TRANSCRIPT
This transcript was completed by an automated system, please forgive any grammatical errors.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
email, brands, retention, product, vo, sms, shopify, email address, people, work, literally, thought, business, mariah, customer, flow, month, clay, vendors, years, branded order tracking examples, generating post-purchase revenue
SPEAKERS
Mariah Parsons, Noah Rahimzadeh, Adam Robinson
Mariah Parsons 00:04
Hi there, I'm Mariah Parsons, your host of retention Chronicles, ecommerce brands are starting to shift their strategy to focus on retention in the customer experience. And so we've decided to reach out to top DC brands and dive deeper into their tactics and challenges. But here's the thing, we love going on tangents. And so with our guests, you'll often find us talking about the latest trends, as well as any and all things in the Shopify ecosystem. So go ahead and start that workout or go on that walk and tune in as we chat with the leading minds in the space retention Chronicles is sponsored by Malomo. A shipment in order tracking platform, improving the post purchase experience, be sure to subscribe and check out all of our other episodes at go. malomo.com.
Noah Rahimzadeh 01:00
Awesome, all right. Welcome back team to the next episode of retention Chronicles. We've got a unique episode today with Adam. Adam Robinson, wow. Founder and CEO of retention.com. So what's unique about this, Adam and I, I'm not sure how familiar you are with the pod, we normally have like really tenured partners on the podcast, to talk about what makes them unique in this ecosystem. Talk about like, our partnership, joint value props and some merchants that we've worked with in the past. This is unique in that right now, as far as I know. And I should know, we're not doing much, if at any, if anything at all with retention.com. So I thought it'd be really cool not only to learn about retention more through you, obviously, to have you on this podcast is retention Chronicles. So it's a natural fit. But maybe we even maybe even riff on some like potential joint value props, and and combined use cases that our two solutions could bring together. And I'll, I'll walk you through that. So don't Don't feel pressure. But yeah, what do you think?
Adam Robinson 02:12
I think that's a great idea. Love it. Okay,
Noah Rahimzadeh 02:15
cool. So we take a bit of a unique approach to these, at least in the intro, before we get into all of those things that I just talked about, we like to start on the personal side and ask you one or two things that you're excited about in your personal life?
Adam Robinson 02:32
Yeah, um, so in my personal life, I had my first child six months ago.
Noah Rahimzadeh 02:40
That's a that's a big deal. It's a big one.
Adam Robinson 02:43
Yeah, it's, it's certainly a big one. And I'm just generally I lived in Manhattan for a long time. And I kind of moved to Austin, Texas, and beat the COVID Rush, I moved in May of 2019. And I'm really just excited about, you know, raising a family in this neighborhood that I live in around the people that I'm around, because it's like, a large contrast to the life that I had living in Tribeca. Everything Everything just seems so much more difficult in New York. So yeah, you know, it's it's absorbing a lot of my personal life bandwidth right now.
Noah Rahimzadeh 03:29
I would imagine, like, I'm
Adam Robinson 03:30
not sure that there would be much else to say other than that,
Noah Rahimzadeh 03:34
you kind of have you kind of have two babies. retention.com And
Mariah Parsons 03:39
yeah, actual baby.
Adam Robinson 03:40
Yeah, and, you know, so like, there's the professional side of having a business, but then there's also how it impacts your personal life. And men like so I had my kid in August. And then in September, we decided we were going to go from really amazing bootstrap lifestyle business to unicorn startup. Gotcha. We hired 42 People in six weeks. Oh, it's like, it's like working. So like, it's it's interesting, because before that decision, I didn't even know that it was like a possibility. You know, and then a bunch of stuff just like like fell into place. And it was like, oh, like, you know, these big Shopify stores are really killing it with our existing product. And then we added this other feature set to it, it's like wow, they're like, doing even better with that. It's like man like maybe I should buy like a huge domain since we're doing more than just getting people emails the company was called get email so bought this domain and then like, found this like COO, who's like this kind of company like rapid growth hyper scalar. He did. Zoom in Oh, and apollo.io and a few other b2b data companies. And yeah, I mean, we just started slamming our foot to the gas like crazy. And like, it's this interesting thing in life where like, if your prospects are improving, if your view of the future is like, sort of steadily, climbing, sure, that's a very exciting time to live during your life. You know, the opposite is true, when your view of the future is steadily declining. That's like, kind of a malaise period of your life, like that seasons coming, I don't know what it is. But like, for the last four months or so, like the kids showed up, and then it was like, and then I was like, Okay, this is a good lifestyle business. Oh, it could, this could be like a unicorn in five years. And it's like, holy shit, this could be a unicorn one year, you know, like, like, Oh, my, this is the, this could be the best business ever, you know, like, like, it's like this, it's like, sort of internalizing all of that, like, it's just, I've never had more fun doing anything, you know, it's giving the personal part of this is like, it's giving so much energy to the rest of my life, that you know, it's just, I want to preserve it as long as possible. So really, I would say the personal things that have been going on are like one having a kid and then be this business changing like so rapidly so quickly, at exactly the same time. You know, that's what's going on. We'll make
Noah Rahimzadeh 06:32
a couple of a couple of things that are Yeah, I'd have a big deal Awesome. Thanks for that update, obviously want to dive a lot more into the business. But yeah, we've had I think already Marie from Sharma brands also relocated to New York to Austin and said very similar things. About
Adam Robinson 06:54
About the No. Glad you're like I I'm taking our imri on my boat this afternoon. No way.
