The D2Z Podcast
Gen Z entrepreneur and DTC agency leader Brandon Amoroso talks with some of the best in the marketing world. Brandon and guests reveal their top business-growth strategies for anyone in the online space–whether you are a brick-and-mortar business looking to scale or an established online business trying to grow. Consumer marketing is under constant and dramatic change, so Brandon aims to tackle new problems with a fresh Gen Z mindset. The D2Z Podcast delivers insights, strategies, and tactics that you can use and aims to shift how you think about business and your relationships with your teams, partners, and customers.
The D2Z Podcast
Direct Mail and E-Commerce: Insights from Postpilot's Co-founder, Michael Epstein - 71
Today I'm with co-founder of Postpilot, Michael Epstein and we unpack his journey from revamping an e-commerce brand to transforming direct mail for the new era. Michael reveals insider secrets on the role of Postpilot in making direct mail more efficient, automated, and user-friendly, and how it has changed the game for digitally native brands.
Michael shares insights on these two technologies that are helping to convert potential customers and the nitty-gritty of lookalike modeling. We also peek into the future of Postpilot, discussing Klaviyo integrations, potential Shopify admin blocks, and the exciting plans Michael has for the second half of the year.
I also pick his brain on data security, the importance of understanding customer pain points, and building an effective SaaS team. Plus, he lets us in on his experience in transitioning from the SaaS and agency world to the brand side, and the successful retention programs for D2C brands.
I'm Brandon Amoroso and this is the D2Z podcast Building and growing your business from a Gen Z perspective. Hey, everyone, thanks for tuning in to D2Z, a podcast about using the Gen Z mindset to grow your business. I'm Gen Z Entrepreneur Brandon Amoroso, founder and president of Retention as a Service Agency, electric, and today I'm joined by Michael Epstein, co-founder of Postpilot and one of our close partners in our Retention Marketing stack. So really excited to have you on.
Speaker 2:Great to be with you, brandon, and love having you as a partner.
Speaker 1:So before we dive into some of the topics we want to cover today, can you give everybody just a quick background on yourself?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure I'm old. I've been in direct to consumer for over 20 years at this point, which is a little bit crazy. Started a company in 2000 that was a manufacturer and online retailer of consumer electronics. I grew that, sold it to Private Equity in 2013 and got into sort of this private equity world and was an operating partner for a couple different funds, mostly running turnarounds of eight and nine figure e-commerce brands in the portfolios, and did that for a number of years. The most recent one was a turnaround of a nine figure aftermarket automotive retailer that was a carve out from a publicly traded company and I always use sort of direct mail at a lot of in a lot of these companies, with success. But it was like a clunky experience and we said somebody needs to build claveo for direct mail.
Speaker 1:So that's what we did with post pilot and it's just been kind of a rocket ship since it seems like that, at least looking from the outside in, I mean especially I think like 2021, you know, direct mail was starting to make a comeback. I would say in the eyes of the of the ecosystem and things like feels like things really started to accelerate in 2022, especially as the focus started turning towards retention and sort of owning your customer more. But what, what has the experience been like for you, transitioning from like a turnaround of an e-commerce brand to starting growing and scaling an e-com sass product?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I will say that scaling an e-com sass product is a little more fun than fixing sort of these big busted brands. You know, working on taking legacy tech stacks and having to totally change the culture of these organizations and and go from like losing 10 million bucks a year to becoming profitable like those are. Those are heavy lifts. And not to say that it wasn't enjoyable or interesting, because it was like learned a ton about a lot of things along the way, but I would. I would take the rocket ship sass over the the large heavy turnaround, I think all day.
Speaker 1:Are there any things you've been able to sort of take from the brand side of things and translate into what you're what you're doing with with post pilot?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I think one was just becoming a better manager over the years, becoming better recruiting and hiring and vetting talent.
Speaker 2:So a lot of these companies that we worked with were you know, they're pretty large, a few hundred people and a lot of them needed major sort of cultural shifts because that's one of the reasons they weren't successful in the first place just needed a culture of sort of execution and accountability and bringing on good people.
