I love this episode. 

Not just because my guest, Rabah Rahil, is a super smart dude with an eye for fashion.

I love it because we tackle two of the biggest issues facing brands, agencies, and developers in the DTC space:

• How to think about and utilize AI for better results (especially if you’ve resisted it a bit).
• How to evolve the customer shopping experience to wow customers and drive better conversion rates.

If you’ve been somewhat bearish on AI or maybe just slow to experiment with it, perhaps you need a better framework.

Rabah lays out his framework by comparing AI to oil companies and how oil companies find land, drill for oil, and refine it for profit-producing products. 

It might not be clear right now, but this is a pretty accurate analogy for getting the most from AI.

We also talk about the social dilemmas of using AI in our daily lives. 

For example, if I use AI to write my wife a poem, does that count, or is it cheating? If I use AI to help me craft answers for a job interview, is that a sign I shouldn’t be hired or that I know how to utilize tools? Or does it depend? 

We also talk about a few of his favorite tools:

• Gong(.io): A tool that Fermat now uses to analyze sales performance and run sales meetings. It’s a game changer in taking data from your CRM and delivering actionable insights and talking points. 
• Riverside: The podcast recording tool that now has AI features that are awesome (and getting better all the time). 

Plus, we discuss some AI features masquerading as businesses. These will undoubtedly come crashing back to reality. 

On the customer journey side, we talk about how creating a cohesive experience that’s also customized at scale is the future of the DTC industry.

3 things have to be in alignment:

1. The ad
2. The post-click experience
3. The offer

We talk about when and how this goes wrong and what to do.

And we throw in some fun 80s/90s references. 

Super fun. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed recording.

Show Notes:

• FERMAT
• Carte Blanche
• Gong.io
• Salesforce
• Riverside
• Pitch Anything
• Rabah Rahil - Twitter
• Equation of Excellence Podcast

Transcript:

Rabah:

I realized the way that AI fits into my life and I think into most people's life in its current iteration is that it's a multiplicative function. And so people think it's just going to build houses by itself. That's not how it works. But a way, if you find the data, so either you find the land or you have access to that land and you can put the right drill and analysis and framework over that land and then have a refinement mechanism to then generate value for the business, it is it all systems go

Brett:

Well. Hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we've got a returning guest. This man is a legend in the DTC space. He knows data, he knows brands, he knows good fashion, he knows how to wear a killer ball cap, killer hat. I want to talk to him about his hat game in just a minute for those that are watching the video. And so we're going to talk about a couple of really big topics and I'm super excited about, we're going to talk about customer journey and where things are broken in the D two C industry and some thoughts, maybe a thesis you should adopt on how to improve the customer journey. We're also going to talk about AI because hey, everybody's talking about ai, right? But the reason we're going to talk about AI is because there's maybe a new or maybe some clarity we can bring to you that Robba can bring to you on that topic. And so my guest is we go way back. Love this guy. He is now the CMO of Vermont, which is a customer journey optimization platform that transforms clicks into conversions, which is a killer line. And I bet Robba had something to do with that. So my man, Robba, how you doing? Welcome to the show,

Rabah:

Brett. Thank you so much. And what a man, I need you to walk around with me all the time for those kinds of intros. I'm all pumped up, man.

Brett:

I think in another time, if I was a medieval Times guy, I could be a Harold. I think that's what they were called. They just walk around and talk like just here's Rob Ray Hill and he's the man. Anyway, I think I could do that. I can

Rabah:

Could totally definitely pull off the fit for sure, man. So great. Obviously a big fan of the show second time. So Achievement unlocked M just one of my favorite humans to jam with.

Brett:

Sweet. And so I teed it up so we can't leave people hanging. You're wearing a killer hat. I think I've seen another, maybe I saw saw Shaq, Nick Shaq wearing that hat too, but carte blanche on the hat. Tell me the scoop one. It's like an orange. It's got a real good vibe going

Rabah:

Here. This is my orange heater. I have another one back there. I just shout out Shaq. He put me onto the brand and I've just really loved what they've done. They're a little bit of a drop kind of vibe where they'll do drops and stuff like that. So there's a little bit of a scarcity vector and just Adam and Louis have been building, it's kind of one of those old jokes of 10 years in the making of an overnight success type of thing. They've been grinding, grinding, grinding, and now they're really seeing a lot of awesomeness from just great product, great branding, great customer experience. Yeah, so I actually just now, what was that? Yeah, black Friday, cyber Monday made the first actual apparel perch, so they, they're dipping into apparel now as well. So yeah, super, super fun. Super fun brand, great vibe, great experience.