Mariah Parsons 07:01
No way. Yeah, my gosh.
Adam Robinson 07:05
I sponsor her newsletter in Daniels podcast, Sharm his newsletter, you know, I'm like doing all that shit. I I love her. I think she's awesome in like, I think she's like the next Nick Sharma just like a few years behind. I I'm like trying to make bets on her career and like, do like community events with her and stuff. You know, Ariane Adam dinner.com or whatever. I really like her. She's just, she's just the best. So
Noah Rahimzadeh 07:34
I would kill, you know, 1010 basis points of her career.
Adam Robinson 07:40
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's like, what can I do to like blind myself with this person?
Noah Rahimzadeh 07:45
I'll tell her. Me. And Mariah said, Hi. Well, we work very closely with them as well. Yeah,
Mariah Parsons 07:51
we were saying we have to do something in person with her. So you're on the list?
Adam Robinson 07:56
Yeah. There you go. Where are you guys looking?
Noah Rahimzadeh 08:00
We're in Indianapolis. got most of our executive teams here. And then we have some people spread out across the country, but about half the company here in Indianapolis now. So yeah, we'd love to come to Austin. With that said anytime.
Adam Robinson 08:14
Yeah, dude, bring it around.
Mariah Parsons 08:18
We don't have any water for a boat.
Adam Robinson 08:22
Yeah, that's, that's one. That's like one of my favorite things about living here, it's really hard to get a boat slip on the lake that's closest to, but like, I managed to just sort of manifest that through, like, speaking loudly about it in my social network. But it's great. I mean, it's like 10 minutes away from your house, you have like a boat that's like, you know, just lifted above the water. So like, you show up, rip the cover off, drop it down. And like, you're like doing the act of wakesurfing within 20 minutes of leaving your house. And then it's like, super easy to like, put it all back way and drive home. It's, it's it's just like, every I've been out there hundreds of times at this point. It's like I just every time I can't believe this, like, it's a real city where real people are doing real things. And there's this experience that like, growing up I had to let I lived in Connecticut had to go to Maine to do it or whatever. It was just like so far and like, the idea of doing something like that living in New York, it's just impossible to conceive, you know, like, the amount of effort it would take to put yourself in an environment where something even like that was possible, right? Like, you know, you can like ride your bike down the West Side Highway with like, 3000 other people. Like that's an option, but it's like not really the same thing. You know?
Noah Rahimzadeh 09:41
Yeah, yeah. New York. I love but love to visit no desire to live.
Adam Robinson 09:48
But yeah, it's it's got its perks. It's got its downsides. It's just I always I lasted way longer than I thought it was going to but eventually I had to just like You know, yank myself off stage or whatever I'm like, way like, I don't want to get stuck in the next phase of my life here. Sure. So
Noah Rahimzadeh 10:08
Latin words. Tell us Okay, so tell us about your background pre retention.com. And then yes, bring us to that point. And then we'll dive into the current base.
Adam Robinson 10:21
So I worked at Lehman Brothers, which is now defunct, depending on the the generation of the listener, they may know what that is. I traded credit default swaps, they made it SVB. It's exactly it's it's a recent iteration, a recent iteration of the same thing. They let Lehman Brothers fail in a very messy way, which they kind of didn't with SBB they kind of got in there like, Oh, you're gonna have your deposits and the equity is wiped out or wherever they just let I don't know. So but I was trading credit default swaps, which like they made a movie about this, The Big Short, like, awesome people who I worked with, like in that book. And the whole time I showed up in New York and my friends who I was living with, they started Vimeo, the video sharing website, like in my apartment. They were like, with them. Yeah, yeah, literally, like, I'm still friends with Jake Lodwick. look him up, like, I'm seeing him this afternoon. Like he just moved to Austin. Oh, my God. So like he he moved to Austin to start a startup with the Casper mattress guys. It's like some really interesting last mile delivery play, where they're like, going to try to like, do Uber for people's garages that have extra storage space and just want to make extra money. So like, they get a container dropped off, they'll have to package some shit. And then like, somebody else will come by and like, I don't know, it's like, there's stuff that people are going to need everyday in the neighborhood. And like, they think this is an efficient way to do it. I think that like guys that smart, don't, they will succeed, but it will be in something tangential to that. Like, it's like your original idea with a lot of this stuff isn't how it pans out, you know, at least that's been my observation. Like my two businesses like what they what ended up working was not what I thought it was in the beginning. This one This one also
Noah Rahimzadeh 12:09
getting emails if you know, yeah, well, but that
Adam Robinson 12:13
was part of the journey, you know. And like, the funny thing was, I was really negative about getting emails when we started it. I thought it because I use third party cookies to do identity. And literally, when we started it three and a half years ago, they were going away in 18 months, but I was like, whatever, like I have this other stuck business, I'll make a couple million dollars to like, start something else. Like it's super marketable, but like I was really negative on the long term viability of it. Then they kept kicking third party cookies down the line. And we figured out how to do without third party cookies. So like, that was just this, like, literally just like what, you know, I would like go to bed and be like, What the fuck am I doing wasting my time on this one, like, this is literally going away. And then the other funny thing was, like, it's hard to describe how stuck I was with this other business. I was like, I literally I thought it wasn't compliant with can spam laws, but I was like, whatever, like this universe, but there had never been a significant can spam lawsuit. So who fucking cares, right? And I was like, these affiliates senators will do this, like they don't, they don't care about cancer, right, they're sending non opt in email anyway, it's just a vehicle to like, you know, accelerate that turns out a it was can spam compliant B, it didn't actually work for these affiliate guys at all. For some reason, like, there's something about the way their business works, we're like, what we do doesn't really work. And then, you know, two and a half