Speaker 2:So really got to hone that skill over time. Shaping a good culture, finding the right talent, getting the right people in the right seats within the organization and building cultures of accountability and execution were some of the big things that I think we could carry into into post pilot to really build that from scratch when we we had sort of a clean slate to work with and we brought in some great talent along the way, which has helped us get to where we are. And then I think also being the customer of post pilot for 20 years is really what's given us a huge advantage and insight into building a product that that someone like in my, in my position on the operating side, would actually want to use and find valuable and use it. You know, build capabilities that they care about, speak to their pain points in ways that you demonstrate we truly understand what they're going through, which we do, and so I think those are sort of key, key elements that we've taken to post pilot from the operating side.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What, um, as you've gone about sort of building out post pilot, are you still, are you Shopify only at this point, or are you platform agnostic?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've expanded beyond Shopify.
Speaker 2:Shopify still our sweet spot and it's I'd still say it's where the large majority of our customers, the platform that the large majority of our customers, are on. But we can help brands off Shopify as well. We just we just released new capabilities with a new API and web books that allow us to allow you to essentially drag and drop a post pilot trigger into a claveo flow within claveo. So it's literally like you want to add a postcard at the end of your email welcome sequence or after a win back email goes out, wait a week and then trigger a postcard if they don't come back. Like you can drag and drop that into claveo directly without Shopify.
Speaker 2:And even just in general we are, our platform is still able to provide a lot of capabilities that brands wouldn't have normally gotten. If you're using sort of just a traditional printer direct mail service provider, you know we still allow a lot more automation and segmentation, tracking, like every personalization, all the benefit you know, so many benefits the digital, digitally native brands are looking for. You know you can still get with our platform versus like batch and blasting to everybody in the zip code or something like that with just finding a printer to mail out cards for somebody who has no context of what direct mail was pre post pilot what?
Speaker 1:what does that world look like, and how has post pilot changed it to make it what it is today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a good question. I think there's probably like a stereotype that people have in their mind of direct mail and it really was like that. It was like a button and it still is. You know, outside of kind of what we do, it's exporting a bunch of it's, somebody like in thick glasses pouring over a bunch of spreadsheets and exporting a bunch of stuff from their system and then finding a print house. You know, I imagine this like dimly lit, dingy room of like printers creaking and stuff, and you find a print house and then you batch and blast you know to a whole bunch of people on a spreadsheet and then you wait like three months and then you get a spreadsheet of respondents and try and manually match back. You know who got my direct mail piece and who converted. Like that's kind of how it's typically been and that's actually still in a lot of ways how it is with sort of the traditional.
Speaker 2:If you go the traditional route, I think what we really mentioned building sort of claveo for direct mail and that really was the premise and concept that we wanted to do which is natively integrate with your e-comtack stack, create segments and triggers the same way you would with an email program.
Speaker 2:So segment everybody that hasn't bought in the last 30 to 60 days and create an automated flow and a trigger, just like an email flow. That's like, once somebody goes 32 days without making another purchase. Trigger an individually personalized card. That's like, hey, Brandon, come back and it's time to get a refill. Here's 10% off, come back today, kind of thing. So the individual personalization, the triggering and automation, the segmentation. And then, because we're natively integrated with Shopify and your e-comtack stack, you get real time reporting dashboards to see the performance of all of these campaigns, broken out by segments based on different cohorts Like all the stuff that a digitally native marketer would come to expect in a platform, and how they think about managing, like email campaigns and Facebook campaigns is how you would. That's the experience that you get sort of with our platform.
Speaker 1:And are you? Do you have the printing capabilities like in-house, or are you the tech overlaid on top of like a variety of printing shops, or however that works?
Speaker 2:Yeah, good question. We do everything in-house. So we went fully vertical. We run our own facilities. We just opened a brand new one in Arizona, so it's gonna be even faster service to like our West Coast customers. We have a large East Coast production facility in South Carolina and that was really because we wanted to control speed, quality and cost. So, like with other companies that are sort of those printing layers where they're sort of farming it out to a bunch of random printers across the country, we would find that quality was super inconsistent and generally really poor. Turn around times could be slow, like you could be waiting days for things to go out and then you're also just adding more middlemen to the whole value stack, and so that just increased the cost. So we decided to go fully vertical and it's been a great decision and a great advantage for us because we can move really quickly, we're super flexible and we make sure that everything meets a super, super high quality standard.
