from our apps to the delivery, to customer care, if that's ever necessary. Stephanie: Very cool. Previously, were you at, I think I saw Microsoft and eBay, or what did your past life before Grubhub look like? Alex: That's right, that's right. I actually am a very strange Head of Marketing. I'm a software engineer by training. Stephanie: Oh, interesting. Alex: I've written a bunch of code. I switched over to product management, and then darkness had me, and I somehow ended up in marketing. I indeed was at eBay before this, also for around about three years. Similar role, maybe a slightly more narrow role, focused on customer retention, marketing technologies. Stephanie: Very cool. I'm sure that was great help working at a marketplace, albeit not maybe a three-sided one, but still maybe a really helpful to transition to Grubhub with as your background? Alex: It very much was. I have to admit, I thought I knew marketplaces after eBay, then when I started Grubhub, I discovered so much complexity. Our business, exactly as you said, is a three side marketplace. Restaurants, food delivery drivers, and consumers. It is a hyper local business. People who live in Palo Alto whole heartedly don't care how many restaurants we have in San Jose, and how good our delivery network is in San Francisco, right? Alex: It has to be block by block, and we have to make sure that we have good restaurant selection there, good demand, and good supply of drivers. Otherwise, if the three sides aren't in alignment, bad things happen. Stephanie: Yeah, that seems like it would be really tricky to keep all that balanced. How have you found success keeping everything balanced? Like you said, it's so hyper local, I'm thinking there could be a driver over in Sunnyvale, and they're definitely not going to go to my local Thai place to pick up the order that I'm looking at. Alex: Yeah, this is where a lot of fun in this business comes from, and a lot of complexity in this business comes from. We have to be really good at predicting things, and predicting demand. And we have to be really good at engaging all sides of our marketplace so that drivers actually want to be online at the time when we want them to be online. Alex: Consumers end up placing additional orders if perhaps we have a little bit too much supply. Restaurateurs want to create deals. Basically, being able to influence three sides of the marketplace in a automated, personalized, hyper local way, is really the only way we can survive, right? This, to me, is super joyful, and super complicated, and where a lot of learning, personally, for me, has come from. Stephanie: Yeah, I'm sure every day it's adjusting a little bit more, and you keep have to kind of changing things up and experimenting a bit. How do I think about where Grubhub is at right now? To me, it seems like it's the market leader. How many meals are being delivered? How much is that in dollar-wise of food that's being sold? How do I think about that? Alex: We're a public company, all of those numbers are public. Quick summary for you. We deliver more than half a million meals a day. Last year, we delivered more than six billion dollars worth of food. Of course, with the arrival of the pandemic, the demand for food delivery has also increased. The expectation of all of our constituents, and of our community, all of us, have risen tremendously. Because, from something that restaurateurs really on for a portion of their revenue, they now rely on delivery as the majority of it. Alex: For consumers, where they would perhaps order delivery occasionally, now is the only way for them to order restaurant food. A lot of expectations on us have increased throughout these past couple of months, even though we already started from being quite a large company with high expectations. Stephanie: Yeah, have you had to adjust quickly with everything going on with COVID-19? What have you seen, other than increasing orders, and how have you had to pivot to meet the customers and meet the drivers in where they're at today? Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Well, most definitely, yes. First and foremost, we began by focusing on safety of all the participants of our marketplace, right? This began with our work on personal protective equipment for our drivers. We distributed hundreds of thousands of PPE sets for free for our drivers. We invested a bunch of work into enabling contactless delivery within our apps. Which, of course, is something that makes the entirety of the marketplace safer. Alex: We basically have to take our product roadmap, and, in many ways, revisit it fully, and focus on things our community demanded of us in that moment. Similarly, we had to do something like that with marketing, as well, because we had a certain strategy. You of course know that a lot of our effort is in making sure that consumers can get the best value on Grubhub. If you spend money on food delivery, your dollars will go the furthest on Grubhub. This really is our brand positioning. Alex: When COVID came, we had to take a pause, because this rewards positioning, or this value positioning, really had to take a step back, because consumer's interest... Sure, they were looking for deals, but they were looking to be safe, first and foremost. Secondly, they were looking to support their community. So we had to reposition a lot of our marketing work to make it so. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. I'm thinking that could be a trend that stays around, even after everything's over, keeping that contactless delivery at least as an option, and thinking about how to actually prove you have the safety measures implemented, and you're tracking that every month. Are you all thinking about how to scale that and keep that for the long term, or is it more just a short term play until the pandemic's over? Alex: Couple thoughts for you. One is, I don't think that we're going to be looking at a pandemic being over and everything coming back to normal. I think we need to get used to the new normal, at least until the vaccine is here. Which means that people's lifestyles, their habits, will be fully adjusted by then. Alex: As such, it's not like we were developing a set of patches for three months, and then after that, we just turned those patches off. But also, there's meaningful, positives coming from this change, right? Like any crisis, it is both a danger and an opportunity. What we've discovered is this contactless delivery, for example, besides making everyone safe, it is actually making our network a tiny bit more efficient. The delivery driver does not need to engage with the consumer in-person. They can just drop it off, take a photo, and keep going, and keep working. Which shaves off a small amount, but in the grand scheme of more than half a million deliveries a day, this starts adding up. It helps our drivers earn more, and it helps our overall network be more efficient, which means food comes to consumers faster. Stephanie: Yep, yeah, that's definitely a good change. There's a lot of food delivery players in the market right now. How do you create an experience that's completely unique to Grubhub? Where people, they're like, "That's where I want to order through." Alex: All of this, in our minds, has to do with differentiation. And you're exactly right, maybe two or three years ago, where consumers didn't really know much about the food delivery category. A lot of what we had to do was to educate them about our existence, which is why a lot of our marketing, a lot of our product, was geared towards a first-time experience of someone who's never gotten anything delivered other than a pizza. Because really, that was the state of the world, right? You would ask an average consumer on the street, "Name a couple companies that deliver food," and they would name pizza brands. Stephanie: That would've been me a couple years ago, too. Alex: Totally. Stephanie: I'd be like, "Domino's." Alex: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Maybe Chinese food, if you've ever tried it. An average consumer didn't know that there's hundreds of restaurants that deliver to them, and that they can find them on Grubhub. So that was the focus of our messaging. Alex: Three months ago, even before COVID, if you asked an average consumer to name food delivery brands, they would name us, and maybe a handful of our competitors. In that environment, I'm prompted, right? This is unaided awareness. Not, "Have you ever heard of Grubhub?" But, "Name a food delivery brand." Alex: Our work switched from creating awareness to driving consideration. Helping consumers understand, what is it that they get if they buy from us versus perhaps one of our competitors? Last year, a lot of our focus has been on stating this extremely clearly and delivering on that experience quite precisely. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, it is all about value for us. Alex: Now that we're entering a bit of a new normal with COVID-19, we're beginning to come back to some of this foundational brand positioning. Talking about rewards and value. We have a TV spot that's actually launching today and tomorrow on national TV. We're one of the biggest spenders on TV in both the category. Stephanie: Oh, interesting. Alex: Generally we're one of top 200 brands advertising on U.S. television that talks about rewards and value. You might be scratching your head and wondering, "Why in the hell is a digital first brand spending so much money on TV?" Stephanie: Yes, I was wondering. Tell me. Alex: It actually is kind of counterintuitive. We, maybe about three years back, we started scratching our heads and thinking, "Okay, if an average consumer doesn't really know what food delivery options are out there, how do we create that awareness? And how do we do that in a way that can confidently map the efficacy of our spend?" Because creation of awareness, let's face it, is the most expensive thing a company can do. Stephanie: Yep. Everyone wants it, but then actually implementing it, tracking it, and seeing how it did, seems a little tricky. Alex: It is so very tricky. Most mechanisms for doing this are actually kind of arcane, right? You do media consumption patterns, which, frankly is a large-scale survey that perhaps an agency would run and say, "Okay, New Yorkers, they absolutely do not watch any TV. They spend a bunch of time in the subway, true. And then they're all very much on digital." Alex: So, a brand that's trying to advertise in New York then would say, "Okay, television in New York, totally worthless. And our consumers are probably just like the average consumer in New York." That's kind of how the line of thinking typically goes. We, despite having a general applicability product, right? Everybody wants food delivery, right? Everybody from 18 to my mom, most definitely could benefit from food delivery. Alex: And yet, what we discover, is that the media consumption patterns of an average New Yorker are not the average media consumption patterns of our consumer. Moreover, what we discovered three years back was even though our intuition was that someone who orders food delivery online is most likely an early adopter of technology, and most likely a cord cutter, right? I mean, if you're about to order food online, you of course are ordering your socks from Amazon. You of course are watching shows on Hulu Plus without any commercials, as opposed to on cable TV, right? Stephanie: Yeah. Alex: Of course that intuitively made sense, which is why we've been spending a lot of money through digital video channels. That intuitively made sense. We stumbled upon a set of techniques that allowed us to, with confidence, compare the efficacy of our awareness spent between digital video and the digital awareness darlings of Hulu and YouTube and Facebook for some of the dimensions, here. What we've discovered is that the bull drought of digital first is actually not as efficient, not at all as efficient per dollar spent, comparing to the- Stephanie: Oh, interesting. Alex: ... boring, stodgy, nobody watches it, cable television. Stephanie: Is it because of the audience that's there, where the digital, like you were talking about, advertising to them, they may already know about you and it's an easier conversion, whereas the people who are keeping the TV running in the background all day, maybe actually need the ad right then and there where it can put a little inception on them and they can hear about it a couple times while they have the news on? Alex: Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons. Other reasons are that, just on a per impression basis, your digital video is dramatically more expensive. Even though I'm a nerd of machine learning, and I love personalization, I don't believe that personalization can cover a five X price difference. It can make something 50% better, but not five steps better. Stephanie: So how do you think about creating that culture of experimentation like you're talking about, where most companies right now are probably not focusing on TV campaigns? How do you think about putting a budget behind that and actually empowering a team to do that, where when I think about teams who are running with marketing budgets, or just budgets in general, it's very scary to not show a great ROI, because you either aren't going to get that budget again. It's a use it or lose it type of culture, it seems like every company operates that way. Maybe Grubhub doesn't, but how do you think about creating good incentives and a culture of experimentation to come up with some of those projects? Alex: I think a culture where you ask for confidence in measurement for your spend is a good culture. Where you ask for feedback loops is a helpful culture. Now, you can take this too far, and you can start trying to map everything to revenue or [inaudible 00:16:56], and that doesn't particularly help with upper funnel marketing campaigns. But, the other extreme isn't particularly better. I see a lot of marketing organizations end up in that spot, where we say, "We demand perfect measurement," from what they call performance marketing. Alex: And the brand marketing side, the one where vast majority of dollars actually have to be spent to create awareness, is not working to the same level of rigor, and the same level of intellectual honesty with measurement. To your question about how to actually create those frameworks for the team, a couple things come to mind. Alex: The first one is, trying to pursue incentive alignment. If people on your team genuinely believe that learning and optimality of investment for the entire team is how they get promoted, is what the company actually values, they will pursue exactly that. Let me give you- Stephanie: Let me hear an example. Alex: Yeah, let me give you a counter example. A counter example is what happens if you hire an agency to manage your Facebook spend. Have you ever heard an agency that managers Facebook spend come back to you and say, "Your Facebook spend is terribly inefficient. You should spend less on Facebook." Stephanie: Definitely never. Alex: Right? That's what their incentives are, they get a portion of your Facebook spend. The same exact thing happens for your TV agency. The same exact thing happens for someone who's managing your Google spend, right? If you have a bunch of outsourced agencies, each of which is responsible for one of your channels, their survival, their ability to feed their children, depends on you being able to spend more money on the channel that they're managing for you. Alex: Of course, they don't have an incentive to try to tell you, "Hey, take money from Google and put it into Facebook." They will personally suffer. A setup like this creates a true misalignment of incentives. Let me contrast that with, let's say, an in-source structure, or perhaps a structure where you have a larger performance agency that is able to reallocate dollars between Google and Facebook without personalty suffering. Alex: In a structure where you in-source, which is how we operate, you're able to create a shared destiny, and you're able to say, "Hey, person running Facebook. Your incentives are all about learning." So if you have a current level of performance, which is a certain level of incremental CAC, and a certain level of incremental LTV. Your goal is to improve that by this percentage over the course of next quarter. Alex: Find some way to do so through whatever experiments that you're able to run. One of the potential outcomes is an improvement in efficiency by reduction in spend. They're able to raise their hand and say, "Hey, I actually want to spend your dollars. Take away some of my budget, and reallocate it over to TV, because they can spend it better. I hear they have a way to spend at a lower incremental CAC than I can." Stephanie: Have you seen that in your culture so far, of people actually being like, "Hey, you can have this budget, move it over here"? It seems like a lot of times, people are personally tied to their budgets, and whoever has the bigger budget is the more powerful one, and I haven't often, at least in my previous days at other companies, I haven't seen people say, "Hey, you can have this budget and move it here." Alex: You are exactly right. A lot of our, I guess, legacy from many of our previous jobs, associates the size of the budget with the influence in the organization, most definitely. This is where the job of a leader really is to create the right incentives and to catch people doing something right. Alex: If you hire somebody off of a company that had that culture, of course, their initial inclination will not be to raise their hand and say, "Hey, my area isn't working so hot." You need to indoctrinate them, if that makes any sense, into a world where it's okay to raise their hand and do it. The way you do it is by upholding folks who do this, and pointing at them and saying, "This person is doing it right," and celebrating their successes. And celebrating their experiments, where, perhaps, they didn't see the immediate success, but they learned something. Alex: So, as a leader, I think you have a lot of power to create these incentives. As such, structure what your team actually holds as valuable versus not. If you point to enough examples like this, you'll actually end up transforming the culture, even for someone who comes in from an organization that wasn't like that. Stephanie: Yeah, it seems like it would also allow someone to wear multiple hats, and kind of become a polymath when it's like, "I don't just focus on Facebook ads, or I don't just focus on this kind of marketing." They get to experiment with a bunch of different areas. Have you seen that happen in your organization? Alex: Oh, most definitely. My paid social folks, just like everyone's, they were super focused on Facebook. What we discovered is them raising their hands and being very creative, and being some of the first folks who ever tried TikTok, for example. This was a little while back now, but we were one of the first handful of brands to invest a lot of money into TikTok, and do large scale experimentation with them. What we've discovered is if you're one of the first ones, there's very meaningful... Effectively, arbitrages to be had, where you're able to not only get a great deal, but shape the product to your liking. As such, get a temporary advantage over the rest of the market. Stephanie: That's fun. How did you think about creating your first campaign on TikTok? When your team presented this idea to you, were you like, "Yeah, let's do it," or were you a little hesitant? What was the first campaign you had go out there, versus what does that look like today? Are you still utilizing it? Alex: Oh my God, this is quite a story, to be honest with you. The team came to me and said, "So, we're thinking about doing TikTok." My reaction at the time was, "TikWhat?" They explained this to me and I read up a little bit about it. My immediate reaction is, "Okay, you are attempting to sell a luxury product." Let's face it, ordering delivery, you're still buying food from restaurants. It is a luxury product in many of the cases, right? To, "You're trying to sell that to people who have no disposable income of their own. The average customer of TikTok at the time just could not have their own credit card." Stephanie: Yeah, they have allowances, maybe. Alex: Right? Exactly. "Why in the world could this possibly work, you guys? Our average consumer is fairly affluent, and you're now trying to go into a different demo. How is that even remotely possible?" But, luckily, at that point, I had already observed that my team knows better than me, and that they have much, much better ideas than I do. Essentially, we just did a test. We did a small test, and we experimented in earnest. Surprise, surprise, they came back and they showed me the numbers, and they were meaningfully better than Facebook at the time. Stephanie: Wow. Alex: We ended up investing more. That was genuine, true learning. Not just for the organization, but frankly, for me. There's multiple possible explanations for why it ended up being so efficient, and I can go into some of them, but the thing that matters to me most is that the crew felt inspired to pursue something new. They felt passionate enough about it to structure a test when there was no framework, really, out there. And they were unafraid enough to basically tell me that I'm wrong, and that my intuition is off. Alex: That made me feel like the culture is actually right. The culture is exactly what I want it to be. The opposite of that, where you're going with the highest paid person's opinion, if that makes sense. Stephanie: Doesn't work. Alex: It doesn't work, because all of our intuitions, no matter how successful we've been previously, we are sometimes wrong. Why hire smart people if you don't trust them to try things? Stephanie: I think there's a good mix between trust your gut, but also don't trust it, because you could be wrong. Yeah, go with other people's ideas, as well. How do you think about those efficiencies that you're mentioning when you're exploring new channels like TikTok? Alex: Sure. To me, it's indeed about being open-minded and experimenting with new types of media, and being unafraid to try things that aren't immediately, obviously, going to work. A similar type of experiment happened with Snapchat a little bit earlier, where I also was convinced that this can't possibly work for the same reason. Luckily, I, again, was wrong. Alex: I guess a pattern of learning is what inspired me to basically create this incentive structure for the team, where they're unafraid to raise their hand and say, "Hey, the way we've been doing this before is really off." If you want, I'll tell you a story of a channel that's not really a channel that I guess formed my opinion on that topic. Stephanie: Yeah, let's hear it. Alex: This is a story of a couple marketers that were attempting to turn a specific city around. Alex: As we talked a little bit earlier, we can be doing super well in one city, and not well at all in another city, or in a corner of a city. A lot of what we do has to do with how do we turn a specific city or neighborhood around? This couple folks, their job was to turn a specific city around, and I was expecting them to come to me and say, "Hey, I'm going to take the budget that you've given me, and I'm going to buy some Google ads, and I'm going to buy some billboards, and maybe I'm going to buy some Facebook ads." Alex: What they did instead, these were two marketers. What they did instead was actually really curious. They experienced the product for themselves. They placed a couple of food delivery orders, and they came to me and they said, "Hey, I don't want to buy any ads," they said. "Instead, whenever I was placing the order for food, there really weren't enough food photos. I was ordering from restaurants that I hadn't ordered from before, and I don't really know if their pad thai looks good. I don't really know if their sushi is something that I want to try." Alex: They were in your position. They said, "Screw it, I'm not going to buy any ads. I'm instead going to hire some photographers to come into those restaurants and take the photos. Then after that, I'm going to measure the incremental impact of the added photography, and see if the efficacy of that is actually comparable or high enough, comparing to the efficacy of ad spend." Effectively saying, "I'm going to open a brand new marketing channel, and that marketing channel is going to be photos." Stephanie: Photography. Alex: I'm like, "Okay, let's just do it." Stephanie: A whole brand new, the vision, of Grubhub, just photography. Alex: Exactly, exactly. These two folks get on the phones, start calling photographers, start calling restaurant owners and scheduling appointments to have the photographers come in there. That becomes basically their job for the next two months. Alex: Then they organize a really [inaudible] visitors for these specific menu pages see the photos, and others don't. They do some serious math to try to say, "Hey, here's the incrementality in here, and here's the efficacy of the spend comparing to what Google ads would be, or Facebook ads would be." They discover that those photos are actually a better way to spend marketing dollars, than any actual marketing. Stephanie: Yeah. Alex: I, at that point, am kind of floored. I come to them, I'm like, "Okay, you guys are on fire, this is amazing. Let's take your thing and give it to operations and scale up this thing." They say, "No, no, you don't understand, you don't understand. This whole project sucked. We spent our entire days on the phone with restaurant owners, trying to schedule appointments. We are going to make it better." Alex: I'm like, "Wait, what's going on?" They say, "No, no, instead of scheduling appointments with the restaurant owners to take photos, we are going to rent Airbnbs and photo studios around town, then order food from the restaurants, bring it to those Airbnbs. Our food stylist is going to make it look good, and we're going to take photos." Stephanie: Oh my gosh. Alex: I'm like, "Wait, wait, what? What?" Stephanie: That's another level. Alex: Yeah. My immediate reaction from this is, "Have you ever seen delivered food? It does not look good." They obviously told me to go pound sand, as they should have, and they showed me the first photos from these experiments. Oh my God, those first photos look much better than anything taken in a restaurant, because food stylists are really good at their jobs. If you were able to control the lighting, you're able to take much better pictures. Alex: When they actually tried it, they discovered that instead of doing two photo shoots a day, the photographer, who's the most scarce and expensive part of the whole operation, is able to do 20 photos shoot a day. Stephanie: Wow, that's efficient, that's amazing. Alex: As you can imagine, at that point, my mind was completely blown. We indeed operationalized this with folks whose day job was operations, as opposed to marketing. This was the example of really learning what learning means. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You kind of picked the markets to do that in, or you kind of see a market not doing so well, and those are the ones that you focus on getting the good imagery for, versus allowing that... UGC content to work well in other markets, or how do you think approaching that? Because it seems like something that would be really hard to scale, ordering a bunch of things all the time from every market in the U.S. How do you think about creating those campaigns? Alex: Yeah, yeah, yeah. With hundreds of thousands of restaurants on the platform, we indeed have constrained resources to do these photo shoots when we can. We can't do all of them next month. We had to be somewhat thoughtful on prioritizing things. A few things came to mind for being able to select the right restaurants to do this in sort of the right markets. Alex: First is, conversion. If consumers land on the menu, and end up buying stuff anyway. Well, that's cool, I guess they don't need the photos. If on the other hand, conversion isn't amazing, but the number of visitors to the menu page is super high, hey, this might be an opportunity to actually add some photos and improve that conversion. Alex: By digging into the data, and looking at where the majority of the incremental impact can be, we develop this framework for allocating this constrained resource, which ended up effectively being an investment of marketing dollars into a channel that's sort of marketing, but sort of not. Is it product? Is it operations? I have no idea. Stephanie: It's something, all the above. Alex: Right? Stephanie: How do you think about, you mentioned incrementality quite a bit. How do you think about that throughout your organization, when developing these experiments and seeing what works and what doesn't work? Alex: Sure. First, if you don't mind, allow me to define it as- Stephanie: Yes, please. Alex: Because I think that's super important. Incrementality, to me, is what would have happened anyway? If you didn't do your glorious marketing campaign, or this amazing product improvement that you just rolled out. This is a difficult question, because it's really attempting to attribute the entirety of this success, or entirety of what's happening during a campaign, to the campaign. Alex: Let me give you some intuition behind this, right? Let's say you go to, I don't know, gap.com or something like that. You see a banner in there that says, "10% off." Well, obvious, a lot of people are going to click that banner, and a lot of people are going to use that coupon to get 10% off of their transaction. The key question, though, is, what portion of those people would have transacted anyway? Stephanie: Yeah, they went there directly. They probably would have. Alex: Exactly, it's clearly not zero, because before you launched that awesome 10% off coupon, some people were buying jeans yesterday. Being able to, with confidence, judge what that incremental behavior is, and what is the incremental CAC, and incremental LTV, is super important. Simple back of the napkin as to how you judge this is, let's say yesterday, a hundred people bought those jeans. Today, 110 people bought those jeans. It's not a real AB test, obviously. But all 110 people used your 10% off coupon. You can wrongly suggest that all 110 converted because of your coupon, or you can look at the truth in the eye and realized 110 used the coupon, but 10 really only needed it. Stephanie: Do you think a lot of brands are missing this when they offer these discounts, and maybe unintended consequences that could come from it? I could see a lot of consumers, if they get used to you always having discounts, then they just wait. They're like, "I'm going to wait for that next 10% off coupon," then they don't have a buyer at all. Alex: Yeah, it is super dangerous. I do think that in some industries, there's exactly that happening, right? We know of the right times during the year to buy a TV, so we don't buy a TV until then. We know when the right time of the year to buy home improvement equipment, and we don't buy it until then. Exactly what you're describing is a real danger. Alex: It's not just a danger of delaying the purchase, it's a danger of create a permanently less profitable business. Imagine is, every Friday, Grubhub was to, let's say, give all our consumers three or five dollars off. Not only are Thursday orders going to be delayed, because our consumers are going to be like, "Hey, I don't really care when I get takeout. I'll cook one night and I'll get takeout the other night." They'll delay it until Friday, but those Friday orders are going to be less profitable. Alex: So we permanently teach our consumer base, if we take that route, to not only delay their orders, but to make them less profitable. That is a real issue and something you got to be super careful with, which is why you must measure incrementality. Stephanie: Yeah, especially right now. You see so many people discounting everything, it's kind of scary to think. How are you going to come back when your entire, everything on your store online, is 80% off? How do you come back from that? Alex: Most definitely. Now, if you have physical inventory, the opportunity cost is not zero. Right? Let's say if you're selling digital goods, for example, right? Let's say you're selling access to, let's say a song, or a book, right? Your fixed costs in that situation, your cost of an action, is terribly low, right? As opposed to if you have goods in the warehouse, and you aren't able to sell them, there's very meaningful fixed costs for you that you need to deal with. Alex: It might be, actually, quite reasonable to be running these high promotions, but if you are, you better be running it as a real AB test. You better be able to confidently say that this is the true incrementality of this 80% off coupon, and that's the true value that I'm getting out of it from both not needing to keep these products in the warehouse, but also from just sheer revenue from the consumer. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. Do you have a good platform or way that you've set up metrics and things like that to measure that incrementality in a way that's not really manual, and then you can just kind of see how the campaigns and what they're doing is performing against each other? Alex: Yeah. In lower funnel channels, it is actually fairly easy to set up a platform for this, and we have. There are tools that you can use for it, right? Google Optimize, for example, or Optimizely, right? We have a combination of in-house and these third party tools to do product experimentation, for example. Alex: For things like CRM, couponing in the apps, or issuing emails with coupons, or push notifications, really good experimentation platforms don't exist off the shelf. We had to do some math ourselves. Some of that math turned out to be fairly fine tuned to Grubhub's needs. Here's what I mean by this. We're an LTV business. It's not just about the immediate transaction, it's about what happens after that transaction. Stephanie: Yep. Alex: For example, if a consumer ends up converting at a higher rate, and then afterwards has a poor experience and doesn't come back, that actually is terrible, terrible, terrible. Your typical, immediate conversion optimization tool, would just look at the first part of this. Oh my God, they converted at a better rate, great, awesome, keep it. Stephanie: Yay. Yep. Alex: We had to build tools specifically designed to capture these long-term effects. We typically look at the results of these long-term activities over the context of a month, right? So we need to see what happens to consumers for a meaningful amount of time to have high confidence that it indeed is net beneficial or not. Alex: Of course, we're able to look at things fairly early, and if something's a terrible idea, we're able to kill it early. But, in order to be able to confidently say what is the impact on the LTVs, we had to build tools. These in-house tools for many CRM things that we do today. Stephanie: Got it. Alex: Even then, it's just for lower funnel. It's just for CRM and product. How do you judge the incrementality of TV versus billboards? That is a whole other, super complicated story. Stephanie: How do you think about the intersection between your CRM and your content management system and your actual commerce platform? How do you create a good environment where they all interact together, and people can see a holistic view of everything that's going on? Alex: Great question. I don't think I have a perfect answer for you, other than enabling as many work streams for experimentation as are possible. That is, allowing the CRM team to run experiments on their own, without involving a bunch of product people, without involving a bunch of finance and analytics people. Similarly, allowing the front end or pricing optimization team to run experiments on their own, and do very specific price optimization experiments just by themselves. Alex: The more work streams like this you have running in parallel, the more you're going to be able to learn, as an organization, per unit of time. Stephanie: That seems like a great answer to me. It also seems like you would get a lot of, you could have a customer with a negative experience, but it would be because of maybe the restaurant. It seems like you guys would have a lot of insights into maybe how to help restaurants improve, where it's like, hey, every time someone orders this thing of sushi, you always forget the wasabi, and man is that making people upset. Do you ever send that data back to restaurants to improve the products as in their food, or the customer experience, or anything like that? Alex: Most definitely, you hit the nail on the head. We are in a really unique position of knowing not just who the people were, or when they placed the orders at your restaurant, but knowing exactly what they ordered. We can see exactly that pattern, right? We can tell you that on Tuesday night, the reviews for people ordering sushi, are actually worse than on any other night. We can help you see that, so that you can train the person that's working on Tuesday night. Stephanie: [crosstalk 00:43:21]. Alex: These kind of insights... Yeah, totally. These kind of insights are exactly what we believe is what is something that we can uniquely provide to our restaurant partners, besides demand. Of course they come to us because they're interested in demand, particularly now. But we can do more, and we've been building a lot of systems specifically about that, that are effectively... you can think of this as recommendation systems in the grand scheme of the word of giving recommendations to the restaurants about how they can lend the totality of their business more efficiently. For example- Stephanie: It seems like that could be a whole different business for you guys to also operate. Alex: It's quite synergistic in our minds, right? If we're able to make our restaurants more successful, it actually makes us more successful, in turn. Because, those consumers who are placing orders and are not getting any wasabi with their sushi, they are ultimately not happy with Grubhub. We want them to have an amazing experience. Alex: Whether the restaurant wins just on Grubhub, or throughout the totality of their experience, because, let's face it, that restaurant might be serving other delivery platforms, and soon enough, hopefully, dine-in, as well. That retraining is going to help the restaurant across the board. We actually very much welcome that. That means that we're able to create the value not just for our platform, but for the restaurant, and increase the chance that this restaurant will, ultimately, be successful. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I think that's a really good point, especially as a lot of brands right now are shifting quickly to the world of Ecommerce and trying to figure out how to sell online. There's going to be a lot of new touch points that they maybe aren't anticipating that could actually hurt the consumer experience. If you've got the UPS guy throwing your box over the fence, and it's getting crush, there's a lot of things that actually, you maybe wouldn't even think of, as a brand, of, "That's not my job," when really, everything form start to finish to delivery and afterwards, and the follow-up, all of that's your job. And how do you think about controlling that experience with so many touch points? Alex: You are so right. The totality of this is their job. From the first ads that they see on TV, to what shows up when they look on SEM or on paid social and discover your brand there, too. The first purchase experience to the interaction with the UPS guy, to the interaction with customer service. All of that, in totality, is what the brand relationship really is, what the product really is. Alex: As marketers, we can't just care about that ads. As product people, we can't just care about the bits installed on the phone. They, in their separation, they don't particularly matter. As you saw from my story with the photos, that really was quite profound to me, right? We kept looking for a solve to get more customers and more sales through marketing, and that solve wasn't there at all. The most efficient solve was far outside. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah, such a good reminder for all brands to think about that, like you said, totality of the process. Because you have a software engineering background, I feel like I'm allowed to ask you tech questions. I saw on your, you guys have a blog on Medium, or your engineering staff does. They were talking about how they were creating discount codes using crypto. It made me wonder, what other kind of technologies are y'all experimenting with, or seeing success, or how did you think about running the platform that Grubhub's built on now? Alex: Sure. A few things are super important. One is having a scalable platform that can withstand demand, and that can withstand massive spikes in demand. As luck would have it, most people in Chicago, want to get dinner approximately at the same time. Stephanie: Yes, who knew? Alex: Right. What a pain in the butt. We've been trying to convince them to maybe come a different... No. Stephanie: Come on, 3:00's your time, come on. Alex: Exactly, exactly. Your dinner delivery window. Which, of course, creates formidable demand. Not just on the services in the backend of our systems, but a formidable demand on our logistics network. A lot of our work goes into being able to spike in response to customer demand. Let me give you one intuitive example of this. Outside of COVID, before COVID, when rain would start during dinner hours, demand would massively spike. Alex: At that moment, we're supposed to magically materialize a lot of drivers on the road doing deliveries. Being able to do so, technically, and when I say magically materialize, I'm of course referring to creating incentives and creating appropriate communication channels with our drivers so that they actually want to get on the road. A lot of our engineering work has to do with how we were talking about in the beginning, balancing the three sites of the network, and being able to respond to either a massive spike in demand, or response to a set of orders that were placed in the specific part of the city on the logistics side. Alex: Or, respond to an onboarding of an enormous partner, like Shake Shack, or Sweet Green, or Taco Bell, with their own unique needs. Remember, we work with such a variety of restaurants, right? We do point of sale integrations with a variety of our enterprise customers, which of course means that we have to have nimble systems that are able to onboard those same customers. They have to be resilient, as well. So, a lot of our work has to do with both scale and being able to deal with these spikes. Stephanie: Got it. Any favorite pieces of tech that you guys are implementing or trying out right now to help with those large spikes in demand? Or where you guys think the future is headed that you're kind of preparing for? Alex: Favorite pieces of tech. Huh. Huh. I'm going to think marketing tech. Braze has been an outstanding tool for our marketing teams. What we've discovered is it effectively enabled a whole work stream of experimentation for our CRM teams. They're able to run pretty sophisticated experiments completely independently from engineering, which increase our velocity of experimentation. Stephanie: Hmm, that's awesome. I'll have to check that out. Cool. So to zoom out a little bit, 30,000 foot level, what kind of disruptions do you see coming in the world of Ecommerce? What's on your radar right now? It doesn't have to be for Grubhub, it can just be in general. Alex: I think that the disruption is already here, where over these past couple of months, we've seen the portion of online transactions, and portion of consumers who have tried buying things online just catapult through the roof. All of those new consumers, let's face it, my 90 year old grandmother is using Zoom now. All of those consumers are a new opportunity. They have very different expectations. They don't yet know much about your brand. Alex: Being able to understand this newly online wave, and heightened expectations of the consumers that already happen online, but perhaps not as active with your service, right? Those, I think, are super important. This to me takes us back to velocity of experimentation, being more important now than ever. That is, truly learning from your customers. Observing them, creating experiments, measuring, and getting a feedback loop from them, so that you're able to focus and find the one thing that you can improve to make the whole story better. Maybe photos. Maybe it's something else. Stephanie: Yep. Yeah, I love that. It definitely seems like with these new people coming online, you have to have a bunch of different tactics to meet them wherever they are. The ones that have been working for the past year, might only work for a subset of the people because you have 50% more people that you need to market to, or develop a platform for, and it's going to be very different with how you approach those new consumers than what you've been used to. Alex: Exactly. Stephanie: All right, so, we're about to jump into the lightning round. Any higher level thoughts, Alex, that you want to share before we do so? Alex: If you're able to structure your organizational incentives to focus on learning and feedback loops, I think now you're going to see an even bigger reward for it in the form of market share, in the form of growth, in the form of being able to adapt to the world around you and leapfrogging the competition. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. All right, so the lightning round, brought to you by our friends at Sales Force Commerce Cloud. It's a fun and easy, quick round of questions where you have a minute or less to answer. Are you excited and ready, Alex? Alex: Very scared. Stephanie: Dun dun. All right, first one. If you are starting a podcast, what would it be about, and who would be your first guest? Alex: Whoa, what a fascinating question. What a fascinating question. I am obsessed with all things culture, and how do you actually create the right incentives for a technology/marketing organization? I love Simon Sinek. He is outright amazing. I learned a ton from reading him. I would probably to get him and if I can't, I'd get one of my former mentors in there, as a consolation prize. Stephanie: Oh, that sounds good. I would listen. I would be your first listener, and I would give you a five start review. Alex: Oh my gosh, thank you. Stephanie: You got me at least. What's up next on your reading list? Alex: Hmm, next on my reading list? I am reading Russian sci-fi novels these days, as a means of escaping from a tiny, one bedroom apartment. Stephanie: Any good ones that we should check out? Alex: I'm actually reading them in Russian, so I don't know- Stephanie: I was going to say, unless they're in Russian, then I don't know if I'll be able to read Russian quick enough to read it. Alex: Oopsie, oopsie, I do have a few people at my work who've been reading Tolstoy before the whole COVID situation started. I don't know if I'd recommend it now, Tolstoy does darkness extremely well. We have enough darkness around us now. Stephanie: That is true. Yeah, maybe not. Alright, well, what thing do you normally buy at a store that now you're just going to buy online after everything with COVID? Alex: What a great question. Only online now. Hmm. Stephanie: Tricky, tricky. Alex: I used to, actually a lot of my electronics. I used to come to the store and look at them and experiment with them. I have a feeling that I'm never doing that again. I used to come to a Best Buy and just try to look at different mice and monitors and all that. I got a new laptop and a new mouse online. I really like them, and I really like the experience. I was unafraid of returning them. That's it, online I go. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree, especially as a lot of these companies are making the return experience a lot more seamless. Yeah, I could completely see the same thing happening. Buy things, test it out, and send it back if you don't like it. Alex: I was just chatting with a colleague about this exact same thing with returns around fashion. I think there's a lot of innovation to be had with moving the fear in fashion through that. Stephanie: Yep, completely agree, except I could see them having to now to figure out a way to resell those items in a way that proves that they've been quarantined, disinfected, and yeah. I was just thinking about that the other day. Man, that's tricky, especially for second hand market places to try and prove to the customer that these items are clean and good to go, and you can buy them. Alex: I agree. Solvable, I think, but I agree. Stephanie: It is solvable. All right, so the last final question. What's up next for Ecommerce professionals? Alex: I think we're going through a time when from being on the early adopter, early majority demand for most of the brands. We've become the critical source of revenue for every single brand. If you think that your company was going through a digital transformation, and is now trying to make digital just a better channel, hold on to your seats, because it's not the only channel, and the majority channel. So, the demand for expertise in our area is increasing very rapidly, and the demand for learning in our area is also increasing rapidly. I think this is a wonderful time to be in Ecommerce. I think this is a wonderful time to be learning and doubling down on Ecommerce. I'm excited for all of us to be right at the center of this transformation. Stephanie: I love that, love the positivity, and yeah, it's definitely an exciting time to be alive and experiment and try new things. This has been a blast Alex, thanks so much for coming on the show. This is your second appearance on a Mission podcast, so yeah, we're so thankful that you came back and joined us again. Alex: Stephanie, thank you very much for inviting me. Stephanie: All right, talk to you later. Alex: Cheers.
There is an evolutionary process for every business, and Beardbrand is no different. When Eric Bandholz co-founded Beardbrand back in 2012, all he had was a Tumblr blog with a modest amount of followers and an Ecommerce shop selling other people’s beard products. Today, Beardbrand is a seven-figure business with multiple high selling products of its own and an entire catalog of content that customers gobble up with each new release. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Eric tells us how he fortified his brand, and how success in the digital world is all about going beyond offering just a product in a box — it’s about delivering value and the best possible experience to your customers Key Takeaways: Move away from the strict focus on simply selling as much as you can and instead aim to find the ways you can add value to your customers’ lives. That will lead to more loyalty and, in turn, more lifetime sales When you're cash-strapped, you must think of creative ways to grow the business without capital. One way to do that is word-of-mouth — you can't incentivize word-of-mouth. You have to just focus on creating an amazing experience that your customers want to talk about Site speed is more important than other features. Achieving that means cutting out pop-up ads and other third-party plugins, which data shows often do not provide consistent or meaningful ROI For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles. Today, we have Eric Bandholz on the show, founder of Beardbrand. Eric, welcome. Eric: What is going on, Stephanie? Stephanie: Hey, hey. Thanks for hopping on here. Eric: Yeah. I'm excited for our conversation. It's going to be a lot of fun. Stephanie: Me, too. You are a true brand. You're rocking an awesome beard. Just what I expected when I was hoping to see you on video. I'm like, "He better have an epic beard, or this conversation won't go well." Eric: Well, it was funny because, actually, I shaved it all off in December, the beginning of December, of last year. That was kind of a big deal for us. That was the first time I shaved my beard completely off. Stephanie: Oh, man. Eric: She's like, "[crosstalk 00:00:44] your beard," or something like that. Stephanie: How many customers did you lose when you did that? Eric: Well, I'd like to think that we actually added a lot of customers, because Beardbrand is not about the beard. It's about the man behind the beard. We kind of support a guy's right to grow his beard as much as his right to shave it off. I really wanted to make that point, especially today, with a lot of our competitors challenging people's masculinity by not having facial hair. We want to kind of say facial hair doesn't matter at all. It's just a style. Stephanie: Cool. Eric: We did some YouTube ads on it as well, which was a lot of fun to do. Stephanie: Awesome. I'd love to dive into the background of how you started Beard Brand and the story behind that. Eric: We're in business, I think it's got to be, eight years now we launched. Stephanie: Wow, congrats. Eric: We launched in 2012 after I had grown a beard out for about a year. What happened is, at that time, I was trying to do this graphic design business or design business, and I would go to networking events and everyone would call me Duck Dynasty or ZZ Top or Grizzly Adams. Those are super cool dudes. They've got epic stories as well. As an individual, I don't identify as those kind of guys. I've got the softest hands you could ever imagine. I never touched an axe. I ended up attending this event where I met other dudes like me who are other entrepreneurs and designers and doctors and lawyers and dads. I realized there's this whole community of guys that do not fit the traditional stereotype of a bearded guy. That was the inspiration to kind of call myself an urban beardsman. Stephanie: I like it. Eric: Beardbrand was going to be the community to unite urban beardsmen and give them the tools they needed to feel confident about rocking a beard. To us, the tools don't mean just the grooming products. They mean, videos. They mean blog posts. They mean style inspiration. They mean community. Over the past eight years, we've been rolling all that out. We've gotten an epic blog and a YouTube channel with over a million and a half subscribers. We've got a private community where we connect with people. We've put on conferences for our customers to be able to connect in person. We've really worked hard to support our audiences, support our customers. I've got two business partners. We're completely bootstrapped. We have no debt. We have no outside funding. We've been able to grow to a nice size seven-figure business. Stephanie: That's amazing. Congrats on all those YouTube followers. How do you think about utilizing your content to sell your products? Was that an idea and a strategy from the beginning, or was it more organic, where you started on YouTube, and then you're like, "Well, now, we have all these followers, we should launch a product as well?" Eric: Yeah, if we'll hop in our time machine a little bit more. We launched 2012 as a blog, a Tumblr page, which I don't think anyone's ever heard the word, "Tumblr," five years [crosstalk 00:03:53]. Stephanie: Long time. Eric: We had a Tumblr page. Then, we also had our YouTube channel. This time, it was just me, as kind of a side project. I'll make a couple of posts on the blog. Then, I would just re-blog some things on Tumblr to make it look active. I think I did six videos on YouTube. It's not like, in that first year, we really built this thriving community. I think we had 300 subscribers on YouTube and just a couple of thousand visitors to our blog. It was enough that a reporter from the New York Times saw the blog and kind of quoted me as an expert. Stephanie: That's awesome. Eric: We utilized that opportunity. I convinced two of my friends to go into business with me, and said, "Hey, why don't we turn this blog into an e-commerce store?" We found a product. We started reselling it. We literally launched the website a day before the New York Times article went live- Stephanie: Wow, perfect timing. Eric: [crosstalk] a couple of days. That was kind of the spark to the business to really give us the energy to continue. Then, I had the vision that Beardbrand, the Urban Beardsman, is going to be like how Lululemon is to people for yoga or Vans shoes is to skaters. Beardbrand and the Urban Beardsman was we're going to serve these urban beardsmen. I always visualize that as apparel or accessories or clothes. I really didn't have the industry knowledge to be able to do that, and the margins are so tight on there, and some seasonality that we found grooming products was going to be that product that united the community. Eric: After, I guess, a year or two of failure after failure after failure of trying to get apparel up and accessories up, we finally admitted that we're a grooming company. For us, the content that we've created was more of not to drive sales. The products we have allow us to share our word more. We sell products as a way to kind of expand our voice and to grow our content, not as a way to create content to sell products. I think we're one of the companies that kind of view it a little bit differently. Stephanie: Got it. How do you utilize newsletters and reaching your subscribers once you have them or engaging with buyers or prospective buyers? I think I've read about some newsletter strategy that you have from day one, everyone kind of starts out in the same place to go on the journey with you. Is that still accurate? Eric: Yeah. We utilize Klaviyo to, I think they call it flows, where you have these series of emails that you send out when people join your email list. We've launched that, I think, in 2015. That's been really good. When you think about building a business, as much as you can automate and build systems and processes, then the more you're going to be able to scale your business and the more traction you're going to be able to gain. Eric: This series that we opened up with is really like an education series. I think it's a 5 or 10-part series where we teach them how to care for their beards, teach them how to care for their hair. A lot of guys still don't know how to shampoo and condition your hair. Basics like that where, honestly, they've been doing it wrong, but there's opportunity for them to improve their techniques and, ultimately, get better outcome through their journey. That's been big for us. Then, at the end of the flow, we give them a little thank you product, or free shipping, or something like that for taking the time to invest in themselves. Stephanie: Got it? Are there any best practices you would recommend other e-commerce sites when it comes to utilizing that newsletter or where you're like, "Conversions were high when we did this," or, "They were lower when we did this," or, "That thank you product really does help drive future sales," any insights around that? Eric: Yeah. A couple of things that we've found that work over the years is we have a product that is not available on our navigation. It's kind of a hidden kit that is only available to people who join our newsletter. Stephanie: Interesting. Eric: The retail value of that kit is $50. We give them a pretty aggressive price point to be able to get on board. It's kind of like a tester kit, sample kit, so they get exposure to a lot of our products. We found that that works really well because we can say, "Hey, get this tester kit, try all of our products, use these products as you're learning about the things that we're telling you, then, in two weeks or a month or whenever, when you go through the products and look to re-up them." We found that that works really well at getting people into the ecosystem and trying our products. Stephanie: Very cool. Eric: What other best practices do I have? For us, it's so much about content. I think a lot of people really err towards sales and discounts and buy from us and chest thumping. That's really not our style. I would challenge people out there to think about how you can bring value to your audience's lives. Then, if you bring enough value to their lives, then, kind of the whole Buddhism karma thing, it will come back to you. People will end up buying from you. We kind of have that outlook on the world, that if you do good things, good things will come back to you. Stephanie: Love that. How do you think about your buyer experience and making that personalized and unique to all your customers as they come in? Eric: We've invested a fair amount into our packaging to our products. The unboxing experience is nice. We use nicer primary packaging, which is going to be your bottles and your labels and your caps and all that. Then, we use nicer secondary packaging as well. When they actually get the boxes and they open it, it's pretty nice. In addition to that, we're working with our own 3PL or a third-party logistics, our own fulfillment center. We make sure that we work really closely with them that they wrap it kind of to our specifications. There's a nice little unboxing experience, a little bit of tissue paper, and a Beardbrand sticker. Then, we have what's called a thank you kit. Within this thank you kit, we have a little booklet. The booklet usually changes every quarter. For instance, one quarter, it was a book of reminders, which are kind of my nine reminders that I tell myself in life as I face adversity. Stephanie: That's great. Eric: Daily planning. It's all tied around our core message or our tagline, which is keep on growing. We're trying to, again, bring more value. You buy from us and, not only did you get great products, but we brought you a little more value outside of what the products can do. Hopefully, by delivering this experience, we can grow through word-of-mouth and loyalty and customers who want to stick around, rather than kind of going on to the next hot thing. Stephanie: I was just going to say I could see that adding to that viral experience by giving people those little presents that are really fun to share, then, just engaging with more customers because of that. It's really interesting to hear about. Eric: I'll tell you this. If you're trying to build a bootstrap company, the reality is you've got more time than money. When you're cash-strapped, you've got to think of creative ways to be able to grow the business without capital. One way to do that is word-of-mouth. You can't incentivize word-of-mouth. You have to really just truly focus on such an amazing experience that your customers want to talk about it. When you have that mentality, not only is it healthy for your business, but it's going to be healthy for your growth. It's just kind of a win-win, and the world's a better place because you're bringing that much value to the customers. Stephanie: I completely agree. Are there any success stories or big failures that you've had come from trying to generate that word-of-mouth and getting people to spread the word? Any advice around that? Eric: It's actually not a metric that we really track or keep an eye on. It's just more of a philosophy internally of just being customer first. I think, to a certain degree, you do have to integrate data. We used to include a little sample of products for people. We found that those samples weren't driving any additional sales of those products in a significant way. When you look at that, you're like, "Well, are you actually bringing value to customers if you're giving them something for free that, maybe, they didn't want or they didn't want need? Stephanie: How do you track that, or how did you know that people weren't really using it or that wasn't helping drive sales? Eric: We would send a beard wash, a little sample, a one-ounce container. Then, we would look at if there's any increase in sales of beard wash. Your data is always going to be muddy, especially when you're a company that's our size and really small. We fundamentally can't get the data. You do have to go off of a certain gap. You have to also look at, "Well, every sample is costing us," let's say, it's $1. Every order is going out, five orders is $5,000 a month. Then, if we're not seeing a boost of really $10,000 in sales to justify the cost of that, then the margin and the future order, then, you're not building a sustainable practice. Again, as a bootstrap company, you do have to think about your marketing efforts being sustainable and being able to exist on their own for a long time. Stephanie: How do you think about creating these marketing campaigns, whether it's YouTube videos? How much do you guys put out per day or per week? To me, that feels like it could be not sustainable if you don't have the right team in place, the right video crew. Especially right now, I'm thinking everything with COVID-19. Has it been hard to keep that content going out and recording the videos and launching them on YouTube and everything? Is it still pretty good, because it's a remote team doing that? Eric: It's been a really long, hard journey. To the listeners out there who are hearing our story now, eight years in is like we've had eight years to build these processes and systems and relationships. You're not going to be able to do all the things that we've done on day one. We're still cranking out about six videos a week. We've been able to do that by leveraging multiple personalities, just like you guys have multiple shows. We're kind of the same thing. It's not all on my shoulders, and worrying about me getting burnt out. Eric: We have four different regulars on our smaller channel called the Beardbrand Alliance. Then, we have, probably, maybe 4 to 10 barbers who will hit on to do these kind of barbershops style videos. We've been able to really spread the burden of the YouTube channel. Then, we have an in-house video editor who is constantly video editing. He's a machine. Then, in addition to creating these YouTube videos, we do a fair amount of advertising in the video form as well. We do have video editing handled by our ad person as well, our advertising coordinator. She'll be cranking out content that way as well. Video is great, man. I would highly suggest anyone listening that if you invest in video, you could have a pretty good competitive advantage in the marketplace. Stephanie: I completely agree. Video is where it's at. How do you make sure that your videos and your content is found? A lot of people create some really awesome stuff and then be like, "Now what? I've only had one view on it," or, "I don't know how to get people to view this video, and then take the action that I want afterwards, which is, probably, buying one of the products that I'm highlighting?" Eric: There's two answers to that. One answer is you pay for it. Really expensive, but if the content is truly remarkable, for instance, when I shaved my beard off, we filmed it. We created a 45-second ad on YouTube. To get exposure on YouTube through their advertising system, if the video is engaging, it's extremely cheap. I think we're paying a third of a penny per view. Stephanie: Yeah, that's cheap. Eric: A million impressions was, I don't have the calculator in front of me, what does that look like? Stephanie: Something great. Eric: Yeah. It's astronomically inexpensive. At the same time, you may not be targeting the right people. Now, organically, I think YouTube is going to be the platform to go, because of how they recommend videos. It's a little more evergreen than Facebook. There's certainly opportunity on Facebook and Instagram, but I'm not as strong on how to perform there. It comes down to, in the early days, the reality is no one's going to watch your content. You think that sucks, but the reality is it's awesome. Maybe, you'll have one person or two people or 10 people watch it. Then, you'll get a couple of comments. Well, you'll use those comments to get your content better and better and better. Then, by the time you've built a larger audience, you've kind of figured a lot of these things out, so you're not really damaging your audience. You think what you create is great, but the reality is it's not. Stephanie: I agree. Eric: [crosstalk] will be shared. By creating and by doing, you get the hang of it, you get more natural in front of the camera, or you get more natural on the editing process and telling the story. As you learn, it compounds on itself. If you're thinking about getting into organic video on YouTube, then plan on having, really, 20 or 50 videos that you want to produce before you really even see any kind of traction. I think it took us three years before we got 10,000 subscribers. Then, again, it compounds and you learn and create more content. You create more content faster that's more in line with what people want. Then, all of a sudden, we're able to grow to daily content and getting 10,000 subscribers a month. It takes time and it takes learning. There's a lot of insights in YouTube that you'll need to learn as well. Stephanie: I think it's really good as a reminder to kind of detach yourself from the content, because when you put something out there, it's like, "It's my baby. That was my best one yet." I remember when we were starting our company, the first couple of episodes we did on Mission Daily, Chad and myself, it didn't get any downloads. It's a brand new podcast. No one had heard about it. We didn't know how to grow the podcast at that point. I remember thinking, "That was my best episode yet. I'll never be able to do something that good again." Now, I look back on it. I'm like, "I'm very glad no one was listening to those episodes because they were not good and the audio wasn't great." It's just a really good reminder to put stuff out there more in the learning phase. Then, eventually, you can move into the really trying to find those subscribers and followers, once you get to the point where you're a bit more experienced and you've tried a bunch of things out. I love that. Eric: Yeah. So much of it is just the process, for a podcast, making sure you can line up those guests and you can post it early. That's hard work. It's easy to get the first one done, or maybe, the first couple and queue it up, but to also record and organize and plan is a very big challenge. Those are the things that you'll be solving when your audience is small. Then, as you solve those, that allows you to grow your audience. Stephanie: I agree. When it comes to solving problems when you're small, when you got the visibility from, I think, you said New York Times, and I think I read Shark Tank, when you got that visibility, were you ready? Was your website ready, your product ready, your fulfillment strategy ready? How did that go when you got those bumps in visitors? Eric: New York Times drove about $900 of sales. Stephanie: That's huge, just kidding. Eric: It actually is. I think we had $100 worth of product. It was nine times our inventory. Fortunately, we were able to solve all that. You have a lot of growing pains, I think. This is my first successful business. I had no relationships. We didn't know where to get our wooden boxes made. We always dealt with supply chain issues. Really, the first two years, as we were growing rapidly, it was just always like a fire was being put out. Then, eventually, we moved to quarterly planning, which has helped significantly in managing our inventory. Stephanie: What was the Shark Tank experience like? I haven't talked to anyone who's been on there yet. Eric: Oh, no. I'm your first breaking your show. Stephanie: Yeah, you're my first. Eric: That's virginity. This was 2014, I believe. Yeah, it's got to be 2014. Halloween 2014 is when the episode aired. A lot of things may have changed since that time. I know Shark Tank was really popular at that time. A lot of people were watching it. It's a very stressful process, because during the whole campaign, not only 80% of the people who go through the whole process are going to end up on the show. You could end up investing a lot of energy, a lot of time. You could pay a lot of money to build out this fancy display case. You could fly out there, step away from the operational needs of your business in a time where your business really needs this stuff. Then, do all that and not make it there. Eric: We always knew there is a good chance that we didn't make it there. Subsequently, we didn't put too many resources into Shark Tank. We kept our display stand, I think, we paid $300 to rent some furniture. Then, we put out some products there. It's just me going on show. It wasn't my business partners, so they could kind of focus on building the business and I just kind of focused on the Shark Tank pitch and stuff like that. Then, you get up there and it's stressful, not just because of pitching to the Sharks, which is how they make the show seem, but also knowing that whatever you do is recorded in front of seven million people. If you make a mistake, you're like, "Seven million people want to know about that." Stephanie: It's replayed over and over again, and reruns. Eric: Yeah. And, fortunately for us, I feel like Shark Tank, they did a pretty accurate representation of how I felt the conversation was. They're cutting down 45 minutes to seven minutes. They're trying to craft a story in seven minutes. Then, the hard part is all five of those sharks, they talk to you all at once and you don't know that on the show coming in. They all ask you a question right at the same time. When you see the people pitching and they're looking all over the place, it's just because five people are talking at once and they're just trying to figure out who to talk to. Stephanie: Wow. Sounds very intimidating. I do love Shark Tank, though. I hope to try and find your episode and see if I can watch it. Eric: Yeah, do it. It was a fun experience. It was like how your heart can race and go on through a roller coaster. It was really that. The whole time, it's just like the adrenaline is pumping. I'm not very good with words. I'm kind of dyslexic. I'm just hoping I'm not saying anything too stupid. I think it was a great experience all over. I think what they're doing for entrepreneurs is great, too. Stephanie: I completely agree. In early days, were you completely selling on your website? How much of it was selling direct to consumer versus wholesale, versus, maybe, utilizing Amazon would your sales strategy look with your brand? Eric: We've done a little bit of everything. We started off direct to consumer. We actually started off, as I said, as a simply an e-commerce retailer. Another people's products in the early days, until we're able to develop our own products. As we were able to get traction, we had passively, companies like barber shops and salons and pharmacists who would want to sell our products. We would kind of sell to these smaller retailers. It was never a core focus of us to bring on wholesale retailers. Eric: Then, we would get on the Amazon. This was the early days of Amazon. Hindsight is 2020. We probably missed a fair amount of opportunity on there. We really always focused on selling on Beardbrand.com. Amazon was never more than 10% of our sales. After a couple of years, we ended up pulling off of Amazon completely. You can't get our products on Amazon now. That's been a great decision for us. Then, we also brought in Target as one of our wholesalers. That happened 2018. Today, we're about half the retail and half direct on Amazon, and on any other market. Stephanie: Very cool. How do you think about separating yourself from your competitors? Not that I watched the beard space often. I don't have a beard that I know of, but I have seen a lot of beard oils coming on the market and just things focused around that. How do you separate yourself from the competitors, especially since you're an e-commerce site and you don't have a bunch of retail locations or not in a ton of places? How do you show that value on how it's different from other products? Eric: The reality is, you're always going to have a competition. If you have no competitors, then your competition is ignorance. We've kind of always embraced competitors and knowing that we're going to have competition in the sense that it's going to force us to elevate our game and provide such an amazing experience to our customers, that they'll have no option other than to go with us because we are the best. With that mentality, we've also come to terms with certain things, like we're not going to be the low price product on the marketplace. If that's the game you want, then we're not going to be a good fit for you. Eric: We try to be really clear about the value that we bring and the things that, maybe, we're not great at. There's always going to be trade off. To us, I think we do a great job because we bring all that value to our customers. Like we talked about earlier in the show, the content marketing, the education, the blog articles, the email flows, the YouTube videos, the customer service experience, the unboxing experience, I think, all of those things are what makes Beardbrand a different company and why someone would want to buy from us. If they're just some dude who doesn't really care and they just want whatever's cheap, then Beardbrand probably isn't going to be the best product for them. Stephanie: I like that idea of being upfront with, "Here's what we sell. If you don't want quality, then, maybe, go somewhere else to find something different." Do you market differently based on that? Eric: To be fair, there's other quality products out there as well. I don't think there's quality products out there that also do the education, that also do the packaging, that also do the customer experience. There's so much more to a business than what's in the package or what's in the box? I think a lot of companies get so focused on their product. Anyone can rip off your product. They can exactly copy your product. They can come down to an exact tee. Then, if that's all you're standing on, what do you have there? Then, it becomes a race to the bottom for the price. Eric: When you build a business, you have to think beyond your product. You have to think about, "How can I really bring value to my customers that is beyond the product?" The product alone is not going to do it. Stephanie: Got it. I love that. How do you think about building better business models for other e-commerce companies? I was looking at, I think, on Twitter, you had an experience with West Elm. I guess they had marked down a table. You kind of went through how e-commerce companies need to figure out how to develop better business models. What is your advice around that? Maybe, you can highlight that experience a bit, because I didn't read the whole thread. Eric: Yeah. A little background story. I bought that table, that table I'm actually using for my podcast studio. 