Brett:

Carte blanche, and I'm saying that right? I've heard French, so check that out. Not a sponsor for the show, but doing cool things. And man, I tip my hat, no real pun intended there to anybody that's on it, anyone can work in the apparel space. The hats be like, it's just so hard. It's so hard to nail fashion and to get people to wear your stuff. And so they're doing it and that is pretty cool. So we're going to talk about customer journey in a minute. Really excited to dive into that. I'm a big fan of the way people shop and why they shop and how do we influence that and make that better. Let's talk AI a little bit because obviously this is not a new topic, but I think the real key is how are we going to use it and how do we make sense of this and how does this practically apply to our lives and to our businesses?

I think still everybody's still figuring it out, even those that really know, it's still figuring it out. And so I know for you, you kind told me before we hit record, you're not anti AI by any means, but just trying to figure it out and you feel like you had a pretty good working thesis. I was definitely in the same boat always watching and interested, but how much am I using it? I feel like I'm a little bit behind the curve there, but talk us through just a little bit of your AI perspective and then how you landed on this thesis.

Rabah:

So we actually got to do a little company hackathon, which is super awesome, I highly recommend, and there's a tweet on my feed in how we structured it. I think it can probably go sideways pretty quickly, but ours went really well. And so this hackathon, the whole point was to figure out ways to leverage chat GPT in the business. This got me to thinking, okay, how am I thinking of ai? Because like you said, I wasn't necessarily bearish on it, I just haven't figured, I hadn't figured out where it landed in the toolkit, what type of tool it was, et cetera. And so where I kind of ended up after pontificating a little bit landed on was almost like an analogy to an oil company. So the first thing you need is the data. And so the data being the land, so you need to find the land that's rich in resources or the ocean spot that's rich in resources.

And then the second stage is the actual analysis or framework. And that's again analogous to whether you're using a little drill, whether you're using fracking deep sea, how are you going to extract that value from the actual land? And then the third phase for me is kind of this refinement, okay, now that I have this crude value and resource, how do I refine it into actual gasoline or petrol to put it in the engine in my business to make impact? And yeah, what was really interesting is it kind of lines up as well if you think of that as well in terms of a value chain, right? So do I own the land? What is the frameworks or analysis or the drills that I can put on this land? And then do I have the ability to refine it to make business impact? And if you think back in, so I'm old, but back in the day when they found all this oil in Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia just had the land.

They didn't have the actual way to get the oil out of the land, out of the ground, and they didn't have the ability to refine that oil. And so you can think of yourself as kind of if you're a company, you're sitting on all this data, but how do I extract it? And so what I've been really interested in is I think a lot of the AI hype was actually a head fake and pretty deteriorative to a lot of company's value because it just didn't, people were just shiny object syndrome, I need to have ai, I need to have ai. However. And so with that, I think there's a lot of, I don't mean this in a derogatory way, just in is where I think there's just a lot of features masquerading as businesses right now. So I think one of two things are going to happen.

One, those people are going to get rolled up into, so HubSpot just bought Clearbit. I think you're going to see kind of a rolling up of these features masquerading as businesses or you're going to see the businesses that have the land and the extraction tools actually use AI as the refinement mechanism. And so a perfect example of this for people that don't know, there's a really awesome, it's very expensive but super awesome called Gong, and basically your sales team is taking calls, blah, blah, blah. And Gong is internalizing all this data and using AI to surface either win rates or how much did one person talk then the other, it's almost grading calls. And so our VP of sales is actually now running our pipeline meetings from Gong, not Salesforce, not to say Salesforce will ever get abstracted away. Salesforce is kind of that the VCs love the term of system of record, super, super important, super valuable, but Gong is actually abstracting away Salesforce in that sense of we don't have to be in Salesforce anymore.

Our VP of sales is running the whole thing from Gong, which I find is absolutely incredible. Another one which we're actually using right now, Riverside, where Riverside has all this data because you're recording in it and now you get AI notes, you get chapter notes, you get AI clips, you get all these things that now it's becoming not only this refinement mechanism, well it's not only extracting the data from me, but now it's refining it. So now I can have all these little magic clips, I can edit the podcast in ways that is just super easy. And so the too long didn't read for me was I realized the way that AI fits into my life and I think into most people's life in its current iteration is that it's a multiplicative function. And so people think it's just going to build houses by itself.

That's not how it works. But a way, if you find the data, so either you find the land or you have access to that land and you can put the right drill and analysis and framework over that land and then have a refinement mechanism to then generate value for the business. It is, it's all systems go. And I've just been, when you find those prompts and those things, it can be a religious experience where you're like, holy crap, that is absolutely insane. But I don't think it replaces people. The person that's going to get replaced is going to get replaced by somebody that uses ai, not by ai.