years later, we realized these big Shopify stores want to kill it. But anyway. So I wanted to be a tech entrepreneur, when I was a Wall Street guy in this apartment, somehow found my way to like, starting an email marketing company that was like kind of competitive a little bit with milk, we were stealing customers from Constant Contact, like, you know, kind of like picking up bread crumbs off of this massive table is the analogy. And that got to be like a decent lifestyle business. But like the problem is like, that market is particularly hard to compete in. It's super mature. It's analogous, I think, to like, trying to sell against Coke and Pepsi, like, you're just not going to sell Cola, right? Like, if you sign up for that you are signing up for a very hard battle. So it got to a point where it was like good, but like slowly shrinking cash flow business. And no matter what I tried, I couldn't grow it because like MailChimp had a free product and they were bidding up every channel and like, you know, they're moving faster and we are on the dev side and they had this amazing integration ecosystem and this and that and whatever. And then CLEVEO came in and like you know, own the whole econ, whatever, which is amazing that they were able to do that. So I was trying to do stuff that MailChimp wasn't doing and I made a couple of huge bets that were just wrong, like two years in a row. and stuff that just didn't work. And then this identity resolution thing came along. And I was like, wow, like, I didn't know that was possible. But like, if you could resolve an anonymous website visitor to a deliverable email address, I just feel like I could sell that to anybody with a website. Right? Like, who doesn't mind that? Ya know, like, who? Who doesn't want that? Right? Like, like, of course, I want that. Right. Like, it's crazy. So like, what? There were a few amazing things. One, I was like, how is that possible took me 18 months to figure out how I'm thinking right now. And then and then and then and then we started selling it, it, it's like, oh, let's call it get emails, that's like a shortened descriptive name that like whatever. And then as many SAS is start, self serve, sign up, $19 a month, whatever. So we let everybody try it. And my suspicion going in was that the emails would be like half as engaged as a normal email. But the price would be like 10% of the price. And we could get like 2030 35%, sometimes maybe even 40 of people's us web traffic, whereas a forum was getting like two, right? So I was like, just the math will work with lower engagement emails that are lower quality. But the Wild Thing is, they actually worked better than people's houses list, the house list, if that makes sense. Like, we would give them email addresses. And that list would perform whatever a higher open rate than what they were currently sending. Wow. Doesn't make fucking sense. Right? Like, it's crazy. Yeah, it's like, it's like, if you were telling me that, I would say that's impossible, but that's just the way it played out. And I think the reason why is because in email, and marketing, in general, it's like, the hottest list is the best list. So it's like, the intent is so high of someone being on your website, and then sending them a one off email, 15 seconds later, or whatever, right? Like, that's what this was. So you know, it started as a feature in the ESP, people were in the email app, people were signing up for it, using the identity part downloading the file, putting it in there, CLEVEO seems awesome. So that's like a good sign of product market fit when someone's like, willing to endure a horrible user experience. And so like, it's so like, spun it out, made it its own thing, sold my other lifestyle business to private equity for like an okay amount of money, like, whatever it is, like 10 million bucks or whatever. And then this was, you know, it was a self serve app. And like, we were letting anyone sign up. And it really it took us, the monthly user churn was always bad. And I thought it was just that the nature of the product itself would just lend itself to high churn in the people that we were selling to a couple of years. And it's hard to figure this out. Because like, you don't know how churn is until a few years in, right, because like, in month six, turn looks great, no matter who you are, because no one's turned yet, in month 18 You have people, you know, the people turn from month three, right? And month, 18, you have people turning from three months ago, six months ago, a year ago, you know, it just stacks. And then we realize that even with that existing product, the get emails product, meaning just someone hits a website, we give an email address to whoever, like these big Shopify stores. were crushing it so hard that they were just like sending us all of their friends and never turning right. Whereas everybody else it'd be like, man, like, we always thought it'd be great for publishers can't get that going or like depend on right, like, b2b disaster like anybody other than small Shopify stores. No, you know, but just like anyone who's on Shopify Plus or like has maybe 3 million GMV, or above three to 5 million does Okay, five to 10 does better. Above 25 million these guys absolutely crush it, like no questions asked. It's
Noah Rahimzadeh 19:03
wild, though, that you're saying this because we just came off an internal like full all hands where we talked about specifically what you just said about, like, how much stickier large merchants are than small merchants, and dude,
Adam Robinson 19:16
they better businesses, and they're better at everything they do, and they have better products. So like, in I think another thing is, if you're providing incremental to people in any way, which like most vendors are, when there's a larger amount of money there to just raise by 20% You can just point it more and you don't increase your prices linearly, like somebody we're making 400 grand a month for We don't charge half right, like we charge 110
Noah Rahimzadeh 19:49
It's not like a lie has to be you know, 10 we're gonna charge 10x No, it's like your are like 1500 and,
Adam Robinson 19:58