25 days later, they put on a sale where I could get the exact same table, but it cost me 75 days, or excuse me, $75 less. As a consumer, that's kind of frustrating, because you kind of feel like an idiot for not waiting out. I would have waited 25 days to save 75 bucks. Personally, I don't think that's a good experience. I recognize they're doing sales, they're doing weekly sales, and some sales are better than others. To me, I feel like, have some kind of policy in place where, within a certain time frame, whatever you feel is appropriate: two weeks, a month, two months, whatever, that you can guarantee the offer that you're giving to them. Eric: It doesn't even have to be a money back guarantee. It could be a store credit guarantee. Then, I think that's going to encourage a lot more confidence in the consumers. Also, consumers will be more likely to buy from them again, because if you have the alternative where you're just like, "I know you screwed; you missed out on this one; you already bought it," then, it's like, "Well, next time, I'm just really going to wait. I'm just going to wait until I know there's an incredible deal," or, "I'm just not going to buy at all because I don't want to feel like I want to be made a fool again." Eric: You run the risk if you're running sales all the time and they're not the exact same sale. Not everyone will feel this, but some people will subconsciously be feeling this. There's quick and easy ways to really just guarantee the experience about it. I don't want to tell people how to run their business and their policy. I'm not mad at them. I'm just kind of calling them out that I think they could do better. Then, to be fair, West Elm reached out to me on Twitter and they offered me store credit. Stephanie: That's nice. Eric: You don't want to have to really fight and argue for that. You just want them to make it right. Stephanie: I think that's a good point, though. Also, that big brands are looking to smaller companies and the individual consumer to kind of learn from. That's a really good point of making the consumer feel good after a purchase and not having buyer's remorse. I've definitely had that experience before of buying something and then seeing a discount afterwards, and then waiting the next time, and then there's no more inventory. Then, I just never go back again. Those little moments definitely matter. Eric: Well, then you think about, the whole West Elm experience for me is, I couldn't do a live chat or email them about it. I had to call them. Then, I called them and I was on hold for 25 minutes. Then, after 25 minutes, they pretty much told me I could ship the thing back and then buy a new one, but shipping would not be reimbursed. Financially, it wasn't going to make sense. It's like, "Okay, this is how you're going to do it." Then, as a small company, you think that these large companies have all the advantages because they can buy in bulk and get better prices. Well, a lot of people don't buy based on products. They buy because they want to be able to reach out to you and talk with real person, not be on hold for 25 minutes. Those are the things that I want you to think about as you build your business, how you can compete with Amazon and how you can compete with West Elm and Walmart and these giant companies out there. Stephanie: I love that. What's one thing that you wish online sellers would start and stop doing? I'm asking you this question because I see you're big in the e-commerce community, always talking and highlighting different e-commerce stores. You've probably seen a lot of best practices that sellers do, and some things are like, "You should just stop. That's not good." Eric: Going back, I don't want to tell anyone how to run their business. There's a lot of ways to build a business. It kind of comes down to who your audience is and what they're okay with. A couple of things that we've always avoided is we don't want to do pop-ups. There's no pop-ups. There's no tricks. There's no immediate discounts. One of the things that is a pet peeve of mine is, "Here's a pop-up. Do you want to save 10% on your next order?" Then, they click x or, "Close out of this if you don't want to save money," something kind of condescending like that; or, with the little spin wheel. I think a lot of these has become a little hokey. Eric: The people selling those software as a service thing always claim that they work. We've actually cut a significant amount of our third party plugins, just because it made our websites so bloated. Stephanie: I was reading about that, how quick were you able to get your website down? I think I saw four seconds. Eric: Oh, my god. We were doing a speed test on our old website. The homepage on the desktop, I think it would have been in the 40 range score. Then, I think the mobile side would have been in the 20 to 25 range, the score [crosstalk 00:34:34]. Then, we essentially rolled out a new website template, a new website theme, killed all the third-party plugins. The new speed is now around 77 for the desktop and around 40 or 45 for the mobile. Stephanie: That's great. Eric: I don't know what that is in actual load times, but in terms of data, according to Google, it's a significant increase. Some of our blog posts would take 10 seconds to load. We really just went and found the stuff. It wasn't just the theme, too. We had some images that we uploaded, which were two megabytes in size, something ridiculous like that. It's just kind of like eight years into having a business and a lot of people putting their hands into the business, it gets a little you lose sight of things. It's always good to circle back every once in a while. Stephanie: I think doing that audit is really important, because like you said, after many years, people are implementing their own things without thinking about the long-term strategy of it and how it might impact things. I think, web chat is one thing where a lot of websites have the digital chat, but that increases the website's load time by a ton. Maybe, people don't even fully utilize it. They would rather call or send an email. It's good to just do that audit, I'd say, at least yearly. Eric: We had one of those live chats. I think it presented some issues because, sometimes, a little pop-up would block information or block the "Add to Cart" button. Stephanie: Oh, man. They're like, "I'm just trying to buy and you're not letting me." Eric: Exactly. It's just like as templates get uploaded or themes get updated, things get reverted. We killed it. We no longer have that JavaScript burden of loading. Those chat bots are fundamentally the things that slow down your page load speed the most, I've seen. We haven't seen any drop in conversion rates or sales. Then, in addition to that, the alternative, what we did is we just moved to a phone number that people can text. I think what we're getting is people who are more serious about needing advice rather than just kind of casual looky-loos who see a little pop-up and they're like, "Oh, yeah, da-da-da-da-da." Stephanie: I that, looky-loos. Eric: That's what my mom calls them. Stephanie: That's good. What metrics are you paying attention to most? You've mentioned conversion rates. Now, we've talked about website speed. Are there a certain set of metrics that you pay the most attention to? Eric: Yeah. I'm like your typical A.D.D. entrepreneur. Being in the details on a daily basis is really hard for me. Everything I do is kind of on an ad hoc basis. When it comes to YouTube, the things that we really look at are our watch time and our click through rate. They're going to be the big indications if a video is going to be successful or not. Then, on our website, really, I'm the top level kind of guy, so I'm looking at revenue. I'm looking at orders. Then, on the ad hoc level, I look at how our blog is converting, then, how our traffic outside of our blog, two of our stores is converting. Then, our page speed has been something that's been a pretty big metric for me, lately. Then, there's so many other more metrics that I should be looking into that I'm fortunate that we have team members who are looking for [crosstalk 00:38:09]- Stephanie: Do that for you. Eric: ... email performance and how those are doing. Stephanie: Is there any themes around either video content that you put out or blog content that you've seen, certain types of videos? Maybe, funny ones convert better or more how-to blog content converts better. Any best practices around releasing content in a strategic way that will actually create a future buyer? Eric: Our strategy is to leverage YouTube's organic growth. To do that, you need to have the viewers want to watch more of your content and stay on YouTube. The strategy isn't really so much of, "Hey, buy this," or, "Be aware of this." It's more of get awareness of the brand. We try to integrate a lot of branding on our videos. We put our taglines on every video, to keep on growing and change the way society views beardsmen. All those call outs in the lower thirds. Then, we try to integrate product placements in our videos as well. It's just bringing awareness to it and not driving people off the YouTube. Eric: Subsequently, when you do that, you're less concerned with any kind of direct sales that you're getting from videos. One great plugin tool that we've used on our Shopify store is called Grapevine. Grapevine allows you to have a simple one-question survey that you put at the end of after they've purchased. We use that to say, "Hey, how did you first hear about us?" We have about 20 different options, from Shark Tank to our YouTube channel to various YouTube personalities. We found that 40% of our customers have first found out about us from YouTube. Eric: Being able to attribute that any particular video, we can kind of segment it a little bit. 18% of it is from our barbershop videos, which was a fair amount. Beyond that, you just kind of have to trust the process. Stephanie: Got it? Do you find influencers in the space? When you're talking about having these barbers do these videos, do you find someone who already has a following? Do you kind of create that following organically through under your brand? Maybe, it's someone that no one would have ever known about, but you just know that they're a great personality to do the video? Eric: A little of both, I would say. One of our most or one of our longest tenured relations, well, we've got a couple of long tenured relationships with influencers, Carlos Costa. We reached out to him back in 2013. He's been with us kind of since then as an influencer for the brand. Then, he's grown to make videos for us. Then, he reached out to Greg Berzinsky, who at that time, I think he had, maybe, 20,000 or 30,000 followers on Instagram. He's a big believer in the brand. Eric: We try to find people who really love your brand, who love the products, who love what we're doing. It's just easier for them to be excited about it. We also try to work with smaller influencers, those who are, maybe, still getting established, or who have a following because they're not influencers. Tobias van Schneider is another one. He's another business owner. He's got other businesses. He's not making money from promoting products. He's more likely to talk about our products and not ask for compensation, which is something that you need as a bootstrap company, to be able to make your dollars go far. Eric: It's been a little bit of that. Then, we have had employees at Beardbrand who are like, "Hey, man. Get on camera. Talk about this. You've got a great beard." They've done that. We've done a little both and have had success and challenges and both processes as well. Stephanie: That's very cool to experiment with all those different types of models. I like the idea of having the employees be the influencer. I know that a lot of companies in Asia are doing this. I haven't seen a lot of companies in the US fully utilizing that model of creating micro-influencers within the company, and then developing their own followings. That's just a nice organic way to do it. Having someone who is an actual expert on the product without being too salesy, because they're not a salesperson. Eric: We try it, too. If you look at our Instagram account, the Beardbrand account is replying to comments, you'll always see Sylvester. He's replying to him. He'll sign his name, or whoever's replying to a comment. On YouTube, they'll sign their name. We're totally in favor of get to know our people, get to know our copywriter, Mike, and get to know our growth marketer, James. Eric: Again, we talked about how you compete with Amazon. Amazon doesn't have a James. They don't have a Mike. They don't have a Lindsey. They don't have a Jordan. They don't have Chandler. But, we have those people. The more we can help them get to know the team. Then, the risk is if you just work with one person within your company, then, that person could hold you hostage or quit or leave or getting a DUI or do something like that. If you have 10 or 20 different people on the regular who you integrate into your content, then, in the natural course of business, as people move on and things change, then, you'll still be able to move forward. Stephanie: In a world where everything is becoming automated and you always know you're talking to bots, I think it's actually nice how certain business models are kind of flipping that. You're mentioning about developing a relationship with the person at the company where you are used to seeing the same name and you kind of are developing an Internet relationship with someone at the company that you trust and grow to love. I like how that model is kind of reversing a bit over the past year. Eric: Sylvester, who I mentioned, that's his full time job, is he runs a community. His responsibility is to build those relationships. He's heading up our private forums. He's putting on these events. He's interacting with people on Twitter and Instagram. As they chat on Twitter, and as they chat on YouTube, and they see the same name over and over again. They start to learn about him. Eric: In our emails, we'll have a photograph of him. We'll talk about him. We'll talk about the style. People will start to trust his input because, obviously, me as the founder, a lot of videos or a lot of views to those videos, a lot of people want to come and talk to me, but I can't interact with 40 people a day and still run the company and have sanity, really. Well, to scale up what I bring, and not only that, Sylvester's got way more incredible style than me. He's a lot more empathetic than me. He's able to really provide these people great advice in a way that I cannot. It brings a lot of joy to me to be able to offer that to our audience, and also, that Sylvester is able to do what he loves. Stephanie: That's really fun. To zoom out a bit, go a little bit higher level, what kind of digital commerce trends are you most excited about that are coming down the pike right now? Eric: Probably, the thing I don't follow too much is the trends. I feel like we just kind of fall into them. SMS is something that a lot of people are talking about, and something that we've actually been doing for a good half a year now. We do it in a way that, I think, most people aren't doing it. Most people see SMS as just another channel to market and throw sales and discounts. That drives consumers crazy. If I see someone marketing to me on SMS, I'm just like, "You're dead to me." How we're using it is as style consulting. You text us, send us a photo. Stephanie: That's good. Eric: SMS is perfect for that because you got your phone there, take a selfie, send it to us, we can tell you where you're trimming your beard, how your neckline is coming in, what your hairline looks like, and what kind of hairstyle will work for you. I think that's an excellent way to use SMS. It's funny. Once we started using SMS that way, the company we work with, Emotive, they actually changed their whole marketing position to be more about style consultants and beauty consultants, and things like that. Stephanie: That's funny. Eric: I want to take full credit for that, but I would like to say we had a little bit of influence in the way that they're selling us on this. I think that's better for the consumer as well to be able to connect with them on a one-to-one kind of consultant basis, rather. Stephanie: How do you make sure they stick with your brand? I can see them, maybe, not having the expertise, like you're talking about, how you're trimming your beard wrong, or what kind of product you need, because of whatever they see in the photo, how do you make sure that they stick with your brand guidelines and make sure they're speaking in the way that you want and they're recommending things correctly and not giving bad advice? Eric: This goes back to our core values, which are freedom, honor, and trust. Part of the hiring process is making sure that we hire people who align with these core values. Then, it's not blind faith with trust, but through experience and interactions. I know Sylvester. I know his style. I see him show up every day in the office and what he's wearing and how he's behaving and how he communicates. It's like, "Dude, man. Go at it. Be yourself." Our brand standard is communicate to our customers in a way that you communicate to your friends. Those no corporate speak, nothing. Eric: If you're a goofy guy, talk goofy. If you're a serious guy, talk serious. Be yourself. You are going to have different experiences. Interacting with Sylvester is going to be different than interacting with Matt. They're two different people. That's totally okay. Stephanie: That's great. Are there any other channels that you're utilizing or looking to utilize over the next couple of years? Eric: For us, our goal has been, again, going back to me being an A.D.D. entrepreneur, you try a little bit of everything. The past two years has been fixing all of my A.D.D. new channels that we've been in. We killed Amazon. We killed selling in the Europe. We've cut marketing channels. It's really how do we get better at the channels we're in? How do we get better at Facebook marketing? How do we get better at Instagram marketing? How do we get better YouTube content? Eric: Like I said, we have a newer, smaller YouTube channel that we're trying to grow and build that awareness. In terms of just completely introducing anything that we've never done before, like TV advertising or radio advertising or podcast advertising, we're going to be staying away from that until we feel like we've completely capitalized on the opportunities of the channels we're currently in. Stephanie: That makes sense. I think killing projects and platforms is a good first step to making sure that you can focus on what's actually working to, then, move into a new channel around the tryout. It sounds like a good strategy to me. Eric: I'll tell you, it sucks, though, when you kill something and then you don't get better at the thing you're supposed to get better at. Stephanie: Yeah, that's a big bummer. Eric: We've done that. Stephanie: That happened a few times? Eric: Yeah. When we pulled out of Europe, Europe was about 20% of our business. We did this March 31st of last year. It was about 20% of our business. The intent was with the new focus of not having to deal with multiple fulfillment centers and different time zones and multiple stores and things like that, that we could get really good at serving our customers. Subsequently, 2019 was a terrible year for us. We weren't able to capture the lost sales that I thought we'd be able to by having more focus. We've had to really analyze. It wasn't so much selling into Europe. That was the thing. I think it was more of the internal structure of our team and kind of red tape that got put in place after seven years of business and systems and processes that kind of built up on itself. We should have taken an axe to all of that, rather than, maybe, potentially taking an axe to the UK channel. Stephanie: Got it. Is there any big initiatives that you undertook that you were like, you talked about internal processes and structures, is there any one thing that led to kind of riding the business back to where you wanted to go after the whole shutting down Europe? Eric: Yeah. Transparently, we had the worst fourth quarter we've ever had. It was a bloodbath. We were just losing a significant amount of cash and just burning through cash. We just had to make hard decisions about the business. When you're hemorrhaging money, you're not profitable, we had to scale back to 15. A leaner team means, "Hey, we're no longer going to have people proofing your work anymore. You're going to have to be responsible for your own work-end. You're no longer going to have someone who's kind of being the quarterback of the marketing team. You have to kind of interact directly with your audience, or your coworkers." By scaling back the team, you were almost, by necessity, forced to cut a lot of that red tape and focus on getting stuff done. Stephanie: Super important. All right. At the end of the interview, we'd like to do a lightning round, which is where I ask you a question and you have under a minute to quickly answer whatever comes to mind. Are you ready, Eric? Eric: I am electrified. Stephanie: Woo-hoo. All right. What's up next on new product launches coming to Beardbrand, if any? Eric: Our big thing is killing scent confusion or ending scent confusion. We want to provide head to toe fragrance and matching products. We don't have anything in your midsection. That's a little hint of a product that will be coming. Stephanie: Fun. I'll have to stay tuned for that. What's up next content or video-wise that you're excited about producing or creating next? Eric: We want to systematize our barbershop and winding in five different barbers and record over the course of a week, which would be a new way for us to perform. I can't wait to do that, but, this whole quarantine has got to end first. Stephanie: That sounds really fun. What's up next on your reading list? Eric: I hate reading. Stephanie: Podcasts, audible, anything? Eric: I hate reading. I'll tell you I just finished the book called Rocket Fuel which talks about integrators and visionaries. It was the one book that I've read over the past year. I'm just going to piggyback off of that one. Stephanie: I don't like it. What's up next on your Netflix queue? Eric: Again, man, I just had a baby five weeks ago. Stephanie: Congrats. Me, too. Eric: Oh, no way. Stephanie: Yeah. I had twins eight weeks ago. Eric: Oh, poor you. Stephanie: Poor us. Eric: It's got to be crazy, right? We're in the quarantine. Stephanie: Yeah. No Netflix for us then, huh? I don't know. I watch Tiger Kings in my off time when they're sleeping. Eric: My answer is a lot of primitive survival type of videos on YouTube. That's my go-to content that I consume. Stephanie: That's great. All right. A little harder one, what's up next for e-commerce pros? Eric: I think there's going to be a move away from Amazon from both a consumer perspective and a seller perspective. I think Amazon is really kind of twisting the screw in a lot of people. There's going to be a little bit of blowback from that. Stephanie: Completely agree, especially with everything going on right now where Amazon's picking what products are essential. I think they just said that they are going to be optimizing for its margins. Instead of showing people, maybe, what they want to find, they're going to be showing people products that have higher margins. I can see that also happening. Eric: They're also neutering a lot of people in the affiliate space where they just literally cut their commissions in half. Stephanie: That's not good. Eric: [crosstalk 00:54:51]. Stephanie: Well, it sounds a good prediction, then. Eric: Yeah. Less people will be pointing links to Amazon, I think. Stephanie: All right. Any final words of advice or wisdom, Eric, that you want to share before we hop off? Eric: The big thing I always like to tell people is, in life you always have doubts and questions about what you need to do. The reality is you need to just go out there, execute, and do it. Action, a lot of times, is better than no action. Just go out there. You know what you need to do. Go and get it done. Stephanie: Yes, do it. All right. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Eric. It was a blast. See you soon. Eric: My pleasure.
“What will my customers like and buy?” The timeless retail question today is answered with enterprise-grade purchasing, inventory, and sell-through analytics for big box sellers, but not SMBs. SMBs have long made these decisions with their guts and intuition. But what if a marketplace powered with those same analytics could enable small shops to purchase with the same information? Faire has discovered this opportunity is worth $1 million in sales per day, and growing. Faire is a wholesale marketplace that helps retailers find and buy wholesale, while also connecting makers with physical stores or businesses. and it was built using a data-first model that evens the playing field for those small shops. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Marcelo Cortes, the Co-founder and CTO of Faire, joined us to explain how the company got started and the steps it took to reach the billion-dollar valuation it boasts today. Much of the success is thanks to Faire’s ability to analyze data and iterate based on what that data tells them, but it is also built on a sense of community between makers and buyers, who have been able to find each other in a world filled with outside noise. Key Takeaways: Implementing personalization throughout the buyer & seller journey is key when setting up a two-sided marketplace You need to have a message people understand quickly that really resonates with them Being able to iterate quickly and build on the go allows you to be more nimble and capitalize on data you are collecting to create a better business and experience For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible eCommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Hey everyone, and welcome to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles. Today, we have Marcelo Cortes joining the show, the co-founder and CTO of Faire. Marcelo, how's it going? Marcelo: It's great. It's great to be here, thanks for inviting me. Stephanie: Yeah, thanks. It's fun having someone, you said you were in Toronto, or a little bit north, right? Marcelo: Yeah, that's right. Our office in Canada is in Kitchener-Waterloo, which is about an hour from Toronto. Stephanie: Cool. Do you ever make it out to the San Francisco area? Marcelo: I do in normal times, I go very often. I usually go there once a month. Stephanie: Next time you're around, you'll have to stop by our studio and we can do an in person interview. Marcelo: Yeah, that would be great. I hope that can happen soon. Stephanie: Yeah, I hope so too. Fingers crossed. I would love to hear a little bit about Faire, and your background and role at Faire. Marcelo: Yes, of course. Faire was founded in 2017. Me, Max and Daniele are the co-founders, the original co-founders. Jeff also started the company with us, but he left and came back after a few years. Faire is a wholesale marketplace. We help retailers, basically mostly physical stores, brick and mortar, find products to buy wholesale. Then on the other side of our marketplace, we have all the brands or makers on our platform that are selling products, and we help connect those makers with the physical stores. Stephanie: Very cool. The makers reminded me, in a way, of the Etsy makers that normally would never be able to have their products in a large retailer, like a Nordstrom. Is that accurate? Marcelo: Yeah. We are somewhere in between Etsy ... I would like to say there is a little bit of intersection with Etsy, but a little bit a level above as well, where we do have smaller manufacturers or makers that have a small operation, but we also have some more sophisticated ones that have warehouses and things like that. Stephanie: Cool. How did you think about creating Faire? How did that idea come about? Marcelo: Yeah, it's an interesting story. Max, who is our CEO, back in the day after he graduated from school, he was working on bank consulting. He was always an entrepreneur by heart, so he was always trying to do businesses on the side. A friend of his asked him if he was willing to try to build a business of selling a product or distributing a product in the United States. The product was actually a physical umbrella, a rain umbrella that was manufactured in New Zealand, called Blunt Umbrellas. It's a very cool umbrella. It has cool shapes, cool colors, doesn't break with wind. He was like, "Yes, let's do this on the side." Marcelo: That's when he learned how the wholesale industry works, especially in North America. He searched on Google, how do I start selling products, or how do I distribute products wholesale like everybody else does? Basically, there were a few ways. You can go find sales reps or hire sales agencies to have all the sales reps trying to sell your products. You have to go to trade shows. He did all of those things. Eventually, he got this company to be successful distributing the product in North America. But at the same time, throughout all this process, he couldn't stop thinking that there's a lot of areas here that could be improved with technology. This whole market is really in the dark of technology. Marcelo: Years later, we met at Square. We all worked at Square together for four or five years each. Combining the expertise we had there with dealing with small businesses with this idea of, how can we really add technology to wholesale distribution, make it better? We finally came to the conclusion that ... we found the data that's available online as well on products, and on makers and on retailers, we could put it all together and build this idea that could add a lot of value to everybody in the industry. Stephanie: That's awesome. Were there any technologies or insights that you gained while you guys were at Square that you took into the business when creating Faire? Marcelo: Basically, there isn't anything .... technology that's advanced. There were combinations of many smaller things. For example, the fact that if you think of a small store, a brick and mortar store that might have one to five locations, which is usually our target audience, they're trying to compete with much larger brick and mortar stores, big buck stores, or with eCommerce. They have no data. If you think of Walmart, they have data on all their products. They know what sells well where, what time of the year. The little store, they're buying products basically all by intuition. They see a few products, they look at it and they have to make a decision whether they're customers are going to like it or not. Marcelo: We realized that we can actually build something that will give them the ability of having the same type of tools that much larger businesses, or big buck stores, or eCommerce platforms have, to make much more well informed decisions on what products are going to work well in their stores. On top of that, another thing that we learned a lot of course at Square is how to deal with underwriting the small businesses. We helped Square do Square Capital, which is the landing program that they have at Square. Part of that process, we learned a lot about how do you decide how much credit to give to a store like this? That's also part of what we do. Marcelo: As a store comes into our platform, we give them the ability to buy products that they can pay 60 days in the future. We give them credit to buy products, and we allow them to return any of those products if it doesn't work. So, basically- Stephanie: Yeah, that's huge. When I saw that you all did that, I'm like, wow, I don't know how you make that work. But not only giving store owners credit and saying you don't have to pay me right away, and you can return products? I haven't