Brett:

I really like that. And well said, I love that analogy of drilling for oil. And I think a lot of times we start with what can AI do for me? And that's not a bad place to start. Then you can work backwards. But then I think we don't work backwards sometimes. And so thinking about each of those steps, I would really love for AI to do this or what can AI do for me? But then we got to understand, okay, well where do I have data and what do I need to analyze and things like that. And so yeah, really powerful. And for me, I've just been experimenting with it more and finding even simple things. I love that gong example. I'm going to check that out. That's pretty crazy. But I think even just looking like I'm leading our sales group through the book Pitch Anything by Orrin KCL and really great book.

And so even looking at, instead I took good notes on the book, but just querying Chad GPT, I'm like, Hey, what were the points on this? Or what were the two chemicals in the brain that he talks about that are triggered that need to be triggered in a good sales process? And it's like it knows it and it spits back out and it's like, okay, cool. It's like my assistant right now is I'm working on these notes and of course is my ideas in terms of where I want it to go. And it's Warren klas you book, but chat GPT is kind of pulling things together, which is pretty sweet. So

Rabah:

Super spot on.

Brett:

Any insights from the hackathon? What came out of that and how did that work? So when I hear Hackathon, I think the movie, the Social Network where you're doing shots and staying up until 4:00 AM or all night,

Rabah:

Not that you got to remember, I'm old now, maybe my younger years. But yeah, so ultimately we had a few people or a few hubs. So we had San Francisco where we're headquartered people came to Austin, we had an Austin hub, we had an LA hub, we had a East coast hub in New York. And then we had a India hub where we have a lot of, so our VP of engineering and product is in the states and we have a few core engineers, but we're building out a pretty big engineering team in India. And then everybody would basically pitch their idea what's going to be the business impact, what's going to be the thesis, how did it work, show it off, and then what are the next steps for it? And so we originally, because this was where the thesis came from where it's like we have all of our clients in a Slack channel and then we have all of our sales calls and gong, how could we extract this data and then run whether it's a sentiment analysis stuff of, and so we ran into some headwinds in terms of some data extraction and stuff like that.

So then we ended up pivoting into an ad coherent score. And so what you can do is we built something and we can drop it actually in the show notes, it's on the chat GPT store, but ultimately you just upload a screenshot of the ad and then you upload a screenshot of the post-click experience, and then it'll just analyze the coherence score just based on six or seven different factors. It'll give you a coherence score on top of, it'll tell you a few things to improve here or there and something like that. So that's kind of where we landed, where it was actually pretty awesome. And again, when using the AI in a way that's very direct and meaningful, it becomes again that multiplicative function where it was like, man, this is actually a really awesome deliverable that you could take to either a client or a prospect saying, Hey, I looked at a few of your ads. The coherent score isn't really high that could be hurting your performance if this isn't on purpose, et cetera, et cetera. And so one of the ads actually we did was a favorite. So Sean Frank over at Ridge, huge, huge fans of the Ridge guys,

Brett:

Shout out. Shout out to Sean Frank and the crew. He is like my favorite follow on Twitter also about to record an episode with him. So legend,

Rabah:

I'm so jealous. He's a legend. He's in Austin, he won't ever hang out with me, Sean, if you were this hang out with me. He actually just launched luggage too. He's the consummate entrepreneur, man, doubt. He really gets it doubt. But they had a really beautiful Twitter ad with the Miami Dolphins Ridge, so they did an NFL collection, but when you click on it, it goes to the whole NFL collection, which is a gorgeous page, don't get me wrong, beautiful. There's no notes on the page. But my thesis was if that wasn't on purpose, there's definitely a reason. Maybe you have this showcase team and oh, you have NFL wallets and then I go and I have it, but I wonder how much better it would convert if you went from a Miami Dolphins ad to an actual Miami Dolphins homepage where it has the wallet front and center, maybe some upsells around that wallet that are peripherally related to the Miami Dolphins, et cetera.

And so that was kind of the thesis around the coherent score. We think of the customer journey essentially in three parts where you have the content or the creative or the ad, you have the post-click experience and you have the offer. And those are kind of the three pieces of anatomy, if you will, of the customer journey. And sometimes you can have an incredible ad, but it just doesn't get a ton of support from the post-click experience because it's a PDP maybe or you're sending 'em to the homepage. And so there can be either a disjointed experience or you just don't have the continuation in the storytelling and at best, the augmentation of the said storytelling where you got somebody to the party, but now there's nickelback playing, the beer is flat, the people aren't as attractive as you were hoping, and it becomes this very mismatched expectation to reality.