Speaker 1:And I feel like things like shared cartelogs would be very difficult to execute if you weren't vertically integrated.
Speaker 2:Totally and shared cartelogs are. Our cartelog is like our mini catalog format, which is like a large sort of trifold type piece where it's like again, it's a really large. Think of it like a mini catalog where you can show a wide assortment of product. You get tons of space, you can educate people on your brand. The shared cartelog format is like multiple brands can participate and each one takes a panel, essentially so that you can lower the total cost to get in front of people. But yeah, all of that stuff is possible because we run our own production and that definitely makes it a lot easier.
Speaker 1:Now I understand the value problem when it comes to like the retention side of things and leveraging your own database to target them with direct mail. But on the new customer acquisition side of things, which is historically what I thought of as direct mail, where you send out mailers to like 100,000, I don't know people who fit some sort of criteria. What does Postpilot offer there? Cause I know you have like Mailmatch, which I'd love to dig into a little bit more around how that works, cause it feels to me like it's almost shades of like what retentioncom has with the anonymous identification of website visitors for email triggers and like how are you helping customers acquire net new or helping merchants acquire net new customers, which is a thing that almost everybody I talk to now is sort of frantically trying to figure out?
Speaker 2:Yes, and we hear that too from everybody. Like, the retention results are awesome and we wanna do that. But we also want you to help us get net new customers, and so you brought up there's kind of two areas that we focus on, both sort of the retargeting side, so helping get people off the fence and ultimately to convert, and then the cold sort of prospecting side. So you mentioned Mailmatch, which is our tech that takes someone that's opted into your email list but hasn't purchased, so you don't have their physical address information. We can match that to a physical postal address and then retarget them with a postcard. So think somebody who opted in, went through your welcome sequence, never converted by the end of your welcome sequence, trigger a card to go out and see if you can get that person to finally convert. We have SiteMatch, which is the retentioncom version of sort of direct mail, which is pixel your site, identify people that are browsing the site anonymously and have not opted in or completed a purchase, find a postal address for those folks and retarget them with a physical postcard. And both of those are great ways to get net new customer acquisition, but targeting an audience that's a bit warmer. So folks that have at least engaged with your brand in some way and shown some level of intent with your brand great way to like ease into acquisition because, again, these are a bit warmer folks. And then, on the pure prospecting side, you can do that through lookalike modeling, which think of that like building a Facebook lookalike audience we can take.
Speaker 2:We can use your first party data, build a segment of sort of best customers and then build a lookalike model off of those best customers and layer that on these large data sets of like 220 million US households and consumers based on thousands of different attributes.
Speaker 2:So that's also something that's changed over the years.
Speaker 2:It used to be blank at everybody in the zip code or use some superficial sort of attributes like they live in this state and they have this household income and they're a male or something like that.
Speaker 2:Now it's like well, we want people that shop in Target three times a month and buy neat jerky products and consider themselves avid outdoor enthusiasts and drive in Acura and have a Netflix subscription and buy premium craft beer and like thousands of these attributes. You're in that database, I'm in that database and it's incredible sort of what the amount of information that's available and so you can build these really sophisticated models of both lookalikes and then even layer on very specific attributes on top of that so you can say, for example, I'm a baby apparel brand, I wanna find lookalikes of my best customers, but I wanna make sure that we know that they have a child in that house between the ages of zero and three, because I might look like a mom but if I don't actually have a kid like, I'm of no use to a baby brand. So we wanna make sure that they look like our best customer and they've got a young child in the house and then we can target that prospect.
Speaker 1:That's very specific. Does the cost of sending to audiences that are more targeted, like that like does it increase as the targeting gets more granular? Because, like on Facebook ads, for example, you mean the narrower you make the audience, the higher the cost is going to be on a per click basis or whatever term you or metric you wanna use to measure that. Is it similar for direct mail or no?