heard of anyone else doing that. Marcelo: Yeah, that's how we are combining and adding technology to this ecosystem to make those things possible. We have to do our job well to be able to offer these value propositions. We have to make sure that we are recommending the right products to the stores, and guiding them into buying the right amounts as well. We can't just let them buy way more than they would be able to sell. We should be steering them away from products that we don't think are going to perform well in their store. If we do that part of the job well, the other part is also making sure that the makers or brands that we're onboarding on the platform are also very high quality and good, so that, again, the products that we are selling have a much higher chance of performing well in stores. Stephanie: How did you build that platform to cater to different types of clients? I can see the one person in Arizona making bracelets versus the larger person who's used to fulfilling large quantities, because maybe they've sold on other platforms before, and then different sized retailers. How did you build a platform that caters to all of them? Marcelo: Yeah, it's a very hard problem. That's another place where technology is used to our own advantage. We need to be very good at serving customers differently, and providing a completely customized experience to different types of stores. That's what we do. That's why data science is so important for us, and we have a very strong data science team tackling this problem of ranking and personalization. The reality is, we really treat each customer differently. Every different store that comes to our platform, they have a completely different experience. If you are a store that sells gifts, you're going to see a lot of gifts. The more we learn about you, the things that you like to see, the search that you make, the products that you sell and you buy from us, the more accurate we get at serving you products that will connect well with your store. Marcelo: But what we can't have, for example, in our platform is that you are a store that sells apparel mostly. You come to our website and all you see is candles, or back products or things that are completely disconnected from your business. From day zero, we have spent a lot of time and effort making sure that we have data, and we are very data driven, and we are building a very custom experience for every different person that comes to our website. Stephanie: Yeah, that seems super important because it can be really easy to get lost when there's tons of products, and you're automatically seeing the wrong one to start with. How do you gather that data on, especially a new customer who's never bought from you before and they're coming on for the first time, how do you have any data to even know what to show them? Marcelo: Yeah. Sometimes it's hard. Sometimes we can't do it and we have to start with products in different categories, and then start to learn as they navigate the website. But there are things you can do in advance as well. Even a brand new customer ... they usually have a reason why they came to your website. A lot of those reasons are they were recommended by somebody, they clicked on a link somewhere. If they come from an ad, it's very easy to know what's the ad that they clicked on, and we at least have some idea of what caught their interest. Obviously we have too this mark into serving things or products that are related to what are where they came from. If they clicked on an ad for a candle, we're going to show them similar types of candles, or of course that same candle that they clicked on. But we are also trying to show, oh, here's some apparel categories as well, or here's some best sellers in a different category. Marcelo: Again, we have to show relevant data, and then show enough of other types of data that we can give them a chance to tell us more about who they are and what they are interested in. Stephanie: Got it. Then most likely, I'm guessing you encourage that sign up process, so then you can learn more and more about them. Then you can recommend products even further after that? Marcelo: Exactly. As they sign up, we have some quizzes. We ask them for more information. We keep adding and changing how we do that, of course. But we will try to do a Netflix style, like, what are the types of products that you're interested in, or categories? How big is your store? Things like that. The reality is, we are in 2020. Every little store, brick and mortar store, they have a presence. Once we learn who they are, what store they are, we will find if they have a website, and we will learn more about them by looking at data that we can see online. Publicly available data that's on the internet as well. Stephanie: Got it. Yeah, that's so cool. I saw that you leveraged machine learning and AI to recommend and show these retailers what's going to do well in their store. How do you know what would do well in San Francisco versus Washington DC? What do you utilize to help teach the retailers what they should and shouldn't buy? Marcelo: Yeah. That's obviously part of our secret sauce. There isn't- Stephanie: You don't want to share that with me? Come on, Marcelo. Marcelo: No, I can share it for sure. It's just ... there isn't a very easy answer. It's not like, oh, if you're in San Francisco it's for sure that you're going to sell candles very well. But there is a lot of input and a lot of signals that we gather. I can give you some examples that make a lot of sense and they're very obvious. For example, we have so many stores on our platform today. There's a lot of correlation. Remember I told you Max was selling those umbrellas, Blunt Umbrellas? Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yup. Marcelo: Even from his time selling those umbrellas, he realized and he learned very quickly that there are correlations between products as well. If there is a store that sells well the umbrella, there are some products that will also sell well in that store. They could be completely different categories of products. It could be a watch. It could be a sunglass. But the customers that are usually interested in this Blunt Umbrella, which is a high end umbrella, are also going to like and very likely buy products that are in a similar style, or similar type of high level upper cost product. Marcelo: Imagine now instead of one umbrella, we have millions of products that we sell, and we get data back from these stores. We know what's selling in each one of these cuts because they're buying it again from us. So we start to be able to correlate things. You can have a gift shop in New York, and you're selling three products that are very similar to a store in San Francisco. Now you add the fourth product, and that product performs very well in your store in New York as well. It's very likely that that store in San Francisco will also have that fourth product performing well. Stephanie: Got it. That's really cool. Have you ever thought about running on the side a point of sale system that you can put in the store, so then you don't only have access to the stuff that's sold from Faire, but then you have access to their entire inventory and catalog? Then you really have full insights into what's happening in that store, what sells together. Then you can even recommend things at, I guess, a better pace? Marcelo: Yeah, 100%, we have thought about that. Stephanie: Are you doing it? Did I already uncover more secret sauce? Marcelo: Maybe. What we do today, of course we don't have our own point of sale system today. But what we do is, we integrate with their point of sale systems. Stephanie: Got it. Marcelo: We add value to them if they connect their point of sales with us as well. For example, imagine that you are a small store and you just placed an order for 20 products. Then next week, you're going to receive all those products in your store. You need to start selling them right away, but you restore all of them in your point of sale. So it takes time and effort. You need to type in the prices, the descriptions. You need to upload photos to the point of sale system. If you were a store that gave us access to your point of sale system, we do that completely automated for you. As you place an order, as soon as the order arrives in your store, all the products automatically show up in your point of sale system. Stephanie: Got it. Yeah, that's definitely- Marcelo: Of course with that, we get some more data from the point of sale that we can help with recommendations as well, and learning more about what performs well in your store. Stephanie: Cool. Yeah, that's awesome. When you started out, did you build your eCommerce platform from scratch? Or did you buy and eventually move everything over to custom? What did that transition look like? Marcelo: Yeah, that's a good question. We actually built everything from scratch, and we built it on the go. On the early days, we started ... and we went to Y Combinator in San Francisco. When we were accepted at Y Combinator, it was end of 2016, I was still working at Square. Max had left already. Daniele was still working at Square. We basically quit our jobs at Square, and we started Faire in January, 2017 at Y Combinator. We had nothing built. We had this pressure that three months later, we would need to do a Y Combinator demo day presentation to thousands of investors, and we needed something to show. Usually the companies that join Y Combinator, they have been doing something already for a year or two, and they get there to try to scale their business. We started from scratch. Stephanie: I was going to say, that's ... well, maybe it's not unheard of now because I think they do accept a lot more people now. But back in 2016, if you didn't have an actual product, you probably weren't going to get accepted if they couldn't see something. So that's awesome. Marcelo: Yeah. But then what we had to do is build it on the go. That's also a lot of how ... it dictates a lot of how we operate today and through the history of the company. We have always been very data driven. When we started, of course we knew this idea of let's let people try the products before they buy. We told Max, we're like, "We really believe in your idea, but let's prove that people really want this." Marcelo: Again, without any technology or any website, we went into stores that Max had contacts with because he used to sell the umbrella. We told them, "Listen, we are going to give you products that we think are going to do well in your store. You don't need to pay us. If you sell the products, you pay us. If you don't sell them, we will come back and pick the products up." The stores were like, "You just want to give me free products to try to sell? We're going to do it, for sure." Stephanie: Yeah, no brainer. Marcelo: That's how we validated the idea. We also got lucky because we had no idea what we were doing when it came to picking products, so we just bought random products. Turns out that one of the products we bought, it's called Pyropets. It's this candle in the shape of animals. When they burn, the skeleton of the animal shows up. Stephanie: Oh, that's awesome. Marcelo: Yeah, it's pretty cool. Stephanie: I need to look that up. Marcelo: It's very cool. They have many different animals. That was one of the products that we gave to the store in San Francisco. The feedback we got from the store right after was that, "Listen, I would never have bought this candle to sell in my store. But since you gave it to me for free and I could try it, I put it on the shelves," and the candle happened to become one of their best sellers. Stephanie: Wow. Marcelo: That's when we saw, okay, there is definitely something here, especially if we can use data to find actual good products, not just random products that we picked on the internet. From that point on, we started to build the experience on the go. Very quickly, we built a website where people could place orders. They would see products and place orders. Everything in the background happened manually. An order would be placed on the website. Basically, people would be able to add products to cart and check out. We didn't even collect payment information. We weren't even charging people. We would deal with payments later over the phone. Stephanie: Oh man, that's great. Marcelo: Yeah. We would get an order. We had one contractor that we hired in the early days, he would be in charge of calling the manufacturer and placing the order over the phone. He would call the maker and be like, "Hey, just got an order. Five Pyropets to be shipped to this store in San Francisco. Here are the details. Here's our company credit card, we're going to pay for this order." There was no automation, nothing else built behind the scenes. Again, we kept building it on the go behind the scenes very quickly. Marcelo: Fortunately, there are a few good things that happened with our company. Very quickly, we found product market fit in the summer of 2017. We started to grow a lot. But by that time, we had automated all of this process. We financial managed to build all the technology so that all this order placement with the makers, and the fulfillment and everything, was fully automated. But it was really like building the train as the train's going forward. Stephanie: Yeah. But a lot of people ... some of the best advice is do things that don't scale in the beginning. That's how you learn what you actually need to build on the backend, instead of doing it all upfront and realizing, oh, that's actually not even how the seller or buyer interact with our platform and now we need to redo it. Now you guys are valued at over a billion, right? A billion dollar valuation, or higher, probably. Marcelo: That's right. Stephanie: That's insane. Congrats, that's awesome. Marcelo: Thank you. Yeah. Stephanie: When you were setting up your website in the beginning, is their any best practices, either setting up the buyer side or the seller side where you're like, we've seen this work really well on the buyer side of the platform? Or these types of ... setting up the eCommerce like this, or having certain pop ups or anything? Anything that you would recommend to someone who's looking at starting a marketplace, or improving the marketplace that they're already running? Marcelo: it's very hard to learn without doing it. We didn't have any facts. We never built a marketplace or an eCommerce platform before. What we did do is, we moved very fast and we built very simple things. We spent a lot of time scoping things down. We thought we had very good intuition that something is going to work. Of course, eCommerce is a problem that's figured out today. There is many very successful eCommerce platforms that you can see how they do things. We always looked at the successful examples when we built our things, and then we tried to build our own version of it. We built the simplest thing possible. We all talk about building the simplest possible thing, but we really tried to do it. We spend time removing anything that would be essential, but we managed to build things that would add value. Marcelo: We built things very fast. We launched things very fast. We gathered information on how people are using it very fast. Then we integrated a lot, improving the experience with our learnings. Many times, our intuition was wrong, and things that we built were not the right things, and we shut it down. But at least we didn't spend a lot of time doing those things. Stephanie: Was there anything that you shut down that you see a lot of other store owners using right now where you're like, oh, we saw that didn't work well, you might want to look into that on your store? Marcelo: Well, it's hard to know what is not working for other people. It might not have worked for us. There is one very interesting thing. It's not really, I think, we'd do it. But when we were in the early days trying to finding product market fit, our very first idea for Faire, as I told you, we walked into these stores and we told them, "Just keep this product. If you sell them, you pay us. If you don't, we are going to take them back." This is pretty much a consignment system. That's what we wanted to build. That was our very first big mistake, I think. We were very sure that we could build a successful consignment eCommerce platform where we would connect to the point of sale systems in the stores, and we would know when they sell something, and they would pay us when they sell. They would keep things, I don't know, until they don't want them anymore. Marcelo: Turns out that the word consignment, the term consignment is really ... people really dislike it in our market. They think of consignment as products that nobody can sell, and they are willing to give it to you for free to try to sell it for them. Stephanie: Yeah. That's what first comes to mind when I hear that word. It's like when you go and you can sell your clothes to a company, and they're like, "Well, we can either do consignment or we'll just give you money upfront." You're like, oh, I'd rather just have money because I don't want to take that risk of you not being able to sell it because you bury it down in a bin somewhere. Marcelo: Exactly. It turned out that whenever we told people consignment, they ran away from us. We couldn't understand it. We're like, it's a good thing, we're giving you very good products. We've built this machine that finds good products, and we'll let you carry them for free. Then we changed our message. We started to call it try before you buy. We're like, listen ... we completely erased the word consignment from our vocabulary. We were like, "This is try before you buy." Stephanie: That's great. Marcelo: You get the products, you have 60 days to pay. Within those 60 days, you can return anything. If you sell, great. Basically, we didn't change much of the consignment idea, but it completely changed how customers understood our business. Stephanie: Yeah, that's great. Such a good lesson too of how little things like that can go a long way, and how just doing those simple tests could really help your business completely transform into a way bigger one if you stop using certain words that maybe are throwing someone off, that you're so deep in the weeds you didn't even realize it. Marcelo: 100%. There is this, of course, concept that people talk a lot of, product market fit. But in this case, there's this other concept that people don't talk much about, which is the message product fit. You need to have a message that people really understand quickly what you're trying to do, and it resonates with them. Stephanie: Yeah. You guys would have to have two different messages, one for the buyer, one for the seller, and not try and make them both be the same, I'm guessing. Marcelo: 100%. The way of selling Faire to a maker or a seller is much different than the way we sell to the stores or buyers. Stephanie: Do you have different teams focused on that messaging? Because it seems like it'd be hard to where different hats where it's like, one second I'm trying to think how the buyer things, and then I'm going to shift over and think how the seller thinks. Is it different teams, or the same one working on all of that? Marcelo: Yeah. Today, it's completely separate teams. Sales teams, ops teams, everything is completely separate. The market team is the same. The messaging is one team that creates both. But how we deal with them internally in operations and sales is completely separate teams, and also product. There is teams building products for the makers, and there is teams building products for the retailers. Stephanie: Cool. That's awesome. I saw you guys had a podcast that you just launched, and it made me want to ask a little bit about your content strategy. What was the thought behind launching that podcast and the goals behind it? And what kind of ROI you're looking at for that project, if any? If you want to talk a little bit about that, that'd be great. Marcelo: Yes. The podcast was also part of a thing that we wanted to do for a while. But our customers, even though we are online, our customers are not online. We are dealing with offline local retailers, and they love community. That's one of the initiatives that we're trying to build, to help them with community, to listen to each other's stories, to learn from each other's mistakes and connect them more. It was especially important to launch it now with this whole COVID-19 era. People need more information- Stephanie: Yes. Yeah, perfect timing. Marcelo: We rushed it out at this point to really get more data and get more information. And really, to support more of the retailers and makers in this time that they really need it. Stephanie: That's great. Marcelo: Yes, thank you. For me, I love listening to it. It's so ... I am motivated to listen to our customers stories, and how they are struggling or how they are being creative to deal with these issues. The feedback I have seen so far has been amazing as well. People really love listening to each other's stories and hints. Again, they see that other people are also struggling, they're not alone in this. They feel more connected. So far, the feedback has been amazing. I personally love to listen to these stories. Stephanie: Yeah. No, that's really fun. I love anything like that that shows I'm not the only one in the struggle right now, and then that you can bypass any future struggles that maybe you don't have to go through if you hear someone else detailing it. You can skip right over it, if possible. Marcelo: It's called Brick and Order. Stephanie: Brick and Order? Marcelo: Yes. Stephanie: Is it on Apple, Google, everywhere? Marcelo: Yes, it is. Stephanie: Cool. Yeah, we will also link that up in our show notes so people can find it. Marcelo: Thank you. Stephanie: Because it sounds like it's a good one. With the pandemic right now, and putting out different types of content and all that, how have you had to shift, if at all, your business model? Because I'm assuming what people were coming to buy before COVID-19 is very different than what they're coming to your site to buy now. How did you have to think about shifting not only what you were maybe recommending, but also what you were suggesting to stores who are probably, a lot of them closing down right now? How did you make that transition or shift? Marcelo: Yeah. COVID has been very big for our company. It hit our customers really hard. Our customers, of course, are small stores. Most of them are still shut down at this point. It was a big transition for us as a company, as well as for our customers. We are this high growth startup that has been adding more customers on both sides of our marketplace very quickly, and a lot of our focus is on growth and adding value to these stores. Suddenly this happened, and we had to shift focus very quickly. Marcelo: The first thing we did when this whole thing started to happen is, of course, to take care of the employees and making sure that everybody's safe. We started working from home very quickly, I think seven weeks ago. Then very quickly, we shifted focus to, okay, now how about the business? Very fast, we had to change from this high growth mindset, sell, sell, sell, to how do we help our customers get through this pandemic? For us, we are a well funded company. We have a lot of money in the bank. It's easier to, again, slow down and survive for whatever it takes, a few years, a few months. But we were really worried about our customers. We're like, what's going to happen with these small brick and mortar stores or the small makers around? Marcelo: We started collecting data. That was the first thing we did. We ran surveys with thousands of makers and retailers on our platform to understand their financial situation. We were asking things like, do you have money in the bank to be shut down for two, three months? How is it going to affect your business? We collected all of this data. We of course shared the aggregate of the data with the community, with everybody on our marketplace. Then we changed focus very quickly to try to help makers and retailers do the right things for them to survive. There was so much confusion on what's going to happen, so much information all over the place that they had a hard time, and they were all overwhelmed with it. Marcelo: We tried to inform them. We tried to guide them on what are the right things to do right now. We changed our focus from growth to helping our customers survive this pandemic. We built tools to help them apply for the government relief funds. Stephanie: That's great, much needed. Applying for that was crazy. Marcelo: Yeah. We tried to help guide them through it and help them understand all these programs. It's a lot of legislation, a lot of language. We tried to spend hours ourselves learning about everything, and writing it in a very simple way that they will understand it, and they know what applies to them and what don't apply to them. We built financial calculators so that they can understand what are the things they need to do? Do they need to renegotiate rent? How can they reduce expenses so that they can basically survive longer with the funds that they have? Marcelo: Then the next thing that we did is really, okay, now another way of helping stores survive this is helping them adapt to this new world. First thing we did is help stores and makers, makers that could sell essentials, they could make different things, or they were already making those different things that were essentials. We started to help them focus on that. For stores, the same. We're like, listen, you might not be selling gifts right now, but you could be selling masks, you could be selling hand sanitizers. You could be selling other categories, like food, that's still in high demand. We definitely changed recommendations. We guided people into adapting their business into this new world. Stephanie: Wow, that's great. Did you see the makers be be able to shift and adapt quickly, or what did that look like when you were recommending maybe tangential things, but also maybe something that hey hadn't focused on before that. Marcelo: Honestly, it really impressed us at how resilient our community is, our customers are. Most stores, especially small business owners, they have survived for so long against brick and mortar stores. They survived Amazon, giant online eCommerce, to keep their business operating. So they are also surviving. They're being super creative on how they change their business to survive this pandemic. Stores, of course, struggled more than makers because, again, they were completely shut down, and some of them didn't even have access to go to their store. Makers adapted much faster. Some of them already had wide presences, and they just had to switch more of their traffic to online. But the stores also were very resourceful. They are really trying very hard to survive. They are doing a lot of the things and following a lot of our recommendations as well. Stephanie: That's awesome. Yeah, that's so great hearing how you shifted everything you were doing to focus on how to help them, give them the tools that they needed that didn't exist in the marketplace, because who knew that this was coming down the pike? What were some of the top learnings from the survey that you sent out that you heard? Because something that comes to mind I just heard about was that apparel retailers, smaller ones don't have more than two month often times of cash on hand to keep them going. What were maybe some overall themes that you got from your survey that maybe you were surprised by? Marcelo: Yes. At the time, and remember that the survey was done over a month ago now when this whole pandemic really stared, but I'll tell you some of the numbers and the things that we learned here. Stephanie: Yeah, I would love that. Marcelo: 76% of the retailers only had enough capital available for up to three months of operating expenses. Stephanie: Wow. Yeah, that's crazy. Marcelo: At the time, and I'm pretty sure this has shifted a lot since then, but at the time only 30% of the retailers had anything with regards to selling online. Stephanie: Some of that seems hard to believe. It makes you realize the importance of surveying someone and not just going forward with assumptions that you have about them, because I would've never thought the numbers were that high. Marcelo: Yes. We keep trying to survey them more often as well to see how it's changing. Other things that we learned was that 45% of retailers, they were already connecting with other businesses. Again, trying to build more community, learning more from each other and sharing information. 41% of the makers at that time had already started changing or reprioritizing their product assortment. Stephanie: That's good, being scrappy entrepreneurs. Marcelo: Yeah. Of course, we adapted. We started launching and selling a lot more face masks. Today, we have already over 200 brands that are selling face masks on our platform. The masks that we sell, they are produced in the United States by local makers. Most of the products that we sell are actually today still made or partially made in the United States. With the results of the survey, we tried to also create a lot of educational content to help everybody else learn about what's happening and how people are shifting their focus to try to help more of our customers to do it as well. Stephanie: How are you getting the word out about that educational content? How do you bring traffic to the content you're making? Marcelo: Yeah, there is a few ways to do it. Of course, we very often email all this information directly to the customers on our platform. We have two blogs. We have a blog for makers, we have a blog for retailers. We have community forums for retailers and we have a community forum for makers as well, both on Facebook at this time. We also have hosted a few webinars that had almost thousands of people attending at the same time. Stephanie: Oh, very cool. How do you see the webinars paying off? Do you see people enjoying that? Do you think that's a good use of time? What have you seen perform the best? Marcelo: We got amazing feedback from the webinar. People oversubscribed. We actually had a hard time dealing with all the subscriptions because ... the platform we were using was not ready for the amount of people that showed up. Stephanie: That's a good problem to have. Marcelo: Yes, always a good problem to have. But me, being the CTO and having to deal with the technology makes my life harder. Stephanie: What did you do to have to try and quickly ... Marcelo: We used to platforms at the same time, and that accommodated all the traffic. But yeah, people came back and they watched again and re-watched it. They shared it a lot. Webinar is not a thing that we have done a lot, but we are definitely going to be doing more of it. Stephanie: Yeah, that's very interesting. With everything that's happening now, what kind of digital commerce trends or patterns do you see coming down the road? Especially because you're so close to retailers and makers, it seems like you guys would have a good idea on what the future could look like if you had a crystal ball. How are you maybe thinking about what the future looks like, and how to adjust Faire based on where you think it's headed? Marcelo: I really wish I could ... Stephanie: Come on, Marcelo. Just tell me the future. Marcelo: I had a crystal ball. Of course, we can't tell the future, but we can pay attention to how fast and what direction things are going. It's obvious that everybody's trying to do things differently online and remote. How that's going to affect makers and retailers too, yet to be seen. I think honestly, from my own personal experience and from the platform, there will be a lot of behaviors that will change, that we do expect to change, but they are for the better. For example, curbside pickup is a thing. I don't think it was nearly as popular as it has become. I think it is going to be a thing that will stick with us. People do enjoy the ability of buying something, and whenever they have a chance, they go and grab it. Marcelo: I think for our platform specifically, that's going to become a very powerful thing. Because now, as I said, we launched this shop neighborhood. We can get consumers to find cool products online that they would never have found otherwise. They will find all these stores around them where they can go and find those products, they can buy it online and go pick it up. Not only go pick up the product that they bought, but they can also see all the other products in the stores, and actually meet the people that are selling this in person. That's one thing that people already loved in local shopping. They like the experience of walking into a shop, and talking to the owner and listening to the stories of the makers or the products. Stephanie: Yeah, that's how eCommerce started. I think back to, I don't know if you watched this, Marcelo, but Little House on the Prairie, huh? Any fans of that? They would basically, the shoppers would go into the store, and they would talk to the store owner and say their problem. He would go in the back and figure out exactly what they needed, and then would check back in with them to make sure it solved the problem. It's getting back to the roots of Little House on the Prairie days. Marcelo: Yeah. My prediction if I had a crystal ball here, if I were to make a prediction for the future is that, what this is going to change is that it's going to make the relationship between online and offline stronger. There will be more intersections. There is a world in which you are both online and offline at the same time, and that's the wold we're living in. We have been getting to this world slowly by having only online interactions and only offline interactions. I think what this is really accelerating is the merge of the two where you have both online and offline experiences with the same companies at the same time. Stephanie: Yeah, I definitely can see that happening. Are there any digital transformations or tech transformations you see necessary to make that happen? Marcelo: I think the technology, a lot of the technology already exists. Of course we have all this video technology, video chatting, video broadcasting. They have been available for a while now. But the applications of these technologies are going to change a lot. Again, another thing that we are working on, I feel like I'm here just marketing the things that we have been doing, but- Stephanie: Hey, that's all right. I'm sure people can learn from it. Marcelo: Another thing that we are working on is a product that will allow people to connect virtually, the same way that they have been doing offline. Think about it as the experience of a local market where makers are going to just be able to show videos, or have a live experience where they connect directly with many or very few of their customers at once, in a private or public type of meeting set up. Stephanie: Got it. To deepen the relationship that maybe all was virtual, or through just emails or just ordering, and you never know who's on the other side. You're trying to enable that relationship more kind of in person, but virtually? Is that how to think about it? Marcelo: Exactly. It's hard to give you more details yet, but we are going to be launching it this summer. Stephanie: That's great. When it comes to thinking about digital transformation, I know earlier you said that you would look to successful examples of other companies, of how they set up their eCommerce stores or strategies they were utilizing. That was the early days. Is there anyone now that you look towards as a leader when it comes to digital eCommerce, or someone that you're following closely where they have best practices that you guys like to keep tabs on? Marcelo: I don't think there is one company. I think, of course, coming from Square, we look a lot at Square and what they have been doing. But I think our platform is special in the way that we combine these local stores, these local relationships into an online global marketplace. I think of our platform as being or having some intersection with Pinterest, for example, which creates a very nice experience for people to navigate through things that they are interested in. We as a platform, I want our customers to enjoy this experience of finding products. Our customers, if you think about it, they start at a small store because they love to find products to show people, to sell, to show their friends. To be able to get these type of people to shop online, we need to create an enjoyable experience for them as well. They need to come to a website where they enjoy navigating, they enjoy looking at products. We're going to show products that are always relevant. They can keep diving deeper into a category and finding new, cool products that they like. Marcelo: Again, it's not just looking at eCommerce, but looking at what are the platforms that are offering the best possible experience that really get people to be hooked onto them? And trying to merge it all into our own platform. Stephanie: Yeah, I love that. I think that's such a good reminder that just because maybe you sell clothing, you shouldn't just look at other clothing companies. You should maybe look at how food companies are doing it, or like you said, looking at Pinterest and how they display images. Trying to just tap into completely different verticals to then pull those best practices up into your company, I think is super smart. All right. We have a couple minutes left. We always do a lightening round at the end where you answer a question in a minute or less. I was thinking about starting with the harder one first, and then doing the fun ones afterwards. How does that sound? Marcelo: Sounds good. Let's try. Stephanie: All right. All right, Marcelo. It's your job to stay ahead of tech and expectations and competition in the industry. In your expert opinion, what's up next for eCommerce pros? Marcelo: Oh, I need to think. This is a hard one. Stephanie: Yeah, got to start with the hard one first. Then we get to the fun ones. Marcelo: Yeah. Answering from experience, of course, that's very important. That's Faire. eCommerce is not just about showing products anymore, or letting people navigate through categories of products. The future of eCommerce is really a very customized, personalized experience. Data science is mandatory for successful eCommerce today. Stephanie: Yup, completely agree on that. All right. What's up next on your reading list or podcast list? It can be your own podcast, if you want, the Brick and Order. Marcelo: It's definitely our own podcast, talking about podcasts. I have enjoyed it so much. It inspires me to keep doing my work. The next book that I'm reading, I have just started, is Finding Genius, which is VC related. It's not really eCommerce, but it's pretty interesting. Stephanie: That's great. Yeah, exploring different industries and verticals. That's what it's all about. What's up next on your Netflix or Hulu cue? Marcelo: I have just been watching random things. I haven't had much time to watch TV lately with all the things we have been doing. I finished watching The Vikings on Netflix. That was the last series I watched. Stephanie: Very cool. Marcelo: After that, only random movies that I just find. They might even be old movies. There's nothing exciting. Usually I fall asleep if I start watching it. Stephanie: Hey, that can be a good way to slowly drift off to sleep. Marcelo: Yes. Stephanie: Once you can leave your cottage in Toronto, what's up next for travel destinations for you? Marcelo: Oh, that's an easy one. I was just about to grow on a cruise. Stephanie: Oh, where to? Marcelo: Actually, I was considering going on the cruise when this whole thing started. Max and Daniele were telling me, "There is no way you're getting to a cruise ship right now." We were going from New York all the way to the Caribbean and back. Stephanie: Oh, fun. Well, hopefully- Marcelo: I'm hoping to do that at some point in the future. I was really excited about it. Stephanie: Yeah, I hope so too. All right. Then the last one, what's up next on your shopping list? It can be tech stuff, it can be something you saw on Faire that you're like, I want to try and order that. Groceries, anything. Marcelo: On Faire, I have been ordering a lot of things. The next thing that I want to buy is a drone. Stephanie: A drone? Okay. What kind of drone are you thinking? Marcelo: As I am at the cottage, that's why I want to buy a drone. As I have stayed at the cottage since this social distance has started, I would love to have a drone that I could use to explore the forest around us here, and maybe find some of the animals that are around. Deer, and rabbits and things like that. That's next on my shopping list. Stephanie: That's fun. Well, maybe all the COVID stuff has a little plus that is making you explore different hobbies that you didn't have before. Marcelo: Exactly. Stephanie: All right. Well, this has been a really fun interview. Everyone go check out Brick and Order after this. I know I'm going to do that. Marcelo, thank you for coming on the show. Marcelo: It's my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.