Brett:

Love that Nick is your landing page the equivalent of a party playing Nickelback. By the way, this is a quick side that we won't dwell here along, but why is Nickelback so hated? I don't actually know many Nickelback songs, but it's one of those things where you hear a couple rifts and you're like, I mean that's not that terrible man. Everybody loves to hate on Nickelback. So any idea, where did this vitriol towards Nickelback come from? It

Rabah:

Bubbled up in the zeitgeist. They just kind of became a bit of a cliche and they almost hit the pop music too on the nose where you're just like, I don't like it because you're a musician. I like it because you're using these psychological and biological kind of rhythms. So

Brett:

Maybe they're drifting away from the art and the passion. They're just falling a formula or something. It's a

Rabah:

Perfect almost analog to what we're talking about with the AI where it just didn't feel like they had character or passion or they weren't an artist. It was like a Milli Vanilli, but they actually made their music. The kids won't get that reference.

Brett:

It's so good. Milli Vanilli, man, I was a kid, but I was around in the Milli Vanilli age. They had some bangers when it came to light, man, they had some bangers. Yeah, blame it on the rain. Come on, look that up on YouTube. That still speaks. But they didn't sing it, they just, somebody else did.

Rabah:

I think that for me is where, especially in music, when you have insincere artists, it feels it's hard to get behind them. Dude,

Brett:

That's such a good example. And I honestly didn't know, I didn't know enough or care enough to research it, but I was like, why does everybody hate Nickelback? It's just funny to hate on Nickelback, but that totally

Rabah:

Makes sense. I think that definitely did happen. The impetus was I think the in sincerity and then they just became a mean, very similar to greed when you have a little bit of the cringe of the lead singers and stuff like that. But

Brett:

Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, cool. Which leads us to some interesting side notes on ai. And we were talking about this before we hit record. If we're going to lean into AI a little bit more, there almost has to be some renewed social contracts, so to speak. There's some agreements we make if we know that now AI is powering some of the things we do. So you want to kind of lay that out, what your thoughts are there and then lay out that specific scenario.

Rabah:

Yeah, so this is one I haven't yet landed on. I've landed on the problem space, but I have yet to suss it out because I can make compelling arguments on both sides. So ultimately the too long didn't read is one of the use cases I was thinking of. So I went to school for economics. In economics there's a term called utility. You can just think of it like positive outcome of the thing, which is a catchall phrase. And so if you were writing a poem to your partner, and the goal of that poem was to incite as much happiness and joy and love and excitement from these words, but you suck at writing poems, but you put a bunch of effort into it, but it still sucks. And you give it to your partner, your partner's like, oh, awesome, this is really bumbly, blah, blah, blah, blah, but you put a bunch of effort into it.

Thank you so much for doing this. However, you could put the same amount of effort. So again, economists love to say all things being equal. So all things being equal, you put the same amount of effort into that because you know exactly what your partner likes when you first met your anniversary, their heritage, their favorite song, and you feed all these really meaningful data points that you have collected using effort and thought and things of that nature into chat, GPT and then chat. GPT writes you this absolutely just tear jerking emotional meltdown style poem that you then give to your partner and they love you, they hug you, they kiss you, blah, blah, blah. But then you tell them that that was written or augmented by chat GBT, that would instantly take away from that feeling. And so I think there's just some things that need to happen in terms of the renegotiation of, again, those social contracts.

Because the two ways I see it, one, you don't pay people for, or the top paid people don't get paid for essentially output. They essentially get paid for the things they know that can generate set output. And so you don't compensate people at the highest level for time. You compensate them for output, and that output could take them a minute, you know what I mean? Because they have all this previous knowledge, whereas people that are on the lower end of the skillset or at a different part of their career, you're going to compensate them on time. And so that's the dichotomy where at what point, there's also a really good Greek mythology fable of thesis' ship. And so at what point is it not that ship anymore, but it is in thought but not in actual resources and stuff. And so that's where I'm landing where I don't know, because at the same time, if you even flip it to a business context, if you came to me and you're like, Hey, I have Brett Curry's awesome store and we sell these incredible gummies, Raba, I want you to create an annual plan for me.