like doctors Yeah, Dr. Squash was on a stage at gro LA with me saying he made 50x In the first three months. And I'm like, look like, that's not going to everybody because they're so big, but like, He's not lying. He didn't make 50x. Please, please listen to that, right? Like, you all want to be this guy. So like, you should use my product, like you'll make money, just maybe not that much. And so yeah, I mean, that we basically like, the other big thing that we did was instead like, it also it took me a long time, like, I don't know how two years two and a half years in like this identity technology could also be used to expand abandoned cart audiences. So like, the product before was just passing an email over. And when the same visitor came by again, that would do nothing. Got it know what I mean? Because we already so you have their email. And like it had no way to tie the email address to some type of first party cookie that was like tracking the user and triggering events based upon their behavior, there was just a top of the funnel strategy, where it's like, warm them up, put them in your newsletter, they will buy and keep buying, that was proven. That's like, oh, shit, we can use this. There's this huge problem that most Shopify stores don't realize were the only abandonment messaging that's being sent out. So like, abandoned cart, abandoned product view, you know, abandoned whatever, like these people have to be logged into the merchants website in order to activate that. Yeah, while no one's logged in, right, it's either on the brands list, and they're on a different device, which is, which is a lot of people. But even more people haven't even signed up in any way for the brands list yet. So we can expand the audience of abandoned carts to both of those audiences. And it's like a 5x. I mean, it's just unbelievable how well it works, which took two and a half years to figure out but we figured that out at the same time, we figured out these big Shopify stores were our ICP. And then like, you know, we basically chopped the price and made it an annual deal and like, bundled all this stuff up together. And then it started just being this like, absolute, like, I mean, it. It is like, perfect product market fit like these people are beside themselves and how well it works. And it's like super fast sale, like there's no there's just nothing for them to hesitate about. So yeah, this is why I'm having so much fun, you know, building this business, because it's it's perfect moment for this product, where we have like 2% penetration into this world. And it will work for every single one of them. Like there's no situation in which it doesn't work. And there's no alternative, which is the fucking beautiful part. So, so yeah, that's kind of the story of what it does and how it got how we got here.
Noah Rahimzadeh 22:54
So just to like, recap that and tell me if I'm wrong about everything. I go visit a website. I've never logged in before I've never visited somehow you're capturing my email address. Is there any? Yeah, I would love to like just if you can share the secrets. Sure. I
Adam Robinson 23:11
share everything. I'm super transparent. I share our financials with everybody. Yeah. So the question is everybody has one of them is the one you're alluding to is how does it work? But primarily, it's like, well, how is that legal? And because it seems like it shouldn't be. But it is. And the reason is, because in the US and this is us only can't do it in Europe can't do it in Canada, we have our IP is ring fenced every email address as US postal address in the US can spam the can spam act of 2020 through 2003, which was reviewed in 2019. And it's staying it's opt out and not opt in. That's just the law. Like we've never not made it through a legal department at a brand like if so like Warby Parker, like, big company, everyone knows them. Like there is no legal problem there. They have a legal department trust me, right? Like there was a lot of back and forth, we make it through because it's legal. If a brand is big enough, like brands, the reason is plus stores are so great is because they're like if it makes me money and it's easy to onboard, and it's legal, I'll do it. If it makes me money. It's easy on board and it's not legal, I'll contemplate it right it's a very different position than like you know, hello fresh with a billion in ecommerce revenue that's like basically like they won't do it because they're like, there's significant PR risk to me here that I just didn't I want to be more polite than that. Like Shopify Plus vendor is not very concerned with being polite about their marketing strategies, if it will make them money. And another way that that that Cody from the VP marketing of ducks quest said he's like, the way we thought about it, whether it'd be damaging to a brand or not, is he's like, if you think about the amount of emails that are in people's inbox, in what's in there, in the amount that people actually signed up for, if you add one from us, that was sent after what is actually an unbelievable amount of intent hitting a website, he's just like, we viewed it as a something that was not going to bother the company and B if the consumer and B if it did, you'd see it in the data. So we would just stop. So yeah, that's number one. And then the next question people say they're like, Okay, so it's us can spam compliant? What about this California stuff? I thought that that was just like GDPR. So it's like it is except for it is also opt out? And by the way, depending on your listeners are, it doesn't apply to people with under 25 million revenue, which is just interesting. So how does it work? There are many networks. There are cookie pools like these, these are all foreign concepts. But like in ad tech, which is the anonymized banner ad world, right? There's like Facebook and Google, but there's like a bunch of open internet ad tech providers, a lot of ad tech, the persistent identifier that follows somebody across websites is an MD five, email hash. Interesting. Okay. So we we look out for these MD five email hashes in people's browsers. And we have a way to basically D anonymize them, you're not supposed to be able to but turns out, if you have ever email address that ever existed, then you can empty five all of those and then just do like a VLOOKUP. And we have opt ins through a courage network for every email that we provide people. It's not a legal necessity. We just do that. Because generally, when a consumer asks, Where did you get my email, and we send them an opt in, of where they opted into this network, they immediately are satisfied with that. So So yeah, that's that's basically how it works. And then the real magic of it is we clean these email addresses. We're purchasing signal data opens and clicks from the rest of the email ecosystem like you can by anonymized opening clicks. So like, we only give people email addresses that have like, opened and clicked elsewhere in the past, like 24 hours, seven days, depending on like, other characteristics of the email address. So we basically were reverse engineer, like the hottest possible email addresses. Yeah, and then pass them over to the brand. So yeah, it's an aggressive tactic, like I'm not in any way, trying to construe that it is not, but it is amazing in how effective it is. And legal. Yeah, it's not actually like retention, either. I just thought it was close enough attention to like, be retention.com is our name, I actually want to create a category called customer reCAPTCHA. That like, you know, embodies what we do. And there's a couple indirect competitors that do it too. I think it'd be helpful brands.