Speaker 2:Generally not. I mean, occasionally there are very specific attributes that may sometimes there's like a bit of a premium placed on those, like one for expecting mothers in their third trimester, and certain things have like there's there can be a little bit, but for the most part and the way you should generally think about it is no, like it's kind of a flat cost with us, it's like seven cents and you can, we can sort of build these really really precise data models and sets of attributes that we can use to define that target customer and it's really as simple as that. And that's the other really nice thing. You make a important point, like the price of the nice thing about.
Speaker 2:One of the nice things about direct mail is the price is essentially fixed. So the fact that you're targeting people over the week leading up to Black Friday when, like, cpcs go through the roof, doesn't apply to direct mail. The fact that you're targeting, you know, a coveted demographic of women who buy luxury apparel at between 25 and 45, with, you know, a large household income that normally you'd have to pay a big premium for on Facebook, because everybody wants to target that audience. You don't pay any more to send it to direct mail as you would to anybody else. So the fact that that cost is sort of captain fixed is a really attractive element of direct mail as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a huge value and I haven't even thought about that before in terms of being able to get almost more targeted with your direct mail than you can with your online ads, which almost seems counterintuitive. But if the cost is prohibitive to be that granular, if you're targeting online, especially with all the issues around tracking now, then you know direct mail as a as a top of funnel source could be almost better.
Speaker 2:Can be. Definitely can be.
Speaker 1:So when it comes to mail match and site match like, what sort of accuracy can brands expect with something like that? Because I'm assuming you know it's not 100% and so where does that sort of typically fall?
Speaker 2:Yeah, good question.
Speaker 2:So there's there's match rate and there's accuracy rate. We care much more about accuracy rate than match rate because our whole philosophy is like we don't want to send a card to somebody that we don't have a very high level of confidence is actually the person that it's supposed to go to or the person that's intended to go to. So we'd rather have a lower match rate and send lower number of cards but know that those cards are going to the right person so that you get the best ROI on that campaign. So from a match rate perspective, you typically are expecting to match about 70% of people based on an email address with a high level of confidence, like 90 high 90% range of confidence. That it's, that that's the correct person. And then on the site match side, typically you're looking at like 20 to 40% of folks, again with a very high level of confidence that it actually is the person that you think it is and that's those are also to like residential addresses, like it's filtering out bot traffic, it's filtering out international traffic, things like that Got it.
Speaker 1:Okay, that makes sense. One question that's sort of outside of the sphere of you know actual, like features of the product itself. How do you think about integrations and sort of gauging which ones to you know prioritize versus others, as obviously there's a lot of other ESPs out there aside from Clavio and Omnisense? Like, how do you think about you know what, what might be the next one?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. That's a that is a constant sort of work in progress to be. We are frequently refining sort of our prioritization list there and we want to. I want to move 10 times faster than we are, but we're cranking them out as as quickly as as we can at the moment. But it's generally looking at a combination of what are the tools that are most widely adopted by our, our core customer base, so Clavio being a good example of one that, like, a very, very high percentage of our customers are already using. So that's like a no brainer.
Speaker 2:And then the, the use case for that integration. So does it present something that's compelling to our customers that they would actually care to use, or is it just like integrating for the sake of it, with a very sort of edge case of how someone might actually take advantage of it? So, for example, with loyalty apps, we can trigger things based on if someone graduates into a new tier of loyalty, like congratulate them. Or, conversely, if they're almost qualified for for a new tier, like send them a note that's like you're almost at your next purchase will get you to the platinum tier, like come back and buy now and you get all these extra benefits things like that.
Speaker 2:On subscription billing apps, it's like churned reactivation is a really strong use case so we're trying to roll out more and more into. We integrate with three charge. We're working on a bunch of new integrations on the subscription billing because that's a that's a popular and strong use case of brands who have people on a subscribe and save uh auto ship plan and then they churned, for whatever reason, they cancel their, their credit card expires, whatever, and then, uh, to get those people reactivated. After they've tried to get them reactivated by email and it hasn't worked, hit them with a direct mail piece. We see great results in that and that's very high value to our brands. Getting someone who churned on a subscription to come back onto a subscription and make multiple subsequent purchases is super high value. So that's like an example of a strong use case that we want to continue to lean into from an integrations perspective.