I want you to do all this stuff, and I use chat GPT to create this incredible annual plan. I'm putting the nuance in it, I'm doing this, and then I give it to you and you're paying me $20,000 for it. And I'm like, oh, but I actually, I created it in AI and you would instantly be pissed off, even though that

Brett:

Was, I'm totally pissed. I want to refund it at some point,

Rabah:

Even though agnostic of the outcome, which is bananas because you should be indexed on the outcome, not necessarily the way you get there. And so it feels a bit like magic. I don't know if anybody's ever, any of your listeners ever done magic, but the worst thing you can do is reveal the trick.

Brett:

Absolutely. That's it. Then you feel that's

Rabah:

All. Then you

Brett:

Feel gypped. Yeah, then it's no longer fun. Such a good example.

Rabah:

So I don't know where it lands, but you said something really interesting as well where it's almost that almost every person that's written a book has an editor. So at what point does the editor take ownership of, does that make sense? Totally makes

Brett:

Sense.

Rabah:

Yeah. If there's more than 51% of edits, does that editor now become the author? And so it just gets into these very interesting quagmires intellectually that candidly, I don't have the answer to, but I find very invigorating to talk about because they are so complex but simple. It's

Brett:

Super interesting and it's something we're going to have to figure out as we go. But I love that example of the poem for your significant other because what's more emotional or what has strikes that chord? And there may be some people that are like, Hey, you put in a ton of effort to this, and yes, you get a little help from Chad g pt, so I'm thrilled you remembered our anniversary and you remember where we met and you remember all these details. That's enough for me. Other people are going to be like, Ew, ai. Should I fall in love with chat GPT now? Should I be going on a date with them? Or it reminds me of the movie, I dunno if you ever saw it, but it's called Roxanne with Steve Martin. It's like an eighties movie.

Rabah:

Oh, I love Steve Martin. No, it's so good.

Brett:

So it's a great movie. So Steve Martin, he's this character with, he's got a giant nose, and so he's not super attractive, but he's in love with Darryl H, but he's super good with words. And then there's this guy who plays slider, I think in the movie Top Guns, like real buff rip guy or whatever. And so Steve Martin's giving slider, whatever his character's name is in Roxane, he's given him all the words to say, giving him poems and stuff. So he's reciting that to Darryl, Hannah's character, and she falls in love with him, but then she realize it's Steve Martin and then they fall anyway, but it's like, okay, yeah, there's some elements of that maybe I don't want you as either a spouse or an employee, maybe I just want you at gpt. Anyway, I noticed this too. We were talking about this, but we hire a Google specialists and Amazon specialists, and one of the steps in the hiring process is we give them an exercise where we say, Hey, this is a fake brand. These are some fake problems and opportunities for this brand. What would you do? And two came through my desk in pretty rapid extinction. I was like, this is chat GPT, right?

You look at the answers to those questions and it's like every answer was three paragraphs. Every answer was like, first paragraph was firstly this, secondly, thirdly, and using words, we'd have to rectify this. I'm like, there's no way. There's no way this person wrote that. And so then I didn't want to read the rest of it. I was angry. But if someone had put their own personality into it and they needed help with a specific sentence or a specific thing that I'm okay with, I even had someone on our team who was like, I'm having trouble articulating this thing. So I had chat GBT help me, and I didn't want to read it. I was like, was this you? Is this the machine? Anyway, so it definitely creates some conundrums for sure.

Rabah:

Yeah, it's so interesting because I feel like it gets to such a core part of the human experience where we say we care about outcomes and we index on outcomes rightfully, but there's also a certain aspect of the paths you take to get to that outcome really matter. And so it is just such a fascinating for me because candidly, I don't know the answer. If delight in making my partner super happy is really what I'm indexed on, then why wouldn't I? For example, I did 30 days in Europe, a big vision quest in Europe, and I used 90%, 90 to 95% of chat GPT to plan that whole trip for me where I said, Hey, I am leaving, leaving from Austin, Texas on X date. I want to be back on Y date. I care about history, I care about culture, food, nice hotels, et cetera.

You put in all your parameters and stuff, and I want you to make me the easiest, most efficient pathway. And it basically made me this beautiful loop across Europe that would've taken me forever. And then you can also have these knock on effects of like, okay, cool. And then by city, I was like, what are the best hotels? What's the best areas? What are the best restaurants? What are photographic spots? I should go see? What are points of interest, blah, blah, blah. And you get all this and it's man, it's incredibly, incredibly compelling. And so I think the only big worry I have is there is a huge opportunity for manipulative arbitrage. And I think that is something that is a little bit societally scary for me, where you can get people that have usually needed to acquire X or Y or Z skills that have been previously constrained by time, where it's like you just had to put in the time to get these skills and now you can get to a matrix level where now I know iris junk boxing and jiujitsu and stuff.