Noah Rahimzadeh 28:03
I like just wrote down on my notes here, it seems very acquisition focused, why not? Yeah, not calm instead of retention.com. Do you do you see use cases on the retention side? Or did it just feel feel like this makes sense? The name Yeah, like,
Adam Robinson 28:23
do you like, the way I looked at it as like, there's retention as E commerce people talking about retention. But like, then there's also just like, like, it is retaining people who are retaining your website and funnel leakage, right? Like, it's not loyalty rewards, reviews, like whatever, like the yacht post suite, if you want to call it that. But it is in some way retention, and I could get the domain. And it's so much like I did so put it this way. I didn't think that there was a better name that I could get that would more accurately describe it and have so much authority, you know, Alex or Mozi. owns acquisition.com. Even if he didn't, yeah, I'm not sure that for what we do. acquisition.com is more descriptive than retention outcome, because it's like, right in the middle, you know? Yep. So I think the category of cuts to customer recapture is like, okay, you know, it's better than 10 retention, but, but the name is incredible, by the way. I mean, it's just, like,
Noah Rahimzadeh 29:33
any commerce right now. Yeah,
Adam Robinson 29:35
yeah, totally. Which is also one of the reasons I bought it. It was 800 grand, it wasn't cheap.
Noah Rahimzadeh 29:42
But worth it so far. Would you say?
Adam Robinson 29:44
Oh, my god, yeah. Because I mean, in a way that is like, like, I wish I wrote down these examples, but you kind of can't it's like, like, people are coming to like, it's just part of the story. And it's such a huge part. And like people are like this fire we're creating the ecosystem is like, I think it's got a lot to do of of how easily we're able to stoke it because somebody hears it. And they're just like, Well, why don't I know what they do? Yeah, you know, like, I would get emails. It's like, Man, I liked it, because it was like, very provocative. Being a consumer email product, like you're not supposed to be doing that. Super descriptive. You can't mess it up when you type it in, you know, you can't pronounce it the wrong way. Right all. My first business was called robe li or OBL why, which I actually this guy who I'm seeing later today. I picked it because of him. He was like, the Vimeo guy. He's like, short, is better than descriptive, which I don't agree with anymore. Yeah, tell us it was a short, it was a it was a short, it was a short name. That was a contraction of the founders last names Robinson, bladnoch. And Murphy. So it was like a short, a five letter word that didn't mean nothing. The problem is, like, we were like growing that business with phone sales. And it was like, Robe li spelled R OB Oh, you know what I mean? It doesn't it's not a word. So people would hear it. And they're like, what, you know, so I like, hated that name. And then get emails was like, I just loved how direct it was, you know? Way completely. Yeah, totally. And it was, it was just amazing. You couldn't fuck it up. You couldn't like it's like, it's like, I would describe what we do. And the like, what's your brand call? I'm like, get this get emails.
Noah Rahimzadeh 31:43
You know, incredible.
Adam Robinson 31:45
And then and then like, just having, you know, so I don't think that you should buy a huge domain like this until your product is literally fire, like, like people are telling you like, dude, like, this could be a unicorn like, then you get something like this. And it just accelerates it. I think it's actually a hindrance in the early stage, because it will send false signal about getting there to like, the best product. That's my two cents there. But like dude worth every penny, you know? I just it will. It is such an accelerant for the journey that we're on. Yeah.
Noah Rahimzadeh 32:26
Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, even for us, it's like, yeah, no brainer to have retention.com on our podcast, because we talk about retention all the time. The podcast is called retention Chronicles. Like the hottest thing in E commerce right now. And there's a whole, there's a whole idea of like retention being a bigger focus even than acquisition now. And that's, this might be the first time in history that that's a thing. So I think that the way that you spend retention to talk about what you're solving for makes a lot of sense as well. So going back to like the full the full value prop. Once you've captured that email address, like what happens, are you automatically triggering any messaging, or, you know, are you capturing events that then can be used to trigger on a play via like, walk me through the full, the full lives, email capture,
Adam Robinson 33:17
both. So if you want to think about the product as two different parts, like the first part is the get emails part, which is just like an anonymous visitor hits your site, top of funnel, right, they leave, they don't fill out a form we give an email to, we literally pass that to clay VO We tell the customers copy or welcome series, change the subject line and thanks for stopping by the site. If they engage with one of the three emails or whatever, put them in a newsletter. If they don't unsubscribe, literally, don't ever contact them again, like hard to unsubscribe. And then on the bottom of funnel stuff, literally, it's just like we have a script that you put next to your clay vo abandoned cart abandoned product scripts and you just run all the events through us and fork the CLEVEO cart flow to this is what was the old side and our side basically. And you send all the events in and it's like, well, if it's not in the other fork, send it if it is in the other four, don't send it. So it makes it really easy just to see the incremental. Got it but like we're driving, yeah, yeah. Okay, but we do no messaging in summary, like we just just, you know, in the in the first case, it's we send the record which triggers a flow and the second case we send an event with the record, which triggers the flow.
Noah Rahimzadeh 34:32
Got it. Okay. And then clavey obviously, is probably a huge tech partner of yours. Are there any other like retention, you know, ecommerce retention stack products or apps that fit really well in terms of a joint value prop?