For those not in the know, The Mars Agency is an independent agency that combines the best of technology with the best human intelligence to provide solutions to businesses throughout the world of retail and eCommerce. And one of the Martians who leads the charge at Mars is Amy Andrews, the SVP Business Development & eCommerce. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Amy walked us through all the trends she’s been seeing in the eCommerce industry, including the changing consumer behavior, the rise of omnichannel experiences, and why companies that can crack the code of using voice plus video technology could see a huge payoff. Key Takeaways: There is an opportunity to merge eCommerce and influencer content in order to make a more relevant and personalized shopping experience The amount of data in the eCommerce world is overwhelming and can lead to losing the humanity of the work, which Mars tries to avoid by having a blend of the best technology and the smartest humanity Voice shopping still hasn’t reached its tipping point, but there is data that shows that voice technology is growing in the world of eCommerce For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible eCommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce, this is Stephanie Postles, co-founder of Mission.org and your host of this lovely podcast. Today we're joined by Amy Andrews, SEP of business development and eCommerce at the Mars Agency. Amy, how are you? Amy: I'm doing well Stephanie, how are you doing? Stephanie: Doing great, yeah as great as can be. So, when I heard of the Mars Agency, I saw that you called your, was it your customers or your employees Martians? Amy: We call our employees Martians, very lovingly. Stephanie: Oh man, I love that. I was trying to think of a name I wanted to give our employees, but nothing comes close to that. Tell me a little bit about the Mars Agency and how all that came about. Amy: Sure. So the Mars Agency has been around for over 45 years, started by an amazing woman, Marilyn Barnett, and really our focus has been on marketing to shoppers over that last, almost half a century. And Marilyn was really a pioneer in this space, she used to be when she started kind of the grocery model who would hold the box of laundry detergent as people walked by. And really just, yeah, and talk about women in business. She was just such an interesting leader and saw that as a marketing opportunity for brands at retail, and started the Mars Agency. And we have a long history in shopper marketing, and shopper marketing is really just marketing to shoppers so, as that has evolved and how people shop has evolved, we followed them and led them to all those different places. Stephanie: Got it. So are you working with large brands to kind of teach them the trends in the industry and how to market to, like you said, the shoppers, is that how to think about the Mars Agency? Amy: Yep. We work with a lot of large consumer package good clients so, like Campbell Soup, Nestle Waters, several others across top retailers. So Walmart, Target, and for me in the eCommerce space, Amazon is definitely a huge player. Stephanie: Okay, cool. And what is your day to day look like there, what is your role look like? Amy: So I lead our eCommerce team, which I mentioned some of the retailers but we really work across all eCommerce retailers and digital platforms. If you think about things that some of you probably use more recently than others like Instacart and other delivery services. We help brands market to their shoppers in those spaces, and really anywhere that you can buy a product online. Which used to be physical stores would convert it online, or your kind of Amazon, Pure Play retailers, and now as I'm sure you've experienced definitely, there's a lot of different options to buy online as you're scrolling through. Instagram you can shop now and kind of always be almost we're moving towards one click away from a purchase in any environment so, that's really what my team focuses on, for our clients, how do we help them market and ultimately sell more online? Stephanie: Got it. Has everything with COVID-19 kind of adjusted your strategy of what you're advising your clients to do? Or what kind of shifts have you made when it comes to that advisory role? Amy: Yeah that's a great question. I think we have seen a lot of data as this, sadly continues for us. But it has definitely had a huge impact on the eCommerce space, particularly for grocery, since a lot of our clients are the CPG packaged clients. We've seen online grocery projections in the last couple of weeks reach what we thought they would be in 2025. So there's been, yeah huge growth in this space, and a lot of new users to this space so, we know that's out of necessity, but again as this kind of continues, we think that a lot of these people, like 60% of people tried a delivery service for the first time in the last six weeks. That's a ton of new people who are buying new groceries online and, yeah there's been a lot of experience as I'm sure you've heard with, not being able to find what you want, or having slow delivery time- Stephanie: Yeah. Being out of stock of my favorite matcha tea, very disappointing. Amy: Out of stock, yes. Which is a little bit easier to deal with than toilet paper but- Stephanie: Yeah, I guess. Amy: I guess it depends on where you are on both with your supply but, no we've had ... Yeah, a lot of people are having to make different choices and having to try things but as this continues, I think people are forming new habits, and even new preferences, so it's definitely influencing how we're advising our clients and where they should invest. I think what's also interesting is because of a lot of those issues, a lot of our clients and a lot of retailers have just put their marketing on pause, to make sure that they can get things in stock, and for retailers to make sure that they're not price scourging or kind of promoting things in the wrong way that would send the wrong message. Amy: So I think what will be interesting long term is, some retailers and brands kind of catch that, and once they have products in stock, once, even Amazon this week has fixed some of their Amazon Fresh delivery issues. As those things start getting worked out, I think they'll be a lot more interesting marketing opportunities, especially as you think about all those new users, either to a retailer or to a brand. I don't know if you bought a different tea brand when you couldn't find yours. Stephanie: I did, I did. Amy: Yeah, a lot of people are having that experience right, so then it's like how does that new brand try and keep you and then how does your old brand try and get you back? So we're definitely working with our clients on all those types of questions. Stephanie: Got it. Do you think clients should be turning off their marketing budgets? As you mentioned, a lot of them are doing that right now, do you think that's a good strategy, or should they till be maybe thinking of ways to experiment because this is a whole new world, it might be actually a good opportunity to kind of experiment a bit without offending people if possible? Amy: Yeah, no, I think ... Yeah, I think it is a bit of both. I think initially, not just marketing but a lot of businesses and industries, just kind of paused to figure out and make sense of what was going on and determine what they should do next. And I think that was, probably a smart move at the time, just to not make any rash decisions. But we're definitely partnering with our clients now on, what is the right way to market. I think one of the trends that we'll see is probably a lot more regional and geographic differences. Like we in the Bay Area are still sheltering in place for another month. So, online shopping here will be very different than other states that are opening up. Amy: And, marketing to those people might be very appropriate now, and I would definitely recommend testing and trying things in that space. Stephanie: Got it. Amy: So I think it's going to have to be a combination. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. Do you see the companies you work with coming to you with similar struggles? Like other themes that you're hearing and any advice around some of those struggles that they're experiencing? Amy: Yeah. I think a lot of the marketing struggles, or just some of the struggles on a more macro level of just the unknown, especially in terms of timing and how long it will continue. And then we kind of have some of the same issues in terms of data, you know there's so much out there, like when you turn on the news, you see so many different stories and different points, sometimes it's kind of hard to determine what are the right guidelines, or what's the right data that you should follow. So, we're really treating this as an ongoing conversation with our clients. And it does differ by geography, it does differ by category or industry. So, I think taking a really custom approach and being able to adapt now, and have a strategy where you're also able to easily adapt moving forward, is going to be really important. Amy: We typically do annual planning with our brands, and we've already been talking, you know we're already in the stages of re-planning but, I think re-planning will be something we do all year now, I don't think it's kind of the pre COVID plan and the post COVID plan, I think it's going to be continuing to adapt. And the brands and retailers that are able to evolve in that way are probably going to be the most successful. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. It seems like a good time to kind of pivot in certain areas, cut projects that aren't, maybe as necessary, and thinking in a completely new light based on everything that's happening. What kind of things do you see being cut or changes be made in these re-planning sessions at these companies? Amy: I mean, the big question now, which the Mars Agency is tackling with our clients is, what might come back in-store and what might not, in terms of marketing and planning around that? There's the kind of legal or even not legal, but kind of the official guidelines or restrictions side of things, in terms of how people shop and how many people can enter the store at what time. But then I think there's also a very real consumer behavior piece of it. So, one thing that has happened in stores and that a lot of our brands being food brands, we've done is, things around sampling and trying new products. And whether that's a cooked piece of food outside of a wrapper, or a sealed up new product, I think in both of those cases, I don't know if for myself, and if I think about other shoppers, I don't know how eager we're going to be to take either one of those samples now. Amy: So, we're trying to rethink things like that that have been really traditional vehicles to encourage trial, how do we think about that in a new way? Either if that's a re-plan in terms of, what do we do with those dollars and invest them in something else? Or what I think is maybe more creative and exciting is, how do we think about sampling in a new way? Or how do we think about demos in a new way? And that's where we really see the in-store and the eComm world kind of colliding, and really creating some of these omnichannel is the word that we use a lot. Stephanie: Yeah. Amy: Omnichannel experiences, so that we're moving towards that anyway, and I think COVID has been an interesting tipping point to, as you said, kind of pivot and think about these things, and push ourselves to think about them even more differently now, to deliver the best shopper experience. Stephanie: Yeah, it seems like it could be with everything bad that happened, maybe a good forcing function to kind of push some brands into the eCommerce world who maybe weren't fully utilizing it before, or not at all. Do you see them being able to adapt to some of these changes that you're recommending them or being able to shift something that they've always been focused on selling in-store, always focused on someone having that in-person experience, like you said, whether it's a sample, a demo, have you seen them be able to pivot on to eCommerce, or being open to that, or even having the technology to do it? Amy: Yeah. I mean I'm pretty optimistic, so I think yes, I think all brands can do this and adapt and pivot and do so relatively easily. I think that was a big question before all of this, and the crisis was just how quickly should each, brand based on their category, be moving into this space? And a lot of brands were over-invested in eCommerce because they felt that that was going to be the future so they're a bit of a step ahead. And that doesn't mean that other brands can't catch up but, I think COVID has just been a kind of internal tipping point for a lot of organizations to think about how they're treating eCommerce and maybe prioritizing it a little bit differently. Amy: So, yeah for brands or companies who weren't thinking about it before, I would definitely say, now's the time. And, because the whole industry and the whole world is really shaken up, it's a great time to think about how you're treating eCommerce differently, and then within the eCommerce space, what we can be doing differently there as well. Stephanie: Got it. Is there anyone that you ever looked to in the industry, where you maybe point your clients in that direction of being like, hey, here's an industry leader when it comes to the checkout experience, or the shopping experience, or the unboxing, or anything like that? Anyone that you guys kind of look to as like a leader in the space? Amy: Yeah, that's a great question. I think there are a lot of examples of brands or retailers doing, I would say pieces of the puzzle really well. The one that comes to mind for me as someone who is creating a really holistic, best in class experience, is actually a retailer. I think IKEA does a phenomenal job in this space, in terms of just digital experiences. They have different digital technologies, and apps and platforms, and AI, and all of that, that is really just helping recreate the experience of going to an enormous, huge physical retail destination, I mean, I can't think of a more traditional shopping experience than kind of browsing through those huge displays in IKEA. Stephanie: So many levels, at least here in Palo Alto. Amy: Yes, definitely. I think of like a huge retail footprint that they've had to translate into a digital experience. There's one now where instead of IKEA saying, what's the best .com site or digital catalog? They are thinking what's the best shopping experience? And now you can as a shopper, walk through an IKEA store, through virtual reality, and pick different products, and then also using AI to see them in your own bedroom. So I think they've just done a great- Stephanie: Oh wow, that's awesome. Amy: ... Job. Yeah, I think I've just done a great job of thinking about it a little bit differently, and kind of doing it in a fun way that that's the biggest piece for myself as a shopper as well, that's sometimes missing from the online shopping experience. It's so convenient, and there are so many wonderful, wonderful benefits that come along with that. But you do lose kind of the fun of shopping, and browsing around, and I think IKEA has done a nice job of bringing some of that physical experience in a fun, very branded IKEA way, to their shoppers digitally. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. I think sometimes people forget that it's not just shopping and trying to buy the thing, but really, like when I go to IKEA, it's my day. It's a whole experience, I'm ready, I'm prepared, I've had my snack, and I'm ready to go through every single setup area to like look at their bedroom, and see how they set it up, and look at this living room setup and incorporating VR into that shows that they know exactly why their customers, at least customers like me come there, is to be able to experience it like I'm actually there. So yeah, that's great. Are you advising other companies to kind of, not only think that way but maybe moving into technologies like that, that they weren't utilizing before? Whether it's VR, or AR, or any of that kind of stuff? Amy: Yes. And I would say just even more broadly, we're advising our clients, and working with a lot of our clients right now on, how do we create the best digital content that's going to be relevant for an eCommerce shopping experience? So, yes that could be an amazing VR IKEA type experience, or that could be a six-second video on a product page, that tells you exactly what you need to know about the benefits of this new water that you're drinking. So I think it's about, what's right for those different brands and, then having that content strategy that then dictates what technology you might need to use to deliver it. Stephanie: Got it. Yeah, I definitely see that shift of a lot of companies, brands, turning into kind of their own media companies when it comes to producing their content, and focusing heavier on that, and not just on a paid strategy where maybe that's been, how it's been for a couple of years. Amy: Yeah, I think I've also seen brands, hopefully, using technology to deliver experience instead of just kind of using or testing, technology for technology's sake, or to have something new. So, it used to be QR codes, and then maybe some AR that just, is just kind of there for the fun, cool factor, that's interesting. In some cases, it's kind of fun, but I think if you're just doing it for the tech's sake, and it doesn't deliver a consumer, or a shopper benefit, it's really a fad and kind of dies quickly. So, we're always trying to think about, what's the need first, and then what can we use to deliver against that? Stephanie: Yeah, it's good to flip that mindset when it comes to that, because yeah I can think of, especially QR code, that's a good example. I've seen random places it's on there, like a cereal box or something that delivers no value, and I don't actually want to even see what's behind that QR code, it seems like it was just placed there because everyone was doing it. So- Amy: Right someone told that- Stephanie: ... You definitely- Amy: ... Told that marketer, "You need a QR code." And they checked that box. Stephanie: They did it. Amy: Yeah. Stephanie: Have you, when it comes to content, I know a lot of brands right now like you said, are focused on that and trying to make sure they get, of course, new customers in that vertical, and also make sure they put out great content. Have you seen any best practices with their clients around like you said, short product videos seem to really increase conversions where you know, like something on YouTube, if you've never been on YouTube maybe isn't the best way to go? Is there any themes around that? Amy: Yeah. I would say generally we always start with what's going to be the right message for the type of media, or for the type of tactics. So, you mentioned YouTube, that's obviously a very different format than say Pinterest, who's also having quite a moment with everyone at home looking for inspiration and recipes, and all of that. Obviously, that type of content you would develop for that would be very relevant to our brands, but also relevant to that platform and what we know people are looking for there. Yeah, I think we're definitely moving towards kind of more bite-size, or smaller content formats, in general. So definitely short format, we always give the example of, you don't want to have your 30 second or 67, 60 second, excuse me, TV spot and just use that everywhere, on your eCommerce sites or on your digital media more broadly, we want to be tailoring it for the environment. Amy: I think another thing that we're trying to do a lot more of now, in terms of a trend, is how are we leveraging influencer and user-generated content in a new way? So, if we talk about relevancy, especially in the eComm world where reviews are so important, and the new mom, you might go on and you're testing the reviews of a stroller, or a really important product for your baby more than you trust advice from your own parent, or from your mom peer group even right? So, people play a ton of influence on that, especially in the eComm space. So, thinking about how we merge eCommerce and influencers, has been really interesting and we've been working with our clients on taking influencer content from a particular shopper since we're in that space. Amy: So, how do you leverage Walmart influencer content on walmart.com, and Amazon influencer content on their site? And in doing so, you create an even more relevant experience for the shopper, because not only do they have those product details and reviews, but you've kind of put all that influencer content in one place, so they can have more ideas on how to use your products, or just more relevant images and messages based on people like them. Stephanie: Yeah, that completely makes sense. I wonder if right now, with how the market is, if it'll kind of give the wrong signals to companies. Like maybe, you have all these people at home so, if you see content is very easy to get right now, you have people maybe at home who actually want the longer podcast and the longer clips. Whereas after all this starts to calm down, I wonder if it'll be hard for brands to kind of pivot again, if all that reverses. And, all of a sudden there's not many consumers who want to create content for free anymore, and long reviews and, people want those shorter clips, like you talked about. Do you see any problems coming up by brands acting too quickly right now, to kind of pivot to what the environment is now? To then it reversing maybe again in a month or six months. Amy: Yeah, I think that's a good question, and that's why I think, as I kind of mentioned earlier, we're taking a proactive but kind of cautious approach. So, one thing we did for one of our brands was, we just went out immediately and pulled out content that, I don't want to say offensive, because that's almost too strong of a word, but pulled out content that wasn't culturally sensitive. For example, a group of people in a home that was more than 10 people. Stephanie: Got it. Amy: We went in and took all of that content down, you know, just to make sure we were being sensitive, and we were also being relevant. Even if someone wasn't particularly upset about it, and maybe they had no thought on it, but we want to make sure we're giving them the most relevant message of how our brand can be used in their lives. So I think that it is going to be an evolution, it's going to be really interesting to see kind of what behaviors stick. I think bread makers was one of the top terms searched on Amazon, the last several weeks. So, I wonder if we're going to get burnt out on making bread anytime soon. Stephanie: That does sound delightful but I'm like, yeah, I don't know how long that trend will last because, my mother-in-law makes bread, and man is it a process. Amy: Well, maybe she needs a bread maker. Stephanie: I know, she does. Amy: But yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see how much of those are kind of the COVID trends that then people get sick of it, or people want to, I'm not sure, maybe people will want to race back to the stores like you said, it'll be maybe really exciting when an IKEA opens, and you can go back in, and browse around and get your meatballs and all that. And I'm thinking people are going to do that in a different way. And I think that we're going to have to continue to evolve. So, that's what I mentioned about the kind of planning, I think annual planning is dead. I think we're going to be planning over and over again, if that's monthly if we can get kind of more on a routine, or maybe that's just continuous as things change, and as the news changes. Stephanie: Yep, completely agree. So, the Mars Agency has been around for almost 50 years I think, how does the company and the Martians of the company, recognize trends and then act on it quick enough to help your clients? Amy: Yeah, I think, I honestly think that's why we have been able to be around so long. In the marketing and advertising world, we're one of the few independents who's left, we're still family-run, the company is now run by Marilyn's son and Ken Barnett. And I think that having that independence, and having really just a lot of still that entrepreneurial spirit, has allowed us to really adapt as the industry has adapted and, in most cases kind of stay one step ahead. We talk a lot about our Martians, as you said, and really think that there's a balance between, our people and our technology. So, over the years we've, of course, as most industries have invested more in technology and data, and all of that, we've also really balanced that with our Martians and having, what we say is the latest technology and the smartest humanity. Amy: I think some companies, especially in the eCommerce space, because there's so much data there, and so many different tech platforms, I think if you go too far in that direction, well one, there can just be kind of data overload, and you're not able to find the insights and all the data. But two, I think you just lose a lot of that humanity, and kind of that person who we like to be who's saying, "Well, why is that the case? And, what does that data point mean?" And kind of taking it that step deeper, so that we can really understand what the human behavior is because I think that's where you have the best marketing ideas that really resonate with people, instead of just kind of trying to attack a data point. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. Are there certain metrics or data points that you've seen many brands use that you're like, you guys are all using this, but it actually doesn't really tell you much. Instead, maybe you should look at this instead. Amy: Well, because we're focused on shopper marketing and conversion, I mean, our ultimate data point is always sales. So we're always looking at, how many products were we able to sell as a result. Along with that though, you obviously want to understand what other impact you might have had on engagement. Or, in some cases, there are other circumstances that are affecting sales that are out of our control. We, of course, want to measure all the other media metrics as well. I think to answer your question on, are there certain metrics that brands are looking at that they shouldn't? I don't know if I would say you shouldn't look at this, but I think a lot of brands are placing a disproportionate kind of weight in the eCommerce based on their ROAS or their return on ad spend. Amy: And there's just some interesting ... There are some ways that you can get a very high ROAS, and that a lot of media companies or retailers will say, you had a very high ROAS and it's typically because you are reaching people who would have purchased anyway. So I think that's one where, it does beg the question of sometimes having a person or maybe a smarter data set that's kind of suggesting, why is that the case? And digging a little bit deeper to understand the why behind that metric. Stephanie: Yeah, that seems like an easy way for someone to be like, hey, look how great those ads doing when you're like, all those people were already previous customers so. Amy: Right if you're ... Yes, if you're targeting past purchasers, you can typically get a pretty high ROAS so. Stephanie: Yeah, that's pretty funny. Are there any new emerging technologies that you're advising marketers to look at or other like eCommerce platforms that you're telling people to check out? Amy: I don't know if I would say this is an emerging technology, but just in light of all of the changes around COVID, I would say looking more at new delivery platforms or channels. And this is something that, we're just having early conversations with our clients on now. But, there are a lot of what used to be in the world of retail, relatively niche players You see a lot of those platforms having really explosive growth now, kind of during this COVID period. So it'll be interesting to see how that behavior might change over time. Amy: I think we're also seeing some really interesting partnerships, so you can have your 7-Eleven order delivered by DoorDash. Or you can make a reservation to shop at a local store on OpenTable. Again, those aren't new technologies, but I think it's kind of new platforms and new channels that will be really interesting to test and learn as we go, as you're suggesting, and then also as things, hopefully at some point, kind of start to normalize. Stephanie: Yeah, cool. And then how do you think about, I saw on your website that you were talking about getting the most out of voice technology and how to conquer Amazon? Do you think, I know voice technology, it feels like it's been trying to ... It's been like that up and up for a while and no one's really cracked it. Even when I was at Google, it still felt like they couldn't crack it. How do you think about incorporating that into what your clients are doing? And same with Amazon as well? Amy: Yeah, that's a great question and you nailed it. I think it has been growing, we have on my eCommerce team, a dedicated voice specialist has a background in user experience. And, similarly, I think we've had tons of great conversations around voice, we've seen tons of great data in terms of how it's growing, but I don't think we've reached the tipping point yet of voice shopping. I think it's still, some of the data and it'll be interesting again, to see kind of how this being at home more might change that. But, there are definitely different behaviors that have grown with voice more than shopping has. We're still actively pursuing and exploring that with our clients. Mars is the preferred Alexa developer, we also work with Google Voice as you mentioned. Amy: But I think it just comes back to, really the foundation of what we do which is, how can we create better shopper experiences, and voice definitely has the technology to do that. I think it's just about the adoption, especially in the shopping space. So to date, we've worked with our clients on, creating skills that can be useful to shoppers based on their different categories. But I think it'll be interesting to maybe see how COVID changes the voice space as well. Stephanie: Yeah, I could see that becoming useful, especially as the catalogs get bigger of what the brands are putting on their eCommerce sites. It'll be easier if you're able just to tell the website like, I want to find this, instead of having to go through the whole catalog and try and find exactly what you want, and it probably growing by 50% from the time you were there maybe two months ago if they can crack, getting the voice technology to actually work and be seamless, and not an extra step. Amy: Yeah. And then I think another thing that'll be interesting now is just, I even have to remind myself as we're talking because typically we think voice and we think, speaking into the speaker, but with the combination of voice and video. Plus people being at home and maybe wanting more, we know there's been a huge surge in recipe searches for example. I think having the voice plus visual is a different way that brands should be thinking about voice now, and something that we're working with some of our clients on. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. And what about the conquering Amazon piece? I'm only thinking about how that maybe has shifted a lot, especially lately because of everything Amazon is doing of like, only surfacing maybe essential things, and changing shipping times, and maybe kind of burying certain retailers if they didn't view them as essential. I could see a lot of people kind of getting scared about relying on Amazon as their platform to sell from, and maybe moving away from that and trying to build their own eCommerce store on their own, and just do their own thing. Do you see that kind of happening? Or what are your thoughts around Amazon? Amy: Yeah I mean, Amazon could probably be a whole nother topic or hour. Stephanie: A whole podcast one. Amy: Exactly, I'm sure there are millions. But, I think in terms of, we've been really digging into what has this last six or so weeks meant? And where have we seen new growth? Walmart.com in March was the number one downloaded app in the grocery space and surpassed Amazon for the first time. So, it's interesting to kind of see all these stats and you think, oh, maybe Amazon isn't as important. Amazon just still dominates the eCommerce space. Which is why you mentioned, we have it on our website. I would say even as of two months ago, people were using Amazon and eComm interchangeably, almost. Amy: So, it's great and it's exciting to see that, and as we have always advised our clients, we should think about this holistically across this space and across all different retailer dot-coms and delivery platforms like your eCommerce strategy should be comprehensive. But I don't see Amazon ever not being a component of that, at least not in the near future. There are a lot of issues now from a user experience, from a shopping experience, also as you mentioned with brands and maybe being deprioritized for essentials or not being able to market in the way that they have been able to before. But it still really is the lion's share, it's still seeing the most growth during this time period. Amy: So it's not, I don't think it's a place that brands can afford not to be, with the exception of maybe a couple of the really big ones. But I think the idea of trying to tackle eCommerce without Amazon, or without having a strategy around Amazon, and there's by the way, a bunch of different ways that you can do that, it definitely doesn't have to be every brand's number one eCommerce retailer. But I think it probably has to be part of the strategy, just because of the number of shoppers that are using that as their primary eCommerce destination. Stephanie: Yeah, agree. So earlier we were talking about brands creating content, how do you think about the intersection, or what do you advise your clients when it comes to the intersection of content management system, their commerce platform, and their CRM? How do you see that working in their space are any best practices around that or advice? Amy: Yeah, I think, I mean one is to be thinking about the total experiences we've been talking about, and making sure that, no matter what agencies or, in our case, we're oftentimes working with a lot of other agencies either at different parts of the funnel or that the brand is working with for different pieces of their advertising. A lot of our clients are large enough that they're hiring multiple agencies. So I think it's, having IT as planning processes that are very integrated, and making sure you're connecting all the different partners so that you can leverage all of the different content and all of the different wonderful assets. Amy: In terms of, what should the content strategy be, I think it comes back to, what's going to be best and what's going to be needed and relevant for the shopper in that environment. So, we're really working with our brands in the eCommerce space on, how are you creating eComm content that typically doesn't always exist in other brand channels? So, how are you creating content for your product pages with information that people need to know when they're at that point of buying you versus buying a competitor. If you don't have that right content, let's create it, we help our clients map that out on what's needed in terms of assets, and videos, and enhanced content, and all of that. Amy: And then really track that over time to make sure that we're constantly optimizing it. We have a new technology, an eShelf maximizer tool that uses data to look across different websites, and identify across thousands of skews for a lot of our brands, what product pages might have some issues or some areas of opportunity, and then we can fix those right away. And with the retailer's constantly changing their algorithms and limitations, and all of that. This is kind of a huge pain point for our brands so, even though we'll optimize content as brands change their packaging, or new products launch, there's kind of continual issues and continued opportunities to optimize. So we're using technology to make sure that we can stay ahead of that and be really proactive for our brands. Stephanie: Got it. Do you see them being able to kind of manage that in a way that stays organized? Because, I kind of view a lot of brands having their content management as one silo, and their CRMs another one, and their commerce platforms another one, it doesn't seem like they've been able to integrate like, well, here's how our content is affecting our customers and actual conversions. Do you see that kind of shifting now? Or are a lot of your brands already ahead and they're already kind of all intertwined, and they got it? Amy: Oh, I wish that was the case. No, I think, I mean, I think we have silos within the Mars Agency, I think most companies have silos, I think most of our clients would say that they have silos within their companies as well. Unfortunately, I think that is a reality so I don't want to gloss over that picture too much. I think it's about, how do you look for ways to work and collaborate across those silos, for more of a common goal? So, I think eComm has been a silo for a lot of brands today. We've kind of siloed it off and said, let's deal with that separately because we don't quite know what to do with it, or maybe it's still a little bit too new for our brand or company. Amy: And this is really a moment when I think we can be integrating it in, we certainly have done that at Mars. Our team is now integrated with our customer development team. So when we're working on a Walmart plan, it's not the Walmart in-store plan and the walmart.com plan, we're all one team. So I think hopefully, that would be an outcome of this time period is kind of breaking down some of the eCommerce silos. But I think as you pointed out, there's definitely still an opportunity for, I would say most brands, to kind of better connect. I think content and eComm are coming together much more naturally. I think CRM is still a piece that we could, as an industry, probably better connect to some of the other pieces. Stephanie: Yep, completely agree. Have you seen, like what do you think the first step is to that digital transformation? Or have you seen a company really do it well? Is it like start from scratch, throw everything away and start over? Or, how have you seen that work? Amy: I think that actually, most companies have kind of, that we've worked with, have kind of taken eComm out and brought it back in, or taking the digital team out and brought it back in. And I think that's actually an okay approach in terms of, especially where you are with your company's growth in this space, some kind of half joking that eComm has been a silo. But, in a way that's been necessary for some companies because, as eCommerce has grown, it typically starts off as an add on within a current team, and then as it grows, it kind of gets its own silo, or its own little team on the side, and then as they get big enough, they come back into the integrated team, typically the marketing team, or in some cases, the sales team. Amy: And I think that that makes sense because, as the space grows for different clients, it needs different resources. I think a lot of companies are going to be fast tracking that now, so they might skip that step of having the separate eCommerce team and just automatically integrate it. I don't think that's a bad thing, I think that could be beneficial to, instead of kind of separating it or starting from scratch, just integrating in from the team from the beginning. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. That sounds like good advice. So, do you see any disruptions coming to eCommerce? Like one thing I've been paying close attention to, or reading up a bit is about these pop up retail stores. And I think maybe that could be a trend that a lot of retail stores are closing down right now, and people might be scared to actually set up locations for 10 year leases, after all this dies down. So I'm wondering how maybe that could influence the future of retail and eCommerce. Do you see any disruptions like that that is on the horizon that you guys are looking into when it comes to eCommerce? Amy: Yeah. I mean I think there's going to continue to be a lot of disruptions, and probably a fast tracking of what would have happened anyway. So, some, as we've seen in the last several years, some really established big box retailers have closed down, or shut several of their locations, because that huge size of space didn't make sense anymore, and to your point that frees up space for other types of retailer formats. I think coming out of this that, one of the disruptions will be, what we go to a physical store for, versus what we continue to buy online. So I think there's going to be a lot of differences in those categories, and even in in subcategories within that. I think what's going to be interesting about the physical stores is just, how do we deliver an experience in those stores that is worth kind of leaving your house for? Amy: And I think some of the best retailers, and some of the best brands have been talking about that for years, right? How do we create a physical experience of our brand? If you think of like the flagship stores, that's meant to be bringing the brand to life and delivering on that experience, and then you think of retailers who have been improving their in store experience, to get people to browse other categories, or browse other sections. I think a lot of that was a trend that will now really be pushed and challenged, and fast tracked as we rethink about what that physical space means to a shopper. So, pop ups, as you mentioned, were great because they were delivering a different experience and that was a reason to go, see something new, or maybe see something that you could only buy there. Amy: I think exclusives will probably continue and be played around with in a new way in terms of what's exclusive online versus in store. But I think it's a little early to tell what disruptions are going to continue, and how people are going to use those physical spaces. I mentioned it earlier, but I could also see there being a big difference in geographies. The coasts have always been a little different anyway, but I could see the the retail experience on the coasts being a little bit slower to change at first, and then probably having more disruptions in the end. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. I can see also when they start streamlining the return process, I've already started see that at least with Amazon, where it's like, you don't even have to bring a box now or anything, just bring the good back there. Once that starts feeling easier, it seems like a lot of things could shift because, to me that's been the biggest hang up of ordering things online and, not knowing how to really return it, and not knowing if I'm going to feel like doing it, and keeping the box, and printing out the label and all that stuff. It seems like that could be a big shift too, and it's kind of already been forced that way over the past couple months. Amy: Yeah, no, that's a great example of now people are having to get creative in how they do things, both retailers and shoppers. And also, just as you try things and get used to it, you might realize that the return process wasn't as bad as you thought. Or the delivery window that your groceries came was actually more convenient than what you'd wanted before. So, I think some of those habits are going to change, which is always interesting to see, because now we're still in kind of the survey phase of, what do you predict that you're going to do? Or will you use this service again? And it's always interesting of course, to see what people say versus what they actually do. Stephanie: Yeah. Amy: And I think just over time as we all keep doing this, we could say, we hate it and it's a pain. But some of that we're going to be adopting those new habits that will stick with us in the longer term. Stephanie: Yeah that'll be really interesting to see what actually comes from that. So before we move into our lightning round, is there any other thoughts you have for eCommerce leaders or trends or anything else you want to highlight? Amy: No, I think you've covered it. I mean, I think this is just such an interesting time for the eCommerce space that, if you talk to someone else next week, they might say something different, and that's what's kind of exciting about it is watching how quickly it's changing, and just really being able to adapt quickly to stay relevant. Stephanie: Yeah, that's why this podcast is so fun. All right. So the lightning round brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where you answer each question in a minute or less. So you have a minute, you don't have to rush too much, but it's kind of whatever comes top of mind. Sound good? Amy: Great. Stephanie: All right, I'll start with the easier ones first, and then move to the harder one towards the end. What's Up next on your Netflix queue? Amy: Oh, this is the lightning round. Let's see. Stephanie: When your eight month old and three year old aren't hanging on you. Amy: Exactly. I have to move into my adult entertainment mode which also doesn't sound like the right phrase to use, so that shows that I've been watching a lot of cartoons lately. Stephanie: No more Daniel Tiger for you. Amy: I know I'm just glad that I can get off Disney Plus and over to Netflix. We are big fans of Nailed It, and with the at home baking, I know I'm a season behind on nailed it, so I need to get caught up on that. Stephanie: Cool. What's up next in your travel destinations after the pandemic is over? Amy: Oh, we were supposed to go to Vienna for my husband's 40th, so hopefully we can get that back on the agenda. But, next week I'm going to be driving from the Bay Area to Aspen to see my new niece so- Stephanie: Oh fun. Amy: It will be a road trip. Stephanie: Sounds awesome. What is the best shopping experience that comes to mind that you've had lately? Other than being in a store? Amy: Yes, I have not been in a store lately, nor had a good experience in a store lately. Well, just this week was the first time that I could get an Amazon Fresh order, and I am a pretty heavy user. So they had a lot of issues, so I was really excited this morning at 7:00 AM when my Amazon Fresh order arrived. Stephanie: Yeah, that's game changing. I love seeing them come up and deliver it. I'm like, this is nice. Not having to do it. Amy: Yes. Stephanie: What was the last thing you bought from an ad? If you remember? Amy: The last thing I bought from an ad. That wasn't one of my clients products? Stephanie: Yes, yep, that wasn't one of your clients [inaudible 00:51:31]. Amy: Yes, that I was actually buying as a consumer, let's see. I bought some Hannah Andersen Star Wars pajamas recently for my three year old. They're very cute and available now and actually they did arrive quite quickly so. Stephanie: Awesome- Amy: I'd recommend that for the- Stephanie: ... For PJ's. Amy: Yes for the toddler PJ's, they are great. Stephanie: Yep, I know all about that. All right, and the hard one, what's up next for eCommerce pros? Amy: Oh, that's a big switch from PJ. Stephanie: I know, that's why I saved it for last. Amy: Yeah, I think eCommerce pros are going to be ... Have much higher regard in their own industries, and have a lot more influence. So, hopefully what's next for them is being able to kind of take a greater role in that brand and marketing experience across retailers. I know we've talked a lot about Amazon, but I think it's, how do we integrate eCommerce and into everything that we're doing, and that should be really exciting for the eComm pros. Stephanie: Cool. Love it. All right thanks so much for coming on the show Amy, this has been fun. Amy: Thank you so much. Appreciate you having me.
Dr. Sheila Gephart. Photo courtesy of Dr. Sheila Gephart. Episode 8 features Dr. Sheila Gephart, neonatal nurse scientist and assistant professor at the University of Arizona College of Nursing. During this episode, Dr. Gephart provides a comprehensive overview of GutCheckNEC, a first-of-its-kind, 10-item risk assessment that she developed for the early detection of NEC in premature infants. She discusses: * Her transition from bedside nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit to her development of GutCheckNEC—what she calls a “real-time, early warning score for NEC,”* The 10 risk factors that make up GutCheckNEC, their associated symptoms, and how risk is communicated,* The development of NEC Zero, an intervention that has evolved out of the Unit NEC rate component of GutCheckNEC,* The strength of evidence for the use of probiotics in the prevention of NEC, and* The importance of shared decision making in the NICU. Copyright © 2015 The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, Inc. This episode was produced in part by the TeacherCast Educational Broadcasting Network. [powerpress] STEPHANIE VAUGHAN, HOST: Welcome to Episode 8 of Speaking of NEC—a free, audio podcast series about Necrotizing Enterocolitis. Produced by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, and funded by The Petit Family Foundation, Speaking of NEC is a series of one-on-one conversations with relevant NEC experts—neonatologists, clinicians and researchers—that highlights current prevention, diagnosis, and treatment strategies for NEC, and the search for a cure. For more information about this podcast series or The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, visit our website at morgansfund.org. Hello, my name is Stephanie Vaughan. Welcome to the show. I’m the Co-founder and President of The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund. Today, my guest will be Dr. Sheila Gephart, neonatal nurse scientist and assistant professor at the University of Arizona College of Nursing, who developed a first-of-its-kind, 10-item risk assessment for the early detection of NEC in premature infants called GutCheckNEC. During our conversation, she will discuss in varying degrees: Her transition from bedside nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit to her development of GutCheckNEC—what she calls a “real-time, early warning score for NEC,” The 10 risk factors that make up the acronym GutCheck and their associated symptoms How risk is communicated, The significance of the Unit NEC rate component in GutCheckNEC, and how that led her to develop the NEC Zero Intervention, The strength of evidence for the use of probiotics in the prevention of NEC, and The importance of shared decision making in the NICU. With that in mind, let me introduce my guest today. Hi, welcome to the show. This is my guest, Dr. Sheila Gephart. She is a neonatal nurse scientist from the University of Arizona College of Nursing. Hi, Sheila, how are you? DR. SHEILA GEPHART, GUEST: Good, thank you, Stephanie! STEPHANIE: Thank you! So, we have had more than one person mention you on our show in previous episodes, so I’m thrilled to have you join me today and would love to let you talk a little bit about your background and how you got involved with Necrotizing Enterocolitis. DR. GEPHART: Well, I am very thankful to be asked to be on the broadcast today, and I will tell you that I started my interest in Necrotizing Enterocolitis risk understanding when I was a bedside nurse. I have been a nurse since 1997, and I worked in the neonatal intensive care unit as a bedside nurse taking care of babies, and many of them were really convalescing. They were doing well, but then we had a subset of babies, or a clump of babies, that all developed this horrible disease within about three weeks. And now I know the clustering of NEC is very common, or not common, but it does happen. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: But then I didn’t really understand a whole lot about the disease, but I was very concerned because I realized that we had been concerned about these babies, as nurses, for hours to days before the actual diagnosis of NEC was made. So what happened at that point was I had the role of getting into the data for our NICU. I collected the data and reported the data for a large registry called the Vermont Oxford Network. And so I was focused on looking at the baby’s case and looking at the research and looking at the data, and I realized that there was a constellation of risk factors that kind of coalesced for these kids, that all of these things seemed to snowball with these babies who developed NEC, and we really had no context for talking to physicians to communicate why we were concerned. We were using terms like something’s not right with this baby, and from there, it really launched me into the next five years of understanding more about NEC risk. STEPHANIE: Okay. And can you talk to me a little bit about the protocol – I think it’s a protocol -- that you’ve developed called GutCheckNEC and how you got from starting to look at the data to compiling and understanding this set of risk factors? DR. GEPHART: Sure, I’m happy to talk about GutCheckNEC. So, being a bedside nurse, sometimes I would work in the middle of the night, and I needed a strategy for putting things together so I could remember them. And when I thought about NEC, I thought about well, we just need to check the gut. So GutCheck was kind of how it organized these risk factors, and I wrote GutCheck in a line straight down, and I remember one day I was at a delivery, and it was about three in the morning and it was taking a while for the baby to be born. And I was trying to understand all of the research that I had been reading about NEC risk and so what I did was I write GutCheck straight down on a napkin and horizontally for each letter I wrote the risk factor that was associated with that letter, and so that helped me organize what I was reading in the literature. But really it started out as just wanting to develop a risk assessment so nurses could really know what the risk factors were, physicians could know what the risk factors were, but then also put the symptoms in the context of what was going on with the baby. So that’s where I started, but then I went into a Ph.D. program, and in science you have to be very systematic. And so my literature review was the systematic beginning. But then what I did was I asked neonatal NEC experts how relevant they thought the different risk factors were to actually developing NEC. So I asked them to rate the relevance, and we went through three rounds of surveys to determine if we had the right list of risk factors, so that was very useful. We got rid of some, we kept most of them and added a few. And then, the next step was I got a very large dataset from a group of neonatal practices here in the US called The Pediatrics Medical Group, and I built, this is research speak, but I will tell you that I threw all of the risk factors into a statistical model to see what fell out as the most important, and the way statistical models work is that they keep the most important things that account for most of the explanation for what you’re looking at, and they get rid of everything that’s not quite so important. STEPHANIE: Okay. DR. GEPHART: So we went from like 33 risk factors down to essentially ten risk factors for GutCheckNEC. And then we tested it to see if it actually discriminated or told the difference between the kids that got NEC and the ones who didn’t, and it showed pretty good discrimination, or separation of groups, for the kids who had the most severe NEC compared to those who didn’t get NEC at all. STEPHANIE: Okay. DR. GEPHART: So that was the work we did, and now we’re taking this ten item tool and we’re trying to combine it with clinical science so that we can really have a real time early warning score for NEC. STEPHANIE: Great. Can you sort of go down the list just for parents that might be listening or family members if they’re seeing any of these risk factors? DR. GEPHART: Sure, I’d be happy to do that. The items that we kept in GutCheckNEC, like I said, there are two versions. There’s the one before the statistical modeling and then there is the one after, and the one that’s before is actually more comprehensive. And if you think about just writing GutCheck down linearly, you think for G, you’ve got growth restricted, so they’re born really small for gestational age, you’ve got gestational age. Those are the main ones that I always thought of with the G. And then with U, the one item that the experts recommended adding was the unit NEC rate, because infants who are in units with high NEC rates are more likely to get NEC, and so I didn’t understand that finding. I’ll talk about that in a minute, about the unit NEC rate. T, if you talk about T, transfusion. There is an association that we see in lots of studies with transfusion and NEC. We don’t see any evidence of causation, but the studies aren’t designed to show us that, so there is a temporal relationship or a time based relationship between transfusion and the most severe NEC. That said, there is a lot of babies who get transfusions and don’t get NEC. So that’s what makes it hard. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: What else goes with T? I’m going to stick to the final version, okay, as we think through the acronym. And then for C, signs of infection, so chorioamnionitis is when mom has a really bad uterine infection prior to the baby being born. Some preterm moms have this because—we don’t know exactly why they have this, but chorioamnionitis, particularly if it’s invasive, if it’s really severe, that is a risk factor. Also cardiac kids are going to be more at risk, so if you think of the C, kids who have had heart disease or heart malformations, particularly those that are low oxygenation kinds of defects… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: ..and there are some more for C but I don’t recall exactly what those were right now, but I’m just going to stick—oh, culture proven infection. That also goes with C. So if babies have had sepsis, particularly more than once, which sometimes these really early babies do get multiple bouts of infection, that is a risk factor. So that stayed in my model long term. Enteral feeding is definitely a risk factor that all babies are hopefully exposed to because we want them to be fed. That I understand a lot more now about the details of enteral feeding, and that particularly if the enteral feeding is formula, that is very important. We know formula is a high risk factor. There is a whole slew of argument about cow’s milk based fortifiers that go with that as well, so there is some argument about how extensive of a risk factor that is, but formula and enteral feedings certainly. And then the H, I skipped the H. That would be hypotension treated with medicines to bring that blood pressure up. So hypotension is low blood pressure. A lot of preemies have episodes of low blood pressure, but we know that the most sick are going to be hemodynamically unstable which means that their ability to regulate their blood pressure and keep their heart rate within a good level is not quite as solid as a kid who doesn’t have those light fluctuations, so that was a risk factor that did stay. Also race. Race stayed. The experts did not think that race was a risk factor, and they were pretty, if you remember the stages that we used to develop GutCheckNEC, we asked experts about how relevant they thought these risk factors were and they really didn’t think race was relevant. But it was so strong in the model, I couldn’t get rid of it. So if a baby is either black or Hispanic, that puts them at higher risk. Now, the reason for that we think, we don’t really know exactly why that stayed in the model, however, we know that black babies are very much less likely to get human milk… STEPHANIE: Okay. DR. GEPHART: ..than white babies, and that is something we can fix. So that’s really important. As I went through these risk factors that are in GutCheckNEC, I started to separate in my mind what’s modifiable, which is what of these can we do something about and what is non-modifiable? And what I saw really was quite a few of these things were modifiable that stayed in GutCheckNEC. You can do a query online for GutCheckNEC and it will pop up the actual, you’ll be able to find GutCheckNEC in the literature. It’s published so anybody can find it. But the thing that was so interesting to me, and I’m probably going to go off a little bit here, is that the NICU NEC rate consumed a huge amount of the variants in this tool which means that if we were to say that these items explained an infant’s risk for NEC. The NICU NEC rate explains three times as much as gestational age, three times as much as transfusion. So it was so important, and what we saw in the sample, we had 284 NICUs in the sample that we used to build GutCheckNEC and to verify it, of those 284 NICUs, we saw huge variance in NEC rates. So that was pretty concerning, and it wasn’t something that I went into the research expecting or looking for really even because I had read 70 papers about NEC risk, and invariably, they would start with Necrotizing Enterocolitis is a disease that we have very few answers for. We don’t really know why it occurs, but we know that premature babies are at risk and that is the most consistent risk factor across studies. So prematurity. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: Everybody blamed it on prematurity and low birth rate, and very few said anything about—oh, and we know, actually we have about six large studies from 20 years ago that show that unit NEC rate is consistently an issue. So that is something that I didn’t expect to find, but I found, and then I was able to go back into the literature and find other studies that verified it. STEPHANIE: Excellent. That’s a phenomenal amount of information, and I think that’s really great for parents going into the NICU to have in their minds. DR. GEPHART: And I think, I apologize to the parents for throwing out all these terms, but I know that you’re smart, and you can handle it. Okay, I’m just going to give you credit, because if you’re NICU parents, you’re super savvy, and you know how to find information. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: But one of the things we were really concerned about with NEC is how we communicate risk to parents and how parents are really the eyes and ears of understanding what’s going on with that baby just like the nurses are. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: And they are really better situated, honestly, to be able to identify the trends in their own kid, because that’s all they’re worried about. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: They’re not worried about the delivery down the hallway or all these other things, they are the expert. So one thing I’ve been working on trying to frame this message for parents as partners on the team looking for signs of any kind of complication and I think if they know to speak up. To keep track and to speak up if things don’t seem right, and I’ve heard many physicians actually say that it’s the parents indication of concern that will make them stop, and think slower, about what’s going on with that baby. So either the nurses concern or the parents concern, because often the physician, as excellent as they are, may not be right at that bedside… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: ..at that moment when something is changing. STEPHANIE: Right. Right And we did have an experience between Morgan’s surgeries where there was a concern in the NICU, and I can’t even remember who had mentioned it at rounds of attempting to give him—I don’t know if it was formula or breast milk—but giving him something that the surgeon had previously not agreed to—and it was a whole day of me trying to get in contact with the surgeon and making sure that nobody did anything until the surgeon had said yes or no. And he called me back from outside of the surgical room and said if anything like this happens, call me, I will call you back. So we definitely found that the doctors are very receptive, and especially when you raise an alarm, and to give people concrete things to look at for their babies I think is a wonderful tool. So thank you for sharing this. DR. GEPHART: Absolutely! And I can say that within the next few weeks, probably by the time this podcast is released, our website will be active, and on that website are parent materials that we’ve created that are designed to help them. Anyone can download these parent materials, they can use them in their NICU, and they are basically pamphlets to talk about things to watch for, what you can do to prevent NEC, and what the signs are, and a little bit about what happens afterwards. Because you know the first-hand experience of how different your life is… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: ..coordinating care for a child who’s had NEC. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So the long term impacts of dealing with life after NEC, I know Laura Martin was on the broadcast… STEPHANIE: Yes. DR. GEPHART: ..recently… STEPHANIE: Yes. DR. GEPHART: ..and her story has been such an important part of my development as a nurse scientist. Think beyond just the NICU stay, to think about how NEC impacts these kids forever. STEPHANIE: Right, right, and we’ve been very lucky that Morgan has had (knock on wood) minimal residual effects. We see a little bit, but I mean, I looked at Laura’s story and they are doing a phenomenal job with him. He is a miracle. DR. GEPHART: Yeah, Joseph is pretty awesome. I haven’t had the chance to meet him in person yet, but Laura and I collaborated to write up his story, and that paper is going to be coming out in the next couple weeks in Journal of Perinatal and Neonatal Nursing, and it is a testament to his resilience. STEPHANIE: Right. Hers too and her husband’s and the family’s. DR. GEPHART: It’s pretty awesome. STEPHANIE: Definitely send me those links and we can certainly share that with everyone—direct links in the show episode notes. So I’ll ask you, now that GutCheckNEC is I’ll say standardized if that’s a correct term, is there anything that you’re looking towards in your research moving forward from GutCheckNEC? DR. GEPHART: Well, that’s a great question, and GutCheckNEC is a risk assessment, it’s a tool. It fits on one page. We’ve just gone through a process where we’ve added to it a structured communication protocol, so if a NICU wanted to use GutCheckNEC, we would have them complete a request form, and on one side is GutCheckNEC, and on the other side is the structured communication form, which also clues the nurses, the parents for which signs and symptoms to look for and how to communicate it. So that’s easy. So that’s where GutCheckNEC is going. We’re also trying to combine it with clinical science right now, so that’s the analysis I’m working on right now, and I’ve worked with a great collaborator, Sherry Fleiner from the Inner Health to do that work. But beyond that, one of the things with research, you do a project and then you have these findings and then there is something that just kind of nabs at you and it doesn’t fit like you expected it to. And for us, that was the unit NEC rate component of GutCheckNEC that carried so much weight in the score, and it demonstrated across the 284 NICUs how variable NEC rates can be. So what we did next is we asked the question, well, why are they different? Why are the NEC rates different? And what if we did something to try to standardize prevention care? So there are a couple of main things that prevent NEC. One is human milk—very, very important starting with colostrum for oral care. The other thing is standardized feeding protocols, stewarding antibiotics, and I can kind of get into more detail there, and then there is a lot of controversy about transfusions. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So those components, those four things plus a strategy for early recognition, we’ve put those components into an intervention we call NEC Zero, and the name of it is designed to convey that we’re hoping to get NEC to zero rate. Now, this is an audacious goal. But why set goals if they’re not crazy? This is an audacious goal, but it was not my idea. There was an editor for Journal of Perinatology, his name is Jonathan Swanson, and he wrote a paper the year that I finished my dissertation, so I think that was in 2012, it might have been 2013, and the title of that paper was “Can We Get NEC to Zero”? And if you ask scientists this and clinicians this, you will hear a lot of concern that this is an audacious goal. Like of course, we’re not going to get NEC to zero, we don’t even know what causes it. However, we do know some things that consistently reduce the risk for NEC. So human milk is, like I said, those five components, but human milk is so primary. So now we’re trying to put those interventions together, make them implementable so that people in the NICU in Delaware could implement them with the same consistency and clarity that people in Texas could do. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So that bundle of practices is NEC Zero. So the process for NEC Zero right now where we’re at in the project is that we’ve gone through kind of an expert process of refining the recommendations. So we’ve gone through that, we need to publish that, but we’ve got them. We had a really great expert group of almost 20 people, and four of those people were parents. Laura Martin was on that group. So we’ve got the recommendations, now we’re trying to break those recommendations into implementable steps, and we’re creating tool kit products to go with the NEC Zero intervention. So pieces of that are— GutCheckNEC is definitely a primary component of that. Frankly, GutCheckNEC has the least strong evidence of any of the components in the tool kit. But it’s something that is actionable, it’s something that we can use to monitor, and we know that monitoring and evaluation is a key component of implementation success for anything. So that’s where we’re at right now is we’re working on NEC Zero. STEPHANIE: Great, that sounds excellent. Do you have a projection of when people might see this? You said you’re looking to get it published, or the first stages of it getting published? DR. GEPHART: Right. We’re working on refining the recommendations really in terms of publishing any sort of a recommendation list or a guideline. They carry much more weight if you have the authority of a professional organization behind them. So our strategy right now is to try to link up with some professional organizations and see if we can get some endorsements for them. So if any of your listeners are prominent members of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Association of Neonatal Nursing, The Academy for Breastfeeding Medicine—any of those groups would be excellent proponents. So we have the recommendations, we have some parent products that will be available, like I said, within a few weeks once our website gets done, and the other pieces of it being available, I will say that we’re testing it right now. So with the testing, there are two things we’re doing. We have the recommendations, we’re asking experts to kind of assign relative importance to the different parts of the intervention, and that score, we’re creating a ten point score for the NEC Zero adherence score, and that’s almost done. And then we’re going to look at relationships between adoption of NEC Zero practices and NEC rates, because we really don’t have a great evidence body for understanding why NEC rates differ so much NICU to NICU. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So this is kind of an effort to add to that body of evidence of understanding why are they different. We don’t know what we’ll find, that’s the beauty of research is you start with a hypothesis, you get your data, you test your hypothesis, and you see how it turns out. STEPHANIE: Excellent. This is great work, Sheila. I mean, it sounds like it’s really sort of simple, but I’m sure it’s not. DR. GEPHART: That’s right! It does kind of sound simple, doesn’t it? STEPHANIE: Or that it maybe should be simple. Hopefully it will be simple, but it sounds like parents in the NICU could really take this information and be able to be confident in their monitoring of their children and really confident in voicing any concerns that they see. DR. GEPHART: Right. STEPHANIE: So I think it’s great. DR. GEPHART: The challenge is that really statistically you’re not going to have a lot of kids get NEC. Even in a high rate NICU, you’re going to have a lot of babies who don’t get it, and a few babies who do. But the outcomes can be so devastating for those few babies. So the simple part is really important, and the other question is do the interventions of NEC Zero affect other outcomes? And really, the answer is yes, because interventions are things like human milk standardized feeding protocols, antibiotic stewardship—those things are good for any baby— STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: Any baby! So the good thing is that any NICU clinician can implement those things with relative confidence. Now, the big wildcard here that people don’t agree to consistently is holding feeding during transfusion. So that piece is a little bit controversial, actually it’s a lot controversial right now, but that component—the health system I’m working with has already adopted a practice to do that, so that is part of our bundle, and we’re going to keep it that way, but as we get into the literature about transfusions and NEC, it is somewhat controversial, and the evidence is not really conclusive. STEPHANIE: Right. We actually had an episode with a Dr. Hussain from Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, and in his conversation about transfusion associated NEC, he had mentioned GutCheckNEC. So it does seem to sort of all circle around. DR. GEPHART: It does, and the thing with GutCheckNEC is that transfusions is a risk factor. So in our structured communications protocol, which is coupled with GutCheckNEC, understanding the context of if a baby has been transfused in the last 48 hours, that’s a trigger. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So those two pieces put together do heighten our awareness of what a baby could be at risk for. STEPHANIE: This was a really great conversation, Sheila. I really appreciate you sharing all of this. A lot of this, even though I have done a lot of research myself is pretty new in this context to me. So I think it really sort of simplifies some really complicated information. So I appreciate you sharing this with us. DR. GEPHART: Well, it’s been my pleasure and honor to try to simplify things. I have to do that for my own brain. I will say that this is an audacious goal. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: People look at me cross eyed when I say NEC Zero. They think what are you talking about? Is that possible? But I will tell you that there are a handful of NICUs across the country who are getting to zero with their NEC rates, and they are models. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: The things they consistently do are they prioritize human milk feeding, it is critical, they use standardized feeding protocols, they start feedings early with trophic feedings, which is just small feedings, and they generally have a fairly specific approach to handling transfusions and feeding. So those things are very important. But the human milk is essential. STEPHANIE: Right. Right. So before we wrap up, is there anything else with regard to NEC or your research moving forward that you would like to share? DR. GEPHART: I appreciate that offer. I would like to just emphasize how we do have evidence. We have pretty good evidence about things that prevent NEC. Now, does that mean that we’re going to prevent every single case of NEC? I don’t know that yet. STEPHANIE: Right DR. GEPHART: But we have pretty good evidence, and one of the things that’s pretty controversial in our country right now is the use of probiotics. I don’t know if any of your experts have gotten into that realm yet, but- STEPHANIE: We’ve touched on it and they’ve sort of said the same thing you did that it is sort of a controversial topic because if I’m saying this correctly, the FDA regulations and the procedures around that, but I know in other countries that they have seen reduced rates of NEC with probiotics. DR. GEPHART: Right, right, and that is one thing that I would say is certainly controversial. There is one of the NICUs that I’m aware of that uses probiotics. They’ve been at zero for like six years. One of the issues we have, I’ve spent a lot of time lately understanding the strength of evidence for all of these components that prevent NEC, we don’t have randomized control trial evidence for most of them. But we have 24 randomized control trials that show a decreased risk for NEC with probiotics—thousands of babies—thousands, and even some people will say the preparations are different in these different studies, there is a recent study that actually pulled the results from just a certain type of probiotic and they still showed benefit. So the issue here we have in the United States is that probiotics are marketed as a food product. And so as a food product, their regulation is different with the FDA than as a medicine. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: However, I think parents should know this, frankly. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: I think this is one of those opportunities for shared decision making in the NICU where a physician, a nurse practitioner could bring up this issue with parents to say hey, look, we have this opportunity to give your baby probiotics and this is what is available, this is the evidence, this is the risk. See, this is shared decision making. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: You go and you have a test, your physician or nurse practitioner would say this is how you have to decide what’s important, but I think NICU parents are very, very smart people, and I think we’re at the point in the United States where it is time to open up the conversation about probiotics to make it a joint decision versus an “oh, we’re just not going to do it”. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: Because we have such strong evidence, it’s just that most of those studies were not done in the US. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: However, there are many things that have been developed in other countries that we can adopt. The other issue is a standard formulation, a safe, standard formulation. There was a case of sepsis a few years ago that was very concerning—that’s severe widespread infection in a premature baby. That is the risk. So that’s what the clinician would say to the parent. But it’s very, very small risk if you look at all of the benefits. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So I’m not going to pretend we should be using probiotics, but I do think that parents need to start asking for them. They need to start asking why are we not using them… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: ..because we have such strong evidence. So we have actually stronger evidence for probiotics than we do for antenatal steroids or Surfactant. Those are common, important, consistently delivered interventions for NICU babies. But you have risks, and that’s the issue. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So we’re at a place for decision making. STEPHANIE: Right. And actually ironically, or maybe not ironically, I know that my boys did get probiotics, and that was five years ago that they were born. DR. GEPHART: That is ironic. STEPHANIE: We had an anomaly with Morgan. Nobody can sort of figure out why he got NEC when he did, but we did do all of the sort of standard care practices, probably even advanced practices for five years ago, and we had one that got it and one that didn’t. So…but knowing now what I have learned is they were doing the very best practices at the hospital where my sons were born. So I think we were at the right place at the right time and had the best outcomes that we could hope for. DR. GEPHART: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Did you feel like with Morgan that they were able to recognize it pretty fast and act? STEPHANIE: I really think they did. I think that is probably the key that saved his life because he developed NEC at four days old and had really only had two trophic feeds, and it was colostrum. DR. GEPHART: Okay. STEPHANIE: Actually after the conversation that I had with Dr. Hussein, I went back and looked and he did not have a blood transfusion within that timeframe, so he sort of, it’s my understanding he’s just sort of an anomaly, but that’s why we’re looking to the researchers to piece together all of these things. That’s sort of what drives me is he doesn’t easily fit into something that could have, should have, would have, maybe been different and that seems to be the riddle that’s NEC. DR. GEPHART: Sure. There’s an analogy for this it’s called, a wicked problem, I don’t know if you’ve heard of that term, but you were at my talk when we were in Connecticut,… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: ..and I talked about the wicked problem and how it’s like a forest fire, it’s not easily solved. There’s a lot of pieces to it,… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: …and I think NEC is really the neonatal wicked problem. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So I’m so glad that Morgan got care so quickly and got such excellent care. And that’s the thing is that clinicians, physicians, dieticians, lactation consultants, nurses, nurse practitioners, they want to do the absolute best for your baby. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: Nobody has ill will. This is a team effort, but they’re human, and that’s the thing with wicked problems… STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: ..is that you have humans operating in these complex systems, and trying to deal with things and what we know with solving wicked problems, like forest fires, it’s a combination of boots on the ground, and standard protocol. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So it’s the strength and protection of both approaches that really is effective, maybe not taking away completely the wicked problem, but at least confronting it. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. GEPHART: So I’m so glad that Morgan got such great care. STEPHANIE: Thank you. We are too. We are too. And like I said, I think it goes to show that I’ve heard multifactorial used and all kinds of big words with regard to NEC, and just knowing that there are researchers out there like yourself who are trying to distill this information and simplify it for parents and practitioners as well that this is one of the ways that I think we will get to zero NEC. That’s our goal as well. So I really appreciate you talking to me today, and would love to talk to you again, and any of these links when the website is up, would love to share. So thank you! DR. GEPHART: Absolutely. It would be my honor to share those. It’s been fun to be with you. STEPHANIE: Thank you. You too. Direct links to more information about the GutCheckNEC can be found in this episode’s show notes. In closing, I’d like to share a few thoughts about today’s conversation with Dr. Gephart. Simply put, information is power. I believe that a risk assessment like GutCheckNEC can empower parents in the NICU by distilling complex medical information, and presenting it in a simplified, and actionable way. Morgan was diagnosed with NEC at four days old. My husband and I were still in shock, and hadn’t even begun to come to terms with our twin sons’ unexpected and traumatic birth, when Morgan was transferred to another hospital and underwent emergency surgery. In the days and weeks that followed, I diligently called two NICUs every morning after rounds for updates on our two babies. I took copious notes to share with my husband on weight gains, Oxygen levels, and whatever else each nurse made mention of during the phone calls. And during our daily visits, we spoke with each baby’s nurse personally about all of the day’s happenings. Since then, I’ve learned a lot more about prematurity and NEC. And if we were in the same situation today, I would have a lot more questions to ask about all areas of our babies care. In retrospect, I realize we didn’t know what questions to ask. We took our lead from the nurses, and we looked to them to tell us what we needed to know. GutCheckNEC presents parents the opportunity to learn what questions to ask about NEC. Objectively. And, proactively. And, it can help open up the dialogue between parents and caregivers in advance of potential crisis. Show your support for our smallest and most fragile babies, those who have the greatest risk for developing NEC. Show your support for continued research in NEC. And join our effort to raise awareness about, and funds for research in NEC by making a donation to Morgan’s Fund at morgansfund.org/donate. If you’ve had a personal experience with NEC and would like to share your story, or have a question or topic that you’d like to hear addressed on our show, e-mail us at feedback@morgansfund.org. We’d love to hear from you! Additional Information You can make a donation directly to Dr. Gephart’s research in NEC at the University of Arizona College of Nursing by visiting https://www2.uafoundation.org/NetCommunity/SSLPage.aspx?pid=341 You can become a donor to the College of Nursing by visiting http://www.nursing.arizona.edu/giving/leave-your-legacy Copyright © 2015 The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, Inc. The opinions expressed in Speaking of NEC: Necrotizing Enterocolitis (the Podcast series) and by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund are published for educational and informational purposes only, and are not intended as a diagnosis, treatment or as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis and treatment. Please consult a local physician or other health care professional for your specific health care and/or medical needs or concerns. The Podcast series does not endorse or recommend any commercial products, medical treatments, pharmaceuticals, brand names, processes, or services, or the use of any trade, firm, or corporation name is for the information and education of the viewing public, and the mention of any of the above on the Site does not constitute an endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund.
Dr. Martin Lee. Photo courtesy of Prolacta Bioscience. Episode 4 features Dr. Martin Lee, Vice President of Clinical Research and Development at Prolacta Bioscience. During this episode, Dr. Lee provides a comprehensive overview of a 100% or exclusive human milk diet in the prevention of NEC in extremely premature babies, those weighing less than 1250 grams (2 pounds 12 ounces) and who have the greatest risk for developing the disease. He discusses: * His transition from the blood industry to Prolacta, which developed of the world’s first human milk-based human milk fortifier * What constitutes a 100% or exclusive human milk diet * The clinical evidence showing a 70% reduction in NEC, an 8-fold reduction in surgical NEC, and a 4-fold reduction in mortality through the use of exclusive human milk diet * The importance of safety in the breast milk industry, including Prolacta’s rigorous product testing and donor safety profiles which parallel blood industry standards. Copyright © 2015 The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, Inc. This episode was produced in part by the TeacherCast Educational Broadcasting Network. [powerpress] STEPHANIE VAUGHAN, HOST: Welcome to Episode 4 of Speaking of NEC—a free, audio podcast series about Necrotizing Enterocolitis. Produced by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, and funded by The Petit Family Foundation, Speaking of NEC is a series of one-on-one conversations with relevant NEC experts—neonatologists, clinicians and researchers—that highlights current prevention, diagnosis, and treatment strategies for NEC, and the search for a cure. For more information about this podcast series or The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, visit our website at morgansfund.org. Hello, my name is Stephanie Vaughan. Welcome to the show. I’m the Co-founder and President of The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund. Today, my guest will be Dr. Martin Lee, Vice President of Clinical Research and Development at Prolacta Bioscience, which “creates specialty formulations made from human milk for the nutritional needs of premature infants in neonatal intensive care units.” Last October (2014), while attending the annual Preemie Parent Summit in Phoenix, Arizona, I had the pleasure of meeting Prolacta’s Chief Executive Officer Scott Elster. During our conversation, I was invited on a tour of the company. A few weeks later, along with a group of representatives from various preemie organizations throughout the country, I flew out California to tour Prolacta’s human milk processing facility, and to learn more about the people and research behind the company. I was highly impressed by all aspects of Prolacta from the manufacturing plant itself to the rigorous testing their products undergo throughout their processing. Even more impressive to me is the fact that everyone that we met at Prolacta has a personal connection to prematurity. The CEO himself is the parent of twins born prematurely. And, I was shocked to learn that one of the key reasons the company was formed, and their products developed, was to reduce the incidence Necrotizing Enterocolitis. The company’s reason for existing is the prevention of NEC. And the research presented to us by Dr. Lee was stunning. So when we began producing this series, it was only fitting to invite Dr. Lee to share the benefits of an exclusive human milk diet to premature infants and the clinical research supporting its use. With that in mind, let me introduce my guest today. This is Dr. Martin Lee from Prolacta Bioscience. And I’m so glad you could be with me here today. How are you? MARTIN LEE, GUEST: Good. How are you doing Stephanie? STEPHANIE: Good, good. So in previous podcasts, we’ve talked to doctors that are attending neonatologists and researchers. So I would like to give you the opportunity to give a little bit of your background and how you got involved with research in NEC. DR. LEE: OK. Absolutely. Well, I spent probably most of my career doing clinical research with various types of pharmaceutical and biotech products. I started with a company you’ve probably heard of called Baxter approximately 35 years ago, and I spent a good number of years working with them. And how that’s relevant to our discussion today is I was working with their group that manufactures blood products, and obviously blood is a significant human fluid, has many of the same issues with regards to safety that we have with breast milk. And so I learned a lot about some of the testing that needs to be done, some of the safety factors that we need to consider. And then I would say about 15 years ago, I met someone who was talking about forming a company who basically wanted to bring breast milk and breast milk products to premature infants so that they would have the benefit of receiving 100% human milk diet, particularly the smallest of the small premature infants. So together we started the company Prolacta. And the whole idea of course in starting the company was to put it‚…I think the most important thing was to put it on a firm clinical scientific basis. And that meant doing really important well-designed clinical trials to evaluate the most important morbidities like NEC, in particular, and even mortality in premature infants, infants certainly that had a high risk of both of those consequences of prematurity. STEPHANIE: OK. Maybe not all of the people that will be listening fully understand…what is an exclusively human milk-based diet? Can you get into that a little bit? DR. LEE: Absolutely. So obviously we know‚…we meaning pretty much the world understands that the best thing a newborn baby can be fed is mother’s milk. And for term babies, that is obviously going to be sufficient. They’re born at the right time and usually at a sufficient weight and mother’s milk has all the good things in it that help the baby to grow, help their immune system to develop, help their organs to develop, importantly it helps their brain to grow at the right rate. But a premature baby by definition is born too soon. And we specialize‚…the work that we’ve done at Prolacta,…specializes in the infants that are born as much as 27 weeks or 12 weeks premature so 27 weeks since the time of gestation. When those babies are born, they have a lot of problems obviously because they’ve come out of the womb way too early. And one of the things that of course they are is way too small. The average baby that we’ve studied in our research trials is less than a thousand grams. That’s around two pounds. Now most people know that the average baby is 6-7-8 pounds. And so they’re born so small that what happens is that mother’s milk which of course comes in when the baby’s born‚…nature didn’t intend mother’s milk to be able to feed these type of babies. This is an unfortunate consequence of something that happened with the mother, something that‚…injury, genetics, whatever it is that would cause a baby to be born premature, the milk comes in, but it cannot feed that baby well enough. And what I mean by that is the baby needs to grow. He needs to grow a lot. The baby needs to have their immune system protected by the mom’s milk, and so on and so forth. So obviously we always talk about mother’s milk being the thing for a newborn baby. It’s not enough for these premature infants. So what they need is what we call a fortifier, something with a little extra kick to the baby. And there are fortifiers that have been on the market for a long time. They’re made by the formula companies. And naturally these fortifiers are made from cow’s milk. And cow’s milk is not the best thing for a premature infant. It may not be the best thing for babies in general, but besides the point, it’s certainly not the best thing for a premature infant. So when we’re talking about 100% or exclusive human milk diet, we’re talking about mom’s milk; we’re talking about a fortifier which is necessary for the baby to grow and to be protected from infection and so on and so forth. That comes from human milk. And what Prolacta did was develop the world’s first human-milk human milk fortifier. And in fact, it sounds like a mouthful because when we talk about human milk fortifier, general people realize or may not realize that that’s a cow’s milk-based fortifier. We make the one from human milk. So that’s what we mean by 100% diet. And then one other thing just to add to that, Stephanie, is sometimes mom’s milk doesn’t come in enough or the baby wants it or needs to eat more, get more milk, so then there’s donor milk involved too. And that’s another aspect of the 100% diet. And of course donor milk is coming from other moms, which again provides the additional nutrition that the baby needs. And there you have the entire spectrum of what we mean by 100% human milk diet. STEPHANIE: OK. Thank you. Yeah, I know that there’s probably a bit of confusion amongst parents new to the NICU that human milk fortifier is a fortifier put into human milk, and not necessarily made with human milk. So I know that that does tend to cause a little confusion. DR. LEE: Right. STEPHANIE: So thank you for clarifying that. DR. LEE: Sure. STEPHANIE: So I guess I’ll ask you to go into a little bit of the research because I find it fascinating. As you know, we were out to your facility in November and I thought that this is a fabulous company. I was not aware of it when our babies were in the NICU and I will just make a tiny note that I know you’ve got significant statistics showing the benefit of human milk and exclusive human milk. Unfortunately for Morgan, he fell in to that other small percentage that I did pump. But he developed NEC so rapidly at four days old being born at 28 weeks. At four days old he developed NEC and I don’t think he had two feedings. So there are babies that get it even when all attempts are made to have an exclusive human milk diet. DR. LEE: Sure. STEPHANIE: And I also know that my other son, Shaymus, his milk was fortified, and to be honest, I’m sure it probably wasn’t with an exclusive human milk fortifier. So just some things to sort of give everyone background. And again, that was, you know, four years ago, 2010-2011. DR. LEE: Sure. I hope…I assume they’re doing OK today, right? STEPHANIE: Yes, yes. Everybody’s doing very well today… DR. LEE: Excellent. Excellent. STEPHANIE: which I think is why I’m so personally‚…my personal opinion is that your products are wonderful and, you know, things being what they were then versus now, I would definitely advocate for 100% human milk diet and advocate for this if I was a parent in the NICU now. So I think it’s great to get this information out to people. DR. LEE: Sure. Absolutely. So your question concerned the type of studies we did. Well, as I said to begin our conversation, we recognized that the only way that people‚…the medical community, both neonatologists, nurses, lactation people‚…would appreciate and realize the importance of what 100% human milk diet does and helps as far as the baby is concerned is to do proper research. As I said earlier, my experience is in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries where doing formal randomized controlled all the kinds of bells and whistles that need to be done when you need to license a drug or a biologic for marketing in this country and other places in the world as well. That’s standard stuff. So when we set out to do these studies, we said what we’re doing here is just as important, just as the need for rigor has to be here as it would be in any other kind of situation where you’re testing a new medical intervention. And that’s what this is. So we decided right off the bat we would get together the best of the best as far as the neonatologists in this country are concerned, and we brought them together and we set up a protocol. And basically the protocol was based on a very simple premise. It is 100% human milk diet better than feeding a baby mom’s milk fortifying then with standard human milk fortifier and then if all else fails or at least maybe not be sufficient than using formula. That’s standard practice for premature infants in this country. It was in 2007 when we started this trial and to a large extent it still is today. So it’s 100% human milk diet standard of care which includes cow’s milk based fortifier and formula. Babies in this study were randomized which is‚…you know, it’s a fairly simple term, but just to make sure everybody understands what I mean by that, the decision when a parent agreed to have their baby be participating in the study which group they get into, the Prolacta or the 100% diet versus standard of care was essentially a coin flip, not literally of course, but that’s the basis. Now why do you do that? Because that’s the best way to design studies. It provides an unbiased approach to making the decision of treatment of nutritional treatment, taking it out of the hands of anybody and putting it in the hands of strictly chance. So you randomize babies. There was a sufficient number of babies in the first study we did. There was over 200 babies that were randomized and I think it was 12 centers around the country. And what we were looking for in this study was whether or not they develop NEC and that was the most significant endpoint of the study. There were other things that we looked at. We looked at how much parenteral nutrition they received. We looked at other things. We looked at sepsis. We looked at‚…which is essentially bacterial infection that circulates in the bloodstream. We looked at hospital days. We looked at days on a respirator/ventilator and so on and so forth. But the main endpoint in this study was Necrotizing Enterocolitis. Now, the babies, by the way, that we used in this study or the babies that constituted the population of the study were babies under 1250 grams (2 pounds 12 ounces) down to 500 grams (1 pound 1 ounce). Very simple reason for that. I think many of the people listening will know that there’s a classification of premature infancy called very low birth weight. And that’s babies under 1500 grams (3 pounds 4.91 ounces). But we said, you know, we want to get the babies that have the highest risk of NEC. So we didn’t use, if you will, the heaviest babies in that weight category because they have, it turns out, the lowest risk of NEC out of all very low birth weight babies. So we took away that 1250-gram group. We also didn’t go below 500 grams because unfortunately, babies born less than 500 grams which is really about a pound or less have unfortunately not a high chance of either succeeding in life really and survival or they have a lot of other problems that make it very difficult to evaluate then. So it was 500 to 1250. That’s basically, I think, the most important aspect. And like I said, they were randomized. We followed them for a period of 90 days, maximum 90 days. Babies could have gotten off the study earlier if they got on to mostly oral nutrition which of course hopefully babies all do because they start off with what’s called parenteral nutrition which means they get their feed essentially through intravenous feeding. They then transition off of that onto enteral feeding which is typically a tube that goes either through their nose or directly through their mouth into their stomach. And that’s called enteral feeding. And then they go to oral feeding. So babies who are on for 90 days or if they got to oral feeding sooner, then they were off the study. Very simply, just to summarize what constitutes a fairly complex study to manage, we found a magnificent reduction in Necrotizing Enterocolitis. The babies in the standard of care group had a NEC rate of about 16%. Or put simply, that one in every six babies develop NEC that got some sort of cow’s milk protein or cow’s milk diet. The babies who got 100% diet was less than 6%. That 16 to 6 is about 70% reduction, and that is phenomenal. We’ve had some of the really very famous neonatologists told us that they don’t see‚…you don’t see that kind of reduction with really any intervention that they’re used to seeing. You just don’t see that. You see incremental things. But now all of a sudden we cut NEC by 70% by doing this. And it even gets more impressive when you consider that the majority of babies or at least half the babies who develop NEC have to go on to have surgery. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. LEE: And that is a really serious consequence not only just from the fact that a premature infant has to go on to major surgery and they take out part of their digestive tract. But even worse, they have a reasonably high mortality rate. So in this study, the rate of NEC surgery of all those babies that were in the two groups, it was at 11% in the standard of care arm and only just over 1% in the Prolacta arm. We reduced the rate of NEC surgery by eight fold, I mean just an incredible difference. Virtually wiped out NEC surgery in this study. STEPHANIE: That’s amazing. DR. LEE: Yeah. I mean, we expected to see something really good. We didn’t expect‚…I guess you could say well we should have expected‚…but it was beyond our expectations, wildest dreams to show this kind of effect. Now a lot of people have looked at this data and said well that’s interesting, and maybe that’s real. But can you‚…you know, can you do it again? And the answer is yeah. We did it again because that first study that I just described, these were only babies who were getting‚… which are most babies‚… who were getting some breast milk from their mom. But there are a small cohort of‚… I don’t know quite what the percentage is in this country, but there’s a percentage of babies who don’t get any breast milk. There’s various reasons. Mom is sick. Mom’s not available. So on and so forth. So we also did a second study in which we only treated babies or fed babies who had to get their nutrition either one of two ways. Since breast milk wasn’t available, they got formula. Soon as they were able to get enteral feeding, in other words the tube feeding, they got formula. That’s one group. The 100% arm, same thing, except here, instead of getting mom’s milk, they got donor milk, and then they got the fortified. So it was a real stark comparison. Only human milk, only formula. And it was a very small study. It was only‚…that first study, I don’t know if I mentioned or made clear, that was a 200-baby study. Pretty big study. STEPHANIE: Yes. Um-hmm. DR LEE: This study was only 53 babies partly because it was very, very hard to find these babies. I mean, we would sign up a mom, they would agree to put their baby on, and then they realized gee, I really want to feed my baby. I really want to give them breast milk. And of course, that’s fine. That’s great. STEPHANIE: Right, right. DR LEE: But they can’t participate in the study. STEPHANIE: Right. DR LEE: So we had a hard time finding. But we eventually did it. Took us three years to find 53 babies, but we did, and you know what? We found the same significant difference, particularly in the surgical NEC. There were‚…in the control arm, there were 24 babies, and four of them had to go on to surgery for NEC. That’s one in six. So about 16%. In the Prolacta arm, in the 100% milk arm, nothing, no surgeries, nothing. One case in NEC overall, but no surgery. So that turned out to be wow. That’s the kicker. Two separate studies, two different classes of babies, breast milk, no breast milk, doesn’t matter. When you give a baby that’s born premature like this, this weight category, less than 1250 grams, and you feed them with only human milk, they’re going to do better. And it even turns out when you start putting all the data together an extra‚…I hate to call it a bonus‚…but an extra important key outcome was that mortality was reduced. Mortality fortunately in this baby population is pretty low. It’s about 8% overall because of the prematurity, of course. We reduced that to 2%. So a four-fold reduction in mortality. So now when you put it all together, what do you have? You have prevention of the major morbidity‚…that is NEC‚…of prematurity, and you prevent mortality. And how can you really ask for anything more from a nutritional approach to these really fragile infants. STEPHANIE: Right. Right. No, I totally agree. And as I said before, my personal opinion, you know, as the mother of a surgical NEC survivor, I would advocate for this if we had to do it again. It’s definitely phenomenal. DR. LEE: Yeah, it’s almost this kind of effect you would expect to see if this was a pharmaceutical breakthrough or some new wonder drug or some sort of biotechnologically-produced intervention. But all it is is feeding the babies properly. I mean it’s such a fundamentally sound, logical‚…this is what nature wanted these babies to get. STEPHANIE: Right, right. DR. LEE: Babies should get human milk, nothing else. STEPHANIE: Now you had mentioned previously the difference between donor milk and then your human milk nutritional products. Can you‚…when I hear conversations, I sort of always think it’s like comparing apples and oranges. You know, it’s almost two different things. So can you clarify what the difference is with donor milk and your products? DR. LEE: Well, again, I’m sorry to be maybe not entirely clear. We make a donor milk product. Essentially, all our products are made from donor milk, both the fortifier, of course, and we make a simple donor milk product that is formulated to have 20 calories per ounce which is what doctors and nurses and dieticians believe they’re giving the baby when they feed the baby either mom’s milk or milk from another person. So donor milk is essentially the equivalent of mom’s milk other than the fact, of course, it comes from another mom. But however‚…and in fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics has said the best thing for a baby is mom’s milk. But if mom’s milk is not available, then donor milk is good. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. LEE: But the problem, of course, and one of the I guess you could say‚…I’m trying to think of the right word. Bad things that people associate with donor milk is well it comes from somebody else, and how do I know that person is the right person to provide milk for my baby? And that’s one of the key things that we had at the center of what we did at Prolacta from the beginning, which was to have a safety profile that was beyond reproach. I mean, we do things as far as testing the moms, testing the milk, that nobody else who ever handles breast milk does pure and simple. I’ll give you some examples. One of the things that I thought of very early on is because, again, remember I told you I came from the blood industry and they test blood and they test donors obviously every which way you can think of. But there’s one additional problem that donors who provide milk have in a sense that blood donors don’t. When you take blood from a donor, you’re seeing the person and it’s blood coming out of their vein and it’s coming right into a bag and you know whose it is. But a milk donor, she donates at home, pumps at home, puts it into containers, and then sends it wherever the donor, the milk bank, might be. In our case, it’s here at Prolacta. They’ll send it to us, and here’s the problem. How do we know it’s that person’s milk? STEPHANIE: Right. DR. LEE: How do we know it’s the person who we screened and did all the blood testing on to start with, that it’s her milk. So we do something very, very unique. We actually have the mom provide a DNA sample, they do a little cheek swab, they put a little stick essentially in there, and scrape off a little tissue from inside their cheek, send it to us so we have a profile. Now she sends us her milk, and when she sends us her milk, we can actually match it up. And now we know it’s that safe mom’s milk, all right? Now you might ask what’s the point? I mean what self-respecting individual is going to send somebody else’s milk to you? And the answer is nobody, for the most part I can say almost universally, will do that intentionally. But there are mistakes. I mean one of the things we’ve seen is moms that are lactating, sometimes there’s a couple of women in a neighborhood, and they’re all doing the same thing. And somebody’s freezer will become full with milk, and they’ll say to their neighbor, “Can I put my milk in your freezer?” And they said, “Sure, no problem.” And she’s got her own milk in there. And then they go to ship milk and lo and behold, there’s somebody else’s in there. We love that‚…we love the moms, but we have to be sure that every mom that donates is a mom that’s free of all of the nasty things that could be in blood because those things could be in milk as well like AIDS and hepatitis and syphilis and all those kinds of things that we should be concerned about. Even as an adult you certainly want to get blood from someone like that. You certainly don’t want to give that to this fragile premature infant. STEPHANIE: Right, right. DR. LEE: So going back to your original question about what we do versus donor milk, that’s all one in the same, I think you could safely say. Everything is based on the concept of donors and the milk that they provide and the safety of that milk supply being tested from any way you can think of so that every product that’s made from human milk is as safe as possible based on all of the different protocols that are used. And that includes other things besides DNA testing. It includes drug testing; it includes testing for whether the mom smokes because they may tell you they don’t smoke, but we’ve seen that instance where there’s byproducts of nicotine in the milk, and that’s not good for a baby. So we do that kind of testing. It’s just a laundry list of things to make that as safe as possible. STEPHANIE: Right. And I guess‚…I’m sorry‚…I guess to clarify my original question, I was speaking specifically about your fortifiers versus human milk. If you could explain a little bit the difference of that‚…I mean this was a very good‚…I can’t think of the word‚…a very good deviation, but yeah. When I was saying apples and oranges, I meant donor milk versus fortifier. DR. LEE: OK. I’m sorry. STEPHANIE: No, that’s OK. DR. LEE: The fortifier essentially‚…if you want to keep it very simple, the fortifier is just very concentrated milk. STEPHANIE: OK. DR. LEE: So essentially, what you do to make the fortifier is you take milk, you filter it to get rid of a lot of the fluid so that you concentrate the protein, you concentrate some of the other important nutrients in there. And that way the baby can get extra, like we say, protein, extra other nutrients in a very, very small volume. So for example, in our typical fortifier which we call Prolact +4, if you add that to mother’s milk in a ratio 80% mother’s milk to 20% fortifier, assuming mother’s milk is about 20 calories per ounce, you’re going to add 4 additional calories for that baby in that small volume which is a lot. So then we can actually do even more than that. We can do a +6, six calories, we can do +8 and even +10. That kind of product is for the babies that are the most fluid restricted. They can get 30 calories per ounce in the same volume that milk that originally was 20 calories per ounce was. So that’s really important for those babies, for example, that have heart defects who can’t take in a lot of fluid or babies for whatever reason are fluid restricted. STEPHANIE: OK. Thank you. DR. LEE: Sure. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that was‚… I think it’s important for parents and family members that might be in the NICU to be able to have a conversation with their doctor and fully understand what’s being given to their baby and be able to ask the right questions. So would there be anything else that you would want to add if you were talking to a parent who’s got a baby in the NICU right now for them to be able to advocate best practices for their baby? DR. LEE: I think that the simple issue for a parent under these circumstances is to ask the doctor based on all of the evidence that’s out there, clinical evidence,…and that’s how doctors make decisions. We talk about evidence-based medicine. This is based on the best evidence that the doctor is aware of, what’s the best way to feed my baby? And having said that, you know, the evidence that we’ve discussed here today is for those smallest of the small. For a larger baby, this is not necessarily‚…it’s not that it’s wrong. It may not be necessary, but when you’re dealing with the smallest babies and the ones that are struggling to survive and grow and thrive and get to where you want all babies to get to, to childhood and so on, then you have to ask the doctor the question what is the best way that our baby can get out of that NICU, that Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and get home and be with his or her parents. That’s really, I think, the fundamental question. And the doctors should be able to answer that question based on the evidence that exists for the diet that the baby should be fed. STEPHANIE: Right. Thank you. Yeah, I think this is a really great conversation for any parent in the NICU, especially those, like you said, the smallest that are at the highest risk for developing NEC and as you said, other issues as well. And it’s‚…it can only be a benefit in my opinion. DR. LEE: Absolutely. And just to add to that, they should also ask the question‚…because there are other sources of nutrition, and there are other places from which milk can be attained we know about, for instance, women sharing milk on the Internet, milk sharing sites. You’ve got to be extremely careful. You’ve got to ask the question not only what’s best for my baby from the point of view of effectiveness, but also what’s the safest for my baby. And you want to be sure that the source, where that milk is coming from, where those products are coming from, comes from a place where you can say everything possible based on modern technology has been done to protect that milk, protect the safety of that milk. And I think that’s really critical. I think there was a story the other day‚…I forget which show, where it came up in one newspaper or another‚…about‚…oh, I know what it was. It was an article that was published that basically looked at milk samples. They actually collected milk on one of these sharing sites, and they found a large percentage of them had nicotine in the milk, had other things, other bad things that you don’t want a baby to have in that milk. So you’ve really got to ask that question what’s the best? What’s the safest for my baby as well? STEPHANIE: Right. Right. And Prolacta has provided us some material, some reference materials for sharing. So I will say that we’re going to be posting those on our website and will have them in the show notes as well. And I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today. If there’s anything else at all that you would like to add, please feel free. DR. LEE: Well, I just want to thank you for the opportunity to let obviously the parents out there know that we’re here for one very, very simple reason. I mean I know it may sound kind of corny, but we said from the day we opened the doors at Prolacta that we’re here to save babies, and I think we’ve done our job in that regard. And we’ve proven that that’s the case. So I’m really‚…I’ve worked, as you heard me say, for 35 years doing clinical and medical research, and I’m very, very proud to say that this is, I think, my best story to tell out of all that long career. STEPHANIE: Right. And as I said, I was out in the facility, took the tour in November, and we were very impressed with your company. And like I said, if I had to do it all over again, I would certainly be asking these questions and in my opinion, I think this is a phenomenal company. And your rigor in testing and your facility are top notch. So thank you. LEE: Well, thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate that, and it means an awful lot to me and to obviously everybody that works at Prolacta. STEPHANIE: Right. So thank you for joining us. And hopefully we’ll talk again soon. LEE: Alright. Thanks so much, Steph. STEPHANIE: In closing, I’d like to share a few thoughts about today’s conversation with Dr. Lee. Recently, I’ve seen a lot written about the use of donor milk, human milk products, and the emerging breast milk industry. Often times, the opinions expressed about Prolacta are solely related to cost: the expensive of Prolacta’s products versus those coming from nonprofit donor milk banks. In my opinion, the cost of using Prolacta’s human milk-based human milk fortifier far outweighs the potential risks of not using it, and any discussion about cost needs to be framed within the context of total cost of care. As Dr. Lee mentioned, Prolacta’s human milk-based nutritional products are intended for extremely premature infants who weigh less than 1250 grams (2 pounds 12 ounces) at birth. My son Morgan weighed 2 pounds 5.5 ounces at birth; my son Shaymus weighed 2 pounds 7 ounces. Prolacta openly shares that the typical cost of using their human milk-based human milk fortifier for these babies is $10,000. That, however, is only a fraction of Morgan’s and Shaymus’ total cost of care. Each of whose exceeded $1 million. In actual numbers, the cost of an exclusive human milk diet using Prolacta’s human milk-based human milk fortifier would have been less than one percent of Morgan’s total cost of care, and less than one percent of Shaymus’ total cost of care. And while Morgan’s case shows that no current preventative strategy for NEC is 100% effective, research shows that access to, and the use of, an exclusive human milk diet significantly reduces the risk of NEC in the majority of extremely premature infants. Show your support for our smallest and most fragile babies, those who have the greatest risk for developing NEC. Show your support for continued research in NEC. And join our effort to raise awareness about, and funds for research in NEC by making a donation to Morgan’s Fund at morgansfund.org. If you’ve had a personal experience with NEC and would like to share your story, or have a question or topic that you’d like to hear addressed on our show, e-mail us at feedback@morgansfund.org. We’d love to hear from you! Additional resources: Prolacta Bioscience, Inc. What Is Necrotizing Enterocolitis? N.p.: Prolacta Bioscience, 2015. Print. Prolacta Bioscience, Inc. 100% Human Milk: The Best Nutrition. N.p.: Prolacta Bioscience, 2014. Print. Prolacta Bioscience, Inc. Nutrition for Premature Babies. N.p.: Prolacta Bioscience, 2014. Print. Prolacta Bioscience. Premature Babies: What to Expect. N.p.: Prolacta Bioscience, 2014. Print. Copyright © 2015 The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, Inc. 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Audio File: Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Stephanie Boyle Founder, Rogue Paper, Inc. Date: August 29, 2011 [music] Lucy Sanders: Hi, this is Lucy Sanders. I'm the CEO of NCWIT, the National Center for Women in Information Technology. We're working hard to make sure that more girls and women are introduced to the exciting potential of computing education and career paths. Part of what we're doing is this exciting interview series with women who have started IT companies. They're fabulous entrepreneurs. They all have such interesting stories to tell. today we're going to interview another one, Stephanie Boyle. With me is Larry Nelson from W3W3.com. Hi, Larry. Larry Nelson: Oh, it's really a pleasure to be here. We like to focus, of course, on business and high technology with a special emphasis on young girls and women in technology. NCWIT has been doing a marvelous job. We're happy to be a part of it. Lucy: Well, and thank you very much for all the support that you give us with this excellent interview series. Now let me say a few words about Stephanie Boyle, the person we're talking to today. She's nothing less than a pioneer in the mobile Internet space as far as I'm concerned, having first helped shape the area as a founding member of Ericsson's Digital Media Innovation Center. Big brain thinking going on in this center, and it really helped to shape the whole mobile area. Now she is the founder of Rogue Paper, and she and her team deliver integrated mobile experiences to users. Now in the old days we used to call this convergence, but there's really a whole lot more exciting language and capability around the space today. I'm sure that Stephanie will be talking about that. But some of the things you can do now with the things that they're working on with Rogue Paper around co‑viewing a TV show and interacting with social media at the same time and integrating all of that. You're thinking, "That's really cool real‑time experience." But wait. There's more. You can actually do it with a rerun, where you can experience the whole power of what people said about the show or whatever movie and do it even when you are replaying or rerunning it. Just really interesting types of interactions going on right now and certainly leading to more engaging experience for viewers. Stephanie, wow! You've got a great company. Tell us a little bit about what's going on here. Stephanie Boyle: Thank you. Rogue Paper, we really started the business a year and a half ago with the mission of using mobile applications and technology to help enhance and drive traditional medium broadcast. Basically we are self‑proclaimed "TV‑holics"... Lucy: [laughs] Stephanie: ...and recognized [laughs] that we really wanted to not only watch television but really interact with the social sphere while we're watching these shows, that the content goes beyond just the primary screen. Really there is a second screen opportunity that can be interactive and augment the primary screen. There's a lot of really bad television being watched, but then [laughs] along with a lot of our guilty pleasures, which makes our jobs definitely a little bit more fun. But we really focused on how can we make the primary screen of television an interactive experience for users on the second screen, whether the second screen is a mobile device, a tablet, a desktop experience, or other things? We're trying to provide the users with second screen interactive content but then also provide media companies a way to reach these people already multitasking, who are already texting with their friends or IM‑ing or posting to Facebook or tweeting about what they're watching. It's really trying to bring the experience together as one single destination for a viewer and for the media companies to really have a holistic double‑screen experience. Lucy: That's really phenomenal. OK, I have a lot of guilty pleasures with TV, too. [laughs] One of them is American Idol, right? Stephanie: Right. [laughs] Lucy: When people are performing, and then people are tweeting or they've got things to say later in the blogs, and it's just not as much fun as if you could see it right then. Stephanie: Yeah. Well, and if you think about it, television has always been a social experience. It started in the 1950s. Maybe one or two people on a block had a television. It was really event driven. The people would come and sit together, and watch whatever was on the television and really talk about it together. Then as the technology innovations and as even socio‑economic things happened, we had VCRs and all of these second screens in the home, second televisions in the home, if you go into the seventies and eighties. Then the conversations started moving around the water cooler, so it was where people aggregated. It could be eight hours, 10 hours, 24 hours after the show aired. In the last two decades this has really moved into a digital landscape. I would say in the last five years or so it's really become back to real time because people aren't sitting together anymore. They're actually on their sofas or tweeting or talking, texting, or instant messaging. All these different mediums, but it's all really because, as a medium, it is social. Lucy: Yes, it certainly is. I remember the first time I saw a color TV in my neighborhood. It was Halloween. Larry: Oh! Lucy: I know. Stephanie: [laughs] Lucy: I was trick or treating. Anyway, back to you, Stephanie. Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about how you first got into technology? Stephanie: Yeah. I was always interested in systems and the way things interconnect. I was of a generation that there was one computer in our elementary school to having them in high school and later. But wasn't necessarily as intrigued with the computers themselves as I was with the Ataris, the ColecoVisions, [laughs] the computer systems that we had at home that really could help me build games or play games. But always interested in how the systems worked and how people interacted with them. Actually, my mother was the first person to show me a computer in a way where she took it apart and had me put it back together. Lucy: Oh, that is awesome. Stephanie: Yeah. [laughs] While I'm not a digital native, I was exposed to technology as something that could be deconstructed to learn about and then put it back together. It definitely eliminated fear for me. It's always something that I felt was accessible, interesting, and intriguing. As time went on, I'm self‑taught in a lot of ways because of that because if I don't know how to program in HTML5, I'll have somebody [laughs] do it for me. Then I'll take it apart and try and change it and put it back together. But definitely I look to my mother as the person who eliminated that "technology is this strange and new" thing and made it instead something that was tangible and interesting. Larry: I wish I had known you a number of years ago when we needed something put back together. [laughter] Stephanie: Right. I remember being intrigued by this whole concept of my mother showing me the mother board in the computer. [laughter] Lucy: That's great. Stephanie: [laughs] I didn't really believe her that that was what it was called. Larry: Being the father of five I thought it should have been called a father board. But anyhow... Stephanie: [laughs] Larry: You've been through a great deal. You're really building an interesting company. What is it about entrepreneurship that makes you tick, and why did you become an entrepreneur? Stephanie: Well, it's really interesting. I think the most exciting part of being an entrepreneur is the infinite blank canvas. Even when you have a product, an idea, a customer, anything, the next steps are never really clearly defined. Persistent problem‑solving and adjusting can be exhausting, but overall for me it's invigorating. It's how do we get to the next step? How do we keep moving forward? What ways do we need to be nimble and still meet our business objectives, our product objectives, our client objectives, the user objectives? It almost feels like the future is so undefined, and in that way I feel like it's really exciting. I often liken it to building a bridge while you're walking over it, which, of course, scares our business people to death. You should build a bridge on a [laughs] stable foundation. But what I mean by that is being an entrepreneur often allows you to be nimble enough to defy gratify and space as necessary. You're moving forward, but the future is undefined and you are still defining it. Lucy: Well, you're inventing it. I mean entrepreneurs are great inventors, right? Stephanie: Yeah, definitely. It's so exciting. Right now we share an office with actually four other startups. The collective energy is so interesting, just watching teams work together and just the steam coming off [laughs] the teams. It's exciting, and some of the things they talk about doing I think are impossible. I'm amazed at how those can be executed. Lucy: Well, now Stephanie, you mentioned your mother as having influenced you, really built your confidence, took the fear out of approaching technology and understanding it. Who else has influenced or supported you on your entrepreneurial career path? Stephanie: There are so many. I wish I had time to name them all. I can tell you the very first person who helped me grow as an employee or an executive or as a contributor to a team was by boss at Ericsson. Her name was Donna Campbell. She's a founder of Ericsson Cyberlab that was Ericsson's Digital Innovation Center. Donna had a very good and healthy way of looking at growth. We have a job that we have to do to make the trains run on time every day, but beyond that take time to learn more about this exciting new area that was mobile Internet or this new thing that has been so undefined because Telco previous to that the only content that existed was voice conversation, that people were talking to each other. It was just a voice channel. Then we were really looking at this next generation, which included data applications, content, anything. While we had all of our jobs to, what we would say, make the trains run on time, whatever that job was, she really challenged us to always think about learning about this new space and helping to define it. I sometimes even just with our team or our employees, I think I hear her voice in my head encouraging them to be as creative and also forward‑thinking and less constrained, that all ideas are really good ideas. Larry: I'm curious. With all the things you've done so far, not only with Ericsson but now with this newer type startup, what's the toughest thing that you've had to do in your career? Stephanie: [laughs] To be perfectly honest, it's probably less about my career itself and more about my personality. But I really believe that the toughest thing was really to learn to listen. That is in a big organization. That's with your own staff, employees, and partners, with your customers, with anything. I mean it's very easy to believe that you know what is the right way and to feel confident in your decisions and to try and push those things forward if you have a little bit of a bulldog personality, which I have. Still, I think the hardest thing for me to do is to really take a step back and realize that not only are all opinions really interesting and can spark new ideas for a collective group, but that you have to pay attention to what people are saying, and really listen. While that shouldn't be a tough thing in a career path, I think it adds growth as a human being, and applying that to my career. It's something I also believe that Donna really taught me, was that while maybe in the end your way is the right way, there are five, ten other people who can contribute and make it a better thing. Larry: Stephanie, we love your candor. Lucy: I have to say that this is such an important point. I can remember when I worked at Bell Labs that we took some amount of our imagination from "Rolling Stone Magazine." Who would figure? Stephanie: Right. Very cool. Lucy: Yeah. Around what we were doing with multimedia communication interfaces, and it came through this person who was sitting on the beach one day reading "Rolling Stone" on vacation. He brought the idea back to us at the Labs, and we at first didn't listen to him. Then we read the article. [laughter] Stephanie: It's interesting when you're really thinking about working through multimedia and technology, it's very easy as technologists to come from, "Well, this is the way it should work." It's really hard to think about, these are the other people on the value team, the people who create music. When you're thinking about all pieces of the value chain, it's really easy to focus on the technology. It's hard sometimes to remember that not only are, maybe, music companies involved, or people who listen, or all the other pieces along the way, to really bring them together. It's sometimes hard to get out of the tasks that we're doing today and think about the holistic view of the ecosystem. Lucy: I'll tell one other quick little story. At Bell Labs, in my organization, we finally realized that the Internet was real when a woman appeared on "The Donahue Show." Remember "The Donahue Show?" Stephanie: Yes. Lucy: OK. The sensation, of course, much more plain than it is today on some of those shows, but the sensation was that she was getting divorced because she had been talking with some other man on the Internet. They did a whole show. [laughter] Lucy: Stephanie, if you were sitting here with a young person and giving them advice about entrepreneurship, what advice would you give them? Stephanie: I actually think that the best advice I could give to anybody would be to take time to learn, to go and do internships, to find the salty dog in the organization who isn't always the oldest person in the organization, or the person who might be a little contrarian. Find those people and really learn about how you can work with them and how you can support them in all of their issues. I think internship is so important. I think coming to an organization with ideas is amazing. I think learning to collaborate and gain consensus amongst a huge number of people who are key influencers within the organizations are really, really good ways to learn how to contribute. I think becoming an intern in a larger organization, or even a smaller organization, and then making sure you touch all points of that organization, gives you a view of how an entrepreneur has to live. Some days I write business cases. Some days I do contracts. Some days I deal with end users. Some days I deal with angry clients on our side. Some days I'm troubleshooting why the applications have bugs in them. Really taking time to learn all of the aspects, all of the people in an organization, helps later to learn what it's like to be this utility person, which is all entrepreneurs. Some days you're accounting and some days you're dev, and all places in between. I think the best exposure is either (A) working in a big company where you intern, or working side by side with other entrepreneurs who pick up the six different hats a day, or even in an hour. Larry: I know a coming out of Ericsson and all, and that was great experience, but what is it about you personally that gives you the advantage of being an entrepreneur? Stephanie: I think I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but I am a little bit of a bulldog. I think when people say that people are like their dogs, I have a very, very, very adorable and stubborn French bulldog named Weesie. I think we share some characteristics, in that when we I want to do something, or think that it's something that is good for the company, or for end users, or for the organization, I can't let it go until we get there. Whether we have to take five different routes to get to the same place, I really think that having a vision and sticking to it, but not sticking to how you get there, is really important in being an entrepreneur. To be flexible and learn how you can do it differently, or any of those things is really important, but just owning what you want to do and, hopefully, the outcome is really important. I think as a characteristic, and while I don't necessarily want to be considered a puppy with a sock. I am sometimes gnawing on that sock until we really can get to the vision. We're flexible enough to think that the vision can change over time and evolve. Definitely, especially within Rogue Paper, because this is a business we wanted to build, to make TV exciting for viewers, but then also just to help media companies to engage with their users and also to drive their core business, which is broadcast advertising. Really thinking about how to keep bringing eyeballs back for them. We'd done a few things to get it to change as time goes on. But I think definitely we always stick to this vision that we really think mobile can help drive traditional media. Lucy: I think it's great advice to think about sticking to your vision and being flexible with the way you get there. That's a powerful piece of advice. Changing gears just a bit, you're very busy, obviously. You're working hard on your company. I'm sure you have a wonderful set of friends and family around you as well. Larry: And a bulldog. Lucy: And a bulldog. [laughter] Lucy: How do you bring balance into your personal and professional life? Stephanie: It is very difficult. It's one of the bigger challenges, I would say, that most entrepreneurs have. I think the most successful are those to whom work is play, to some degree. If you love what you do and it bleeds into your personal life, it's not necessarily a hassle to do that. It's still that you're so excited about what you're doing and you're consistently thinking about it. In that way, there is not a huge difference in work life in terms of happiness. It's exciting to work at work, it's exciting to think about it afterwards. But it's interesting. Every company has growth phases. There's an innovation phase. You go through these big bursts of time when the focus gets really hard. I have an agreement with people in my personal life that in those two or three months, or in this growth phase, that I might be checked out a little bit. Then after that period goes, or after we solve a big problem, then I'm back at the dinner table and being an active participant in life. I would say it's not a burden on me, but it can be lonely for the other people in your life. Fortunately, the bulldog doesn't really notice as long as you throw the ball. [laughter] Stephanie: But it is a challenge. It's something that I watch people do around me. My business partner and co‑founder, she works nine hours a day full time, really hard during those times. Then she's able to really turn it off afterwards. It's something that impresses me and I admire, but at the same time, my brain is going at all times. I don't necessarily turn it off as well, or go as intensely during the day, but it is definitely one of the bigger challenges. But I would say in partnership, we just have to have agreements that this is a head sound period and I'll be back in two weeks, and a better participant. Lucy: I think that's an important point, that you can in fact give the people who are around you a heads up that this is going on and that you will be back. Stephanie: Right. I think it's definitely something that I learned through relationships and friendships, that what was scary was just going away, even though I knew I'd be back. Lucy: Right. Exactly. Just that simple communication seems like a pretty good tool for one's tool chest. Stephanie: It's not acceptable to miss birthdays and big events, but for the daily check‑ins, or the high‑intensity communication, I just kind of wave my hand and say, "OK, I'll get back to you in a couple of weeks. We're really powering through something." Larry: Stephanie, you might want to check with your mother before you answer this next question. [laughter] Larry: That is, you've already been through and done a great deal. What's next for you? Stephanie: Rogue Paper is actually my third business. The first one is really focused on technology. I actually taught Pilates and had Pilates studios. My life has changed in these big ways. Going back to what we were talking about earlier, that was a system. Pilates is a system, the human body is a system. I was always intrigued by that. This technology, co‑viewing and television, it's applying the same framework to a different type of thing. I would say I'm so excited about Rogue Paper. We're still just about a year and a half old. I feel like we're just really at the precipice of some really interesting things that we can do for media companies and for users. I think mobile penetration is really getting bigger. It's hard for me to think about too much of the future. Maybe I'm a little too comfortable with ambiguity, but I feel like there's so much I want to do now that is at the intersection of mobile media and entertainment. We're really excited about growing. I'm sure my mother would say, "children." Larry: [laughs] Very good. [laughter] Stephanie: "Grandchildren." Lucy: [laughs] Thank you so much for talking to us. You have such a great company, very interesting work. We wish you the very best for the future. We'll be watching, both from a business perspective, and probably we'll be using your technology as well. Stephanie: That is so exciting. Lucy: Yeah. Really. Thanks very much, Stephanie. I want to remind listeners that they can hear this interview at w3w3.com, and ncwit.org, as well as all the other interviews that we've done. Larry: You betcha. Thank you very much, Stephanie. Stephanie: Thank you. Have a great day. Lucy: Thank you, Stephanie. [music] Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Stephanie BoyleInterview Summary: As a self-proclaimed “TV-holic,” Stephanie Boyle founded Rogue Paper, Inc. to use mobile applications and technology to help enhance traditional media broadcasts and create an engaging double screen experience for viewers. Release Date: August 29, 2011Interview Subject: Stephanie BoyleInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry NelsonDuration: 22:06