So that's the only thing that, but at the end of the day, I don't know, the only thing you can do is be a good person and hopefully you can put the good karma in the balance of beating out the bad karma. But that is one thing that worries me a little bit, where you're seeing some crazy scamming stuff, especially with kind of older people where they're able to kind of spoof the voices of their, that's terrible, man. Still old people, people and stuff. It's horrible. But again, technology more or less is agnostic where it's amoral totally. You can take a PR hammer and build a house or you can hurt somebody with it.

Brett:

And I do think we'll figure it out. And maybe a quick takeaway that just came out this discussion is use ai, but don't be nickelback with ai, right? Use AI to be authentic, to bring out your authentic self, to just enhance your work, multiply to make your work better. Don't use AI just to do the work for you because then you're going to be the nickelback in your industry and nobody wants that. And so because I think this works, if you use physical products, would my wife want me to go make her a purse or go make her a ring or just wants me to buy one? She's want me to buy one, right? I'm actually good with words. I like words, and so I would want to write her something, but if she found out that, man, I was stuck with this thing and so I had AI kind of help me, she'd probably be okay with it. So it's like, we'll figure this out as we go, but if we're just using AI to multiply and bring out our authentic self, then I think we're moving on the right path. So interesting stuff. Appreciate you bringing your perspective, love talking about ai. Any final thoughts on that? Otherwise I want to transfer to the shopper journey.

Rabah:

No, I will just say though, again, not to beat a dead horse, but the people that are not embracing AI and finding ways to integrate it into their workflows will get replaced by people that do. Because what you're finding is really smart, people can use ai. So for example, going back to that consulting analogy, creating that annual plan used to be a huge lift, monumental. And now if you're a charismatic, awesome person, and you can deploy this, you can sit across three to five clients, especially if there's not even any executional work. And it's not like you're misrepresenting anything because like you said, if you're just having this multiplicative function and now I can build out this whole annual plan, nuance it to the client, yada, yada, yada, now you're really, again, augmenting your output in ways that it's pretty transformative. Because Brett, I also fancy myself a little bit of a wordsmith, and every time I put it into ai, it is better. It never goes zero to one. I can't ever say, write me this article and it is better than what I wrote, but I can take a 90 to 95% done essay and put it into ai, and every time it's beat me, it's better, it's

Brett:

Better. It's a little

Rabah:

Scary. It's a little scary.

Brett:

It is. But that's a really good way to put it. Awesome. So I totally agree. You got to be using ai, experiment with it. You'll get better over time. You'll figure it out over time. So you just got to dive in. Let's talk about customer journey. This is something that we're both passionate about. I'm more on the ad side. You're kind of on the customer experience side, but where do you think as an industry, the D two C world is missing the boat? Where are we failing our customers and our shoppers with the shopper journey? I know you kind of laid out three things, the ad, the post-click experience and the offer, but any specifics there on where are we failing?

Rabah:

Yeah, I wouldn't say necessarily failing, but I think as stores get larger, you want to become more sophisticated in your offerings. And so being able to offer that, again, create a more cohesive customer journey, I think net is just going to be a better experience and generate more, not only value for the consumer, but also business impact, whether that be revenue, more retention, et cetera, et cetera. And so I think it's almost like corduroy, right? What's old is new again. And so you're seeing that, I don't want to use the P word like personalization. I'm not super into the quote personalization. I like to use the C word more of customization of, okay, we can use these data sets to then make a more customized journey that's going to allow for people to not only surface the products they want, but by doing that, by merchandising better, by putting the messaging in a way that's meaningful to them at their part, at their specific place.

In that journey, you're just going to get better results. And so I think what you're going to see, or at least that's the thesis at format and personally my thesis is you're going to see these bigger stores abstract away, kind of the main Shopify site. And so the way I've been explaining it to people is almost like a solar system where you have earth, earth being your Shopify store, your sales commerce store, what have you have a ton of returning revenue, you have a ton of brand equity, you don't want to mess with any of that. And now you can build these constellation sites around earth when people want to go explore. Because what we were talking about where I kind of bifurcate the customers into connoisseurs and explorers and a connoisseurs, I know my local pub, I know what the drink I like, I know the seat I, I know where the jukebox is and the music on the jukebox just get out of my way and let me give you money, which is great. But then you also have this explorer mindset, which is more of the growth and retention teams re-engagement teams. And this is more of like a tourist or traveler, I just landed in Vienna or Budapest,

Brett:

Prague, tell me about the neighborhood. Tell me about the bar. Tell me about this drink. Tell me what should I listen to on the jukebox guide me. I want the experience. Yeah,