Adam Robinson 34:47
Yeah, so the email apps that EECOM stores use are the most I mean, there's there's one dominant one in this part of the market which is clay vo there's five ones competing for share immediately above it. So it's like iterable, braise Salesforce or sale through Salesforce marketing cloud and like whatever emarsys Are you also integrated with those just to, you know, we have integrations that we decided that so there's also other vendors that do kind of similar things, like they're not quite as aggressive as we are, they're a little more full service. So it's not comparable offering like you would either pick them or pick us. Bigger companies have reasons to pick them. And they can't actually service the part of the market that we're selling into profitably, just because of how they run their business and what their product does. So like, there's this white space for us to go after in the Shopify world. And that's just Shopify Klaviyo. We have integrations with two other stuff where we're not really focused on it. But like, interval customer shows up at our door, we're like, overjoyed, obviously, you know, it's like, oh, this freebie. We're just not the sales guy is not pointed it at that for now. The thing I'm encouraged by is, I actually think CLEVEO in Shopify, are way better companies than any of these other companies. I mean, how wouldn't you? Clay vo created a monopoly literally, like so did Shopify, and they both want to go up market. So like, Shopify is growing Shopify Plus faster than we're growing our company. That makes sense. Yeah, they're added, you know what I mean, they are proactively bringing on vendors from Magento or whatever, faster than we are penetrating our way into
Noah Rahimzadeh 36:40
their existing base. Yeah, yeah. That's a That's an awesome metric. Yeah.
Adam Robinson 36:45
It's amazing. It's like the best backdrop ever. It's like, in Klaviyo wants to do the same thing. They create a CDP. I don't know how they may, they may actually just turn it off and like further develop their core app into a CDP, but like, they are the best email marketing company, no question about it, there might have been an argument between them and MailChimp and MailChimp got bought buy into it. And that's not what they are anymore. Like, there's something different, like clay Vo is the best in the world, that anything anywhere close to this, right? Like, it's laughable that attentive, is attempting to compete in E commerce email, email is so fucking hard. I think it's way harder than SMS. So the email side of it's the most natural, there's this use case for SMS that is very natural as well. So when I was describing the abandoned cart flows there's two audiences of people that we're expanding the audience to. One is the people who they are not opted into the brands list yet, they're opted into arco Reg, you can't send an SMS to those people. However, the other audience, which is sort of equal in ROI that it drives is someone who's on their list, but on a different device. And we can trigger SMS flows to those people, if the brand has the number double opted in interest, we have an integration with attentive and PostScript and you know, SMS bump and like all those. And it's really great. I mean, the SMS vendors love it. Because flow, SMS flows are where all the money comes in. It's the it's the least invasive type of SMS thing. It's least dangerous, like whatever. And the brand loves it, because it's just money that you point to. We love it, because it allows us to have tech partnerships with the people and they'll send us they'll send us leads. So it's like a perfect, oftentimes, it's not such a serendipitous relationship between vendors. There's, it's like really one sided, you know, but but that's a great one.
Noah Rahimzadeh 38:46
Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, it'll be interesting, real quick on the intent of clay vo thing. So we're gonna, we're gonna build an attentive email integration at some point this year. And we've heard mixed things honestly, like, we haven't heard anything super negative about a tenant email. Most people that we know have switched over are happy. But there's been a ton of feedback around like, why would I switch off of clay vo email, like, those people will be you know, then have a choice. Do I want to stay on a tenant SMS or move over? And I think they're both sort of building, you know, directly competing products. And it'll be really interesting to see, can clay vo build as good of an SMS platform and keeping a tenant build as good of an email? And can there be consolidation or our brands? Okay, having two vendors for those two things?
Adam Robinson 39:35
Yeah. It's it's the streaming wars. Right. Yeah, that's what it is. And to be fair to attend if they acquired privy. Yeah. And I think it was just so they can get Ben Jacoby because he's done. I mean, that guy knows how to create an email app the right way. So So yeah, I mean, yeah, we'll see what happens but like clay Vo is just There's also this thing in marketing that I've read, where it's like, if you get above 60% of a market, then you basically enjoy monopolistic rents in a way, and the way is like, people in order to compete with that above 60% market share, they would have to outspend you by three to one. Oh, interesting. Yeah, just to, like kind of a rule, it's like, once you kind of own two thirds, and you're everywhere, then like, everybody just accepts you as like, Coca Cola or whatever. It's very hard to compete with that. So that's what a tentative is up against, right? They certainly don't have that in SMS, in the way that clay vo has it an email, right. So it's kinda like, everything clay vo does has that dynamic. You know, I'm not saying there'll be able to compete in SMS, you know, whatever. But for email, like, they own it. I mean, in any given point, 20% of the users of an app, any app are upset for some reason. But like, they're in an incredible position. I don't know. I have so much respect for those guys.
Noah Rahimzadeh 41:06
Yeah. Okay, so I don't ride. You step in here. If you're thinking of any, like combined use cases with retention.com? I can't really think of any, because we are so focused on like, post purchase. So I don't I can't think of any top of head. But can you? Or, you know, obviously?
Mariah Parsons 41:27
Yeah, I was thinking through, like, I think with us directly, probably not. But like all of our partners, like we're talking about, like, I'm thinking through the abandoned cart use case. And how that then, like, would be interesting to see. If you send those people like they become customers, and then if they had like, a customized order tracking page, like, what would that how would that differentiate between? Like the other segment that you were talking about? Adam, have someone have like your, your, the list that a merchant would have that isn't? from you all, like I'm more curious about what that would eventually look like is like, is that like higher intent for us where the tracking the customized tracking page would then lead to higher repeat purchase rates or something along those lines? Because they are such they have such a high intent? Like that's, that's where my mind is going for use cases of seeing, like, I wonder how it's like it the what's the metaphor, the analogy of like, you just pour, pour fuel on the fire? Yeah. Yes, yeah. Yeah. Because it's all super, super interesting. And I'm like, yeah, it's just amazing that you were able to backtrack, and like figure that all out.
Adam Robinson 42:55
It was a lot. It was a long and winding road. I mean, literally, from the, from the second that I heard about it. It was 18 months, until I figured out how it could be done. And actually, my, my co founder of this business, Diana Ross, I have two of them. She's one of them. She started consulting for us on something else in the first time I ever spoke to her. I was like, so what I'm really trying to do is figure out this identity shit, because like, I think if I can't like insult anybody, and then we tried something, it didn't work and then like this, like, you know,
Noah Rahimzadeh 43:29
good, good problem to have, I think. Do you have any any ideas for joint use cases or value props? I really am kind of at a loss on it.
Adam Robinson 43:39
Ya know, I mean, you know, co marketing maybe like doing physical events that we sponsor for each other. Yeah. That's like, as beautiful of a thing is, is sort of the use case just like we have these audiences. Let's like 100%, I think are the cost of these community events.
Mariah Parsons 44:00
Yeah. Are you all going to shop talk? I feel like I saw somewhere.
Adam Robinson 44:04
We're sponsoring three different kind of smaller events. Have a big booth. I'm going on Monday for 24 hours. Yeah, I just, you know, I've been I've been traveling a lot. That's yeah.
Noah Rahimzadeh 44:19
Yes, I agree with you on that. Like we I run partnerships, and like, my general philosophy is like, even if we had the most golden use case, we should actually start with CO marketing first just to see like, how do our ICPs align? Can we tell like a good mutual joint story even without the the integration or joint value prop and sort of just feed off each other's you know, networks from there. And if we end up building something, you know, some sort of combined solution that's almost like the secondary concept, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We'll keep that conversation going. We're we're coming to time pretty soon, but tell us outside of identity resolution, what should what should brands be focused on in 2023 in the Shopify ecosystem?
Adam Robinson 45:10
I mean, so I come from the world of email. Yeah. I'm very surprised when people haven't set up a product view abandonment flow in Klaviyo. And that's for anybody just don't even have to be a certain size. It's just such low hanging fruit and so easy
Noah Rahimzadeh 45:28
to do. Is that product view abandonment flow not Yeah,
Adam Robinson 45:31
exactly. So like, there's the there's the add to cart abandonment, but then there's also just that they hit the product page and leave like clay vo has a very easy script deployment and flow setup. To nurture those people with the product that they were looking at in the email, very easy to set up, you just send an amount over. That is like number one, and like a lot of people are not doing that. That is like number one wreck. And then number two, I'm still surprised at the amount of brands that are reluctant to use SMS in general. And that would be another thing that I would recommend. If you're not doing it, figure out how to figure out how to capture the numbers. If someone gives you their phone number, you are not. You know, in some ways, it's much easier than email. You only have to write a sentence, right? Like how could you design be casual in your voice, but like, you will just be I mean, it's a 90% open rate or whatever. Like it just works. Yeah.
Noah Rahimzadeh 46:34
So that's good, because one i Mariah, I don't know, I've never heard like product view abandonment be said it makes total sense. And I'm sure like, brands are doing it, but to your point out of not enough are doing it. Right. So that's fascinating. And that's what are you saying that's out of the box with Klaviyo I'm just surprised.
Adam Robinson 46:54
It's just a really easy install, you know, like, they don't force you to install it when you create the account. They force you to install a checkout abandonment, but they call it cart abandonment. I see which is confusing. So then we'll small brands stop there larger brands generally at least set up an Add to cart abandonment. And then far fewer set up the product view abandonment. But you do it in the same way that you set up the add to cart it's just you put a script in and you set the flow up.
Mariah Parsons 47:27
Yeah, I have not heard that use case before even just in being clay VO and looking through it like not a ton not I haven't seen it and even speaking with like our merchants as well abandoned cart sometimes comes up but not quite a few of Andaman. Yeah, I will also say I Oh, go ahead.
Adam Robinson 47:47
No, no, go. I was just saying everybody should do it.
Mariah Parsons 47:50
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Especially because, I mean, one of the things that I'm sure we all can agree on on this call is like, if it is something that maybe would be more unique to like the consumer point of view, like, that's just another way how you stand out as a brand, right? Like, oh, they really know their stuff, or like, they really know what I want. You're paying into those. You're paying attention to that customer behavior. Like, it always helps, right? But I was gonna ask and say like, if someone comes to you and says, I'm hesitant to roll out SMS, like, what, how do you kind of calm those nerves? Because I've on the brand side of this podcast, I've heard like, both. I've heard people in both camps where it's like, I don't want to do it, I'm fully for it. What do you what do you what's your argument behind why you think everyone could and should have
Adam Robinson 48:37
SMS? I mean, to me, it's all about, like, if people don't want you to text them, they won't give you their number. If they're not giving you if you're giving if they're giving you their number, like I'm not saying text them every day, like create an abandoned cart, SMS flow, like, it will be the greatest thing that you've ever done for yourself, the ROI on that stuff is unbelievable. Same thing with product, like attentive makes it easy. Klaviyo probably does, too. All these other SMS apps do as well. Like, it's just incredible how effective it is. And like, you can be more casual with your language, if that's what you're worried about, right? With your brand voice if you want, you know, but if you don't do it right now, like at least get yourself in a position to do it. Like next quarter, like spend three months internalizing this idea that if someone gives you their phone number, they're fine with you texting them. Yeah. You know, like, I don't I don't understand the argument against it. You know? Yeah, I mean, it was like they just wouldn't give you the number. If they didn't want you. With the caveat.