Rabah:

Precisely. And so for the most part, these bigger stores are essentially handcuffed to either a PDP, A lander that takes forever to get built or a homepage. And I think you're going to see some unshackling of that where there's going to be some more sophistication, especially again when you overlay AI where one of the things that we're really interested in for kind of like a Q3 Q4 launch is being able to ingest, whether it's Klaviyo data or what have you, and be able to not send everybody to the same page where you can actually get almost like an Amazon homepage experience where everybody's Amazon homepage is different or the Facebook feed, like everybody's Facebook feed is totally customized to them. And so I think that's where it can get really interesting where you can start to ingest all this data, then you refine it, this customer, we want to either get more LTV out of this customer or a OV out of this customer, or we want them to get down this certain product path. How can we get them down that path? And you can have this more, I guess, set a different way. I think we're going to transition from broad soar to scalpel, and you're still going to have your broad soars, don't get me wrong, but totally

Brett:

Useful tool. Never get away from it.

Rabah:

Yeah, exactly. It's heavy to swing and it's very crude, right? You're just taking these big hacks where this scalpel, I can start to have these really precise surgeries to then unlock this customer value that I can then materialize in the business.

Brett:

Love that. And the analogy of the regular at the pub versus the tourist is such a good mental picture, but we have that all the time with new shoppers versus returning shoppers to our stores. And so Vermont's helping solve that. Can you give some use cases, some examples that, I know we can't talk about specific brands and things like that because we want to keep a close guard on what they're doing, but walk us through a couple of use cases that will bring this to life a little bit.

Rabah:

Yeah, definitely. So a few of 'em, one are kind of the high skew set, but also high segmentation kind of stores. So think of ball caps or a big clothing retail that have men, women, kids, things of that nature. And so being able to segment and filter that merchandising and that SKU set to the actual people, so you don't get the kind of department store vibe. You get more of this concierge feel of like, oh, Brett, I know you're this size. I know you like these colors and I know you like these cuts. Here's the merchandise that we can show for you. So almost that concierge curation shop that look kind of style. We also have really cool, we have a bunch of beauty brands that are really heavily leveraging quizzes, which isn't anything super, super new, but it's just really nice to again, have that filtration function where you can start to have that self merchandising in a way.

And then a lot of subscription. So being able to do things to push first order subscriptions, which is super holy grail. I don't even buy first order subscriptions. And so that's something where being able to give that testing velocity, we not only have the experiences, but we have experiments as well where you can test these different experiences against whether it's an advertorial, a quiz, a video shop, a hero shop, things of that nature. And so we've seen a ton of just really awesome stuff and really in supplements and apparel have been our biggest really home run hitting vectors. And then we're starting to expand out into other areas like, geez, not health and beauty, UPSs, health and beauty apparel, and I'm spacing on the other categories that we're penetrating. But yeah, so I mean ultimately either high SKU set or the ability to unshackle your growth team from the actual main Shopify site are really the big value vectors that we are currently pounding down. And then obviously the experimentation vector where being able to test whether it's shipping thresholds offers, et cetera, et cetera, at not only low lift in terms of expense to the company, but also the high velocity as well

Brett:

And protecting the core

Rabah:

Side of a hundred percent. Yeah, that's the main thing. You don't want to touch any of the brand equity or returning revenue for

Brett:

Sure. So I love that concierge angle and kind of that picture there. So in that environment, so it's a high skew count apparel brand. So I come in, I land on one of these satellite sites rather than on the core Shopify or BigCommerce or whatever site. So then I'm kind of led through a quiz where they find out my size and my preferences and things like that. And then now it's a curated shopping experience. Is that sort of how that goes?

Rabah:

Exactly. So that's one pathway. The other thing is being able to use your past purchases to then generate that shop or whether it's a Klaviyo, SMS, what have you, so almost like merge tags on steroids, but instead of merge tags, you're actually using the MER to identify different types of merchandising. That's going to be ideal for almost like dynamic product ads in a way where how they merchandise that ad inventory for you. That's what we're trying to do on the backend for a lot of these, especially again, that high skew count. And then there's also just the self kind of selection where the media buyer has X or Y or Z in the actual creative, and then being able to show those products on the post click experience. And then the tertiary thing is influencers. So you have the influencer ad and then the influencer now has this dedicated lander with their face, their recommendations, et cetera.