Noah Rahimzadeh 49:51
If they give you the number, there is no argument other than, like bandwidth, maybe like we don't have the time to do that. But okay, yeah,
Adam Robinson 49:59
but But by the way, like, it's just a setup. You know, it's like, if you don't have to, you don't have to start regularly sending texts to people or whatever, like you can just set up a cart, the cart abandonment flow and collect numbers and a couple spots on your site that's it, you know,
Noah Rahimzadeh 50:22
it's product view abandonment. Love that brand should do SMS, Mariah and I 100% agree, we will let you get on the lake. But first, tell us one tip or trick or two that's helped you throughout your super impressive career so far.
Adam Robinson 50:39
The biggest thing is just continuing to throw spaghetti against the wall. And like, I mean, the last like, I'll tell the abbreviated version, I share an office with the guys who started Jasper AI. Okay, wow, they started a company two years ago, I've been sharing an OS with them for four years. Before they started Jasper, i There were more stuck than I was, it was crazy. Like, I have texts from December of the year of two and a half years ago, which is what it was. And these guys were totally fuck, they were out of money, they were going to sell their business for $2 million and start a restaurant. And at the time, my business get emails was at $267,000 a month monthly recurring revenue. And that was the high watermark. This is from Dave Rogen Moser, the CEO of Jasper AI. Its first paying customer is for $100 had the idea seven days ago. It says hopefully this is my get emails. Wow. Wow. Right. So like, I sat there and watched them over 14 months creating a unicorn, they raised $20 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, the founder, so a lot of secondary. And it, the whole process of it caused me to totally reexamine what we were doing. I was like, Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way. Because like, they did it kind of bootstrapped. But they were plowing back in all of the profit back into Facebook ads. And they were spending like $2 million a month on Facebook, when they had 50 million in revenue. I had gotten to a with I had gotten to eight with one salesperson who was paying like 30 or 35 grand a month. So I was like, what if I could spend a million dollars a month on salespeople? What would that look like? How do I do that? You know, like what would? What would be worthy product wise of actually doing that? Right? So just watching that, and being such close peers and stuck. So like if I heard a podcast about this, I wouldn't think of would have applied to me. But I sat there 20 feet away from these guys. So like, you know that you're the same as them when you're in the same room, right? Like, it's not like, Oh, they're lucky. Like, these guys just fucking tried something, you know, and it like worked, you know? So. So yeah. And then now as a result of that, like, I'm going for it. And I don't see how it doesn't pan out. I mean, I don't think everybody's in that position. But like, I can literally get a spreadsheet and like, map the path to like 200 million ARR or something just based upon what we're doing. In that was just a different, you know, and I have been a different version of stuck so many times. And, you know, I just, but I always kind of love the game, you know, like, even though it was it was, it's hard to be stuck. And I loved being a student of the game and like learning sort of being inspired by what other people were doing and trying to figure out how to do things better and everything. But yeah, I mean, I think when you throw spaghetti against the wall, it's not like these guys got a lotto ticket and won it. They accrued lotto tickets by trying shit, like, proof was their last business. It worked. Okay, they tried two things that didn't work. The third thing they tried was worth a billion dollars. Very stiff. Yeah, my thing was like, I tried the first one, it worked. Okay, I try. I made two huge swings at something didn't work. My third one worked pretty well. And then it turned into this thing that, you know, check back in and the years see where we're at. You know, so yeah, that's, that's what I think you got to do.
Noah Rahimzadeh 54:39
That's good advice. We haven't heard that one before. I think the other thing that came out from the story you told is like surround yourself with inspiring people who are you know, yeah,
Adam Robinson 54:48
man, like it's so it is very interesting. That how powerful that is. Yeah. You know, like cuz I did it for him. I'm like, No, don't start a restaurant. Like if you have a couple of like, because I had two profitable SAS businesses that point me my founders run making a million dollars. I'm like, This is great. You know, like, maybe we start one more, maybe a million and a half each. That'd be awesome. You know, like a couple money. We're rich, right? And I had Dave sold on this idea and he's like, totally Yeah, man, whatever. And then, like, he's like, Nah, man. You can play way bigger. You know? So yeah, it's, it's, it's really important, I think, but I kind of but at the same time, it's like, I didn't try you know, that just happened. It was like good fortune that that happened to those guys. Like I loved being around Dave because I thought it was really good for both of us to try to like, and I think he feels the same way which is why I'm still here. But like, it wasn't like, I from day one was like, oh, I need to get an office with like, you know, the clay vo founder. Right like
Mariah Parsons 56:02
anyone happens to like circumstance.
Adam Robinson 56:04
Yeah, it was. That was dumb luck. But it's super Your point is not lost. Like it is the most important thing that I think like navall said this it's like, if you want to be happy, hang around people less No, if you want to be successful, hang around people more successful when you do want to be happy. hang around people less successful.
Noah Rahimzadeh 56:25
Oh, man, I know we're at time and you got places to be so we'll let you go. But this was a really unique episode. Like I said at the top do not disappoint. Thanks so much for joining us. And Mariah and I both will be in Vegas. So we'll see you there. Yeah.
Adam Robinson 56:37
Awesome. We'll meet up. Take care guys. Thanks for having me.