Again, you see the macro concept of coherence where I see this influencer, but then I don't see 'em on the page. What? That's weird. Or I see this product and purse on the page or handbag on the page, but now I'm on the homepage and all this is showing me is jackets or something. And so that disjointed journey I think is going to go away as people get more and more sophisticated. Because before it was just hard. You either had to either spin up a landing page, which again, if you're a smaller store, it's not a big deal. But as you get these bigger stores, again, nobody's allowed to touch the Shopify site or it takes two or three weeks because you're on Salesforce commerce or something. Nothing against Salesforce commerce. Tons of big people on there, but it's not configurable by any stretch of the imagination. You're submitting a sprint ticket or something like, can you change this color or this headline like it's 2024. You can't have your growth teams operating in a way that is, your website almost has hours type of thing.

Brett:

Super interesting. Yeah, I'm excited to continue to see use cases and see this work because it sounds like this is great for the first time shopper to really help give them a customized experience. It's great for different ad experiences and influencer. So there is that cohesion. And when I click on this ad and I land on the page, I feel like I'm in the right place. Exactly.

Rabah:

It

Brett:

Makes sense. I feel like, hey, this was designed for me, so that's great. But then it also sounds like then you can, returning customers could be like the pub visitor that's like, Hey, get out of my way. I know where I'm going, so I'll just use the main site. Or you could configure something custom for them too where it's like, Hey, I'm clicking on this Klaviyo link and now I'm going to my little shop. Almost. That's built for me, configured for me. Which would

Rabah:

Cool. Exactly. So that's the big thesis. That was the pitch that got me to come where we want to be that connected tissue between the content and the commerce. And then what gets really exciting is because right now we're really upmarket, but the kind of expansion plans for the TAM is essentially going down market where we can almost play in that ClickFunnels area where you're selling an info product or something where you just don't need can to kill a mosquito. I don't need this huge website. I just want landers that I can send people to. I hook up my Stripe account, blah, blah, blah. And so now we have this nice kind of barbell effect where we're eating the market from both sides.

Brett:

It's really cool, man. Really cool. Excited to watch the journey and the progress unfold. So people are listening to this, they're like, I got to check this out. I got to find out more. Where can they go to learn more? Yeah,

Rabah:

Just firm@commerce.com, F-E-R-M-A-T commerce.com. And then book a demo on there or just ping me on the Twitters if you have any questions. Me, Rashab Andress. I'm the two co-founders, super, super active on social. So you'll see us out in the streets

Brett:

And I'll link to your Twitter profile in the show notes, but for those that are listener on the go, they just want to check it out. What's your handle? Yeah, it's

Rabah:

Just my first and last name. So at Robert Rayhill. R-A-B-A-H-R-A-H-I-L. Yeah, just hit me up at me. Send me a dmm. If you feel like writing the lightning, chances of you getting a response are very, very low. But I try and respond. Let me rephrase that. The chances of you getting a timely response are very low, but I try and I'm actually going through right now a batch reply, so I appreciate all the love. I just, you're

Brett:

A popular guy, man. People are hitting you up on the social,

Rabah:

It's a jungle. My dms and dms and emails not my strong seat. I need some ai. There

Brett:

Got to be something there. So check him out on the socials, reach out on the website for the demo. But Rob, super fun, man. I think you've earned round three whenever that is.

Rabah:

Let's go

Brett:

Whenever that makes sense.

Rabah:

And then I got to do the shameless plug. We just started Equation of excellence. So you have to come on now. This is the arm

Brett:

Twisting a new pod and it's equation of excellence. Yes.

Rabah:

So everything will be kind of math puns because of the company was named after a super famous mathematician. So you know how I like my puns.

Brett:

I'm not sure that super famous and mathematician go together. Super famous in the math world. But anyway, I actually love math too. So equation of excellence. I'm there, man. Just let me know when. But yeah, brother, appreciate it. You killed it and can't wait to see what's next for you.

Rabah:

You're the best, Brett. You are just not only one of the best humans but incredible hosts. And I need to work on my sultry radio voice. I feel. Dude, you good voice. Whatever you're doing over there. I need the secrets, man. You sounding good. N NPR R voice over there, killing

Brett:

It. NPR. Hopefully not putting people to sleep, but yeah, it's good. So hey man, we covered a wide range of topics from AI to Nickelback to eighties pop culture movies and stuff. This was super good. So

Rabah:

Even snuck in a Milli Vanilli reference. Milli

Brett:

Vanil man, that was the first on the show and I'm so excited. So awesome, Rob. Thanks man. Looking forward to next time. You're the

Rabah:

Best, Brett. Thanks so much, brother.

Brett:

Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We love to hear your feedback on the show. Love that review on iTunes or wherever you listen. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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