Speaker 1:Does your new product with claveo actually reduce the need for integrations, because let's say, hypothetically you wanted to send a postcard to anybody who left, like a five-star review for a product. Couldn't you skip the whole, like integrating with a Kendo or integrating with Yapo or whatever, and then just have the client trigger that off of the integrations that are already built in the clavia, so that way you don't have to go one to one?
Speaker 2:You. That is absolutely right and a really great observation, because that is that is a current work around that we have for a lot of these integrations and use cases. There's so many that we can use. Claveo is like the, the common, like the common integration point that allows us to piggyback on that claveo integration and do exactly what you described. There's so many of these tools that trigger events and capture those events in claveo and we can just leverage that on top of it. So there are some, there are some integrations that we have today that we'll call them like soft integrations, because we can easily create that use case for the brand without a direct integration with that particular tool, because we just leverage, like the claveo integration.
Speaker 1:Got it and I think, like, even like Shopify flow for example, I think you could probably do something in that with with triggers. There was a in additions, yesterday there's this new sort of extension for apps that allows you to essentially push like flow actions and triggers into Shopify flow from from your app. So I think will be interesting to potentially for to see how sort of the ecosystem does or does not leverage that.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. I got off to check that out because I was skimming through like the hundred whatever updates that they rolled out, so I don't think I saw that. I got to check that out, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:I was up to like 1am last night just like reading through it and then I put it into like a PDF and then provide some like analysis for the team, because it's like it's really difficult for me to digest that like landing page that they have. It's like 100 plus things. There's so much like stuff moving around. There's all these images and whatnot. I'm like, just give me what, give me what I actually need to know.
Speaker 1:There's some cool developer stuff like you can add, basically blocks into the actual Shopify admin. Now, if you're an app so let's say you're on a product details page in the Shopify admin, as opposed to, you know, having to click out to the Akendo app to go look at the reviews for that product Akendo could just build a block that would sit in that product details page and I guess you could maybe hypothetically do something similar for post pilot in like the customer profile or something, or, or I don't know, maybe, maybe gorgeous could do something like that. But there's some interesting things. It'll it'll be curious to see how, how the sort of the Shopify plus certified partners build into all these new features that they're rolling out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure, checking that out this afternoon it's a bit overwhelming.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally, you know, going into sort of the second half of the year here, what are the things that you're most excited about?
Speaker 2:I think, well one. I think Black Friday is going to be like. The holiday season is always really huge for us and we've grown so much again this year that it's going to be a little bonkers again, which is good. It's always, you know, just a peak period for brands, like we talked about earlier. It's a great time to be leveraging the channel, because you're not competing with with everybody for as much attention and costs continue to go up and it's just a way to get in front of those people to make sure that Black Friday and holiday messaging is getting through. So that's just in general, like we're already start starting to ramp up there.
Speaker 2:But in terms of features, capabilities, we're continuing to release a bunch of new stuff. We're going to be expanding internationally through the holiday season. So facilities in UK and other countries that's going to be cool. Leaning more into some of these prospecting capabilities to help brands acquire new customers, we continue to do more and more there, which is which is really cool, and then I think, also just like continuing to get the word out, like we just seen it's. So it's so rewarding and fun to have sort of a level of enthusiasm for what we're doing, to see that level of enthusiasm for what we're doing. So, like we just got to, we're trying to get the word out even even faster over the next couple months to get people in before, sort of, the holidays creep up.
Speaker 1:I know you offer like design services in house to brands. What and I've had this conversation with some other tech partners, like you know do you invest in that almost managed service component or do you sort of pull back and just leave it all to the system to service which, like claveo had done historically until claveo one and now they have more like that white glove service. And you know when attentive first started like they were purely all white glove and then they sort of backed off from that and now they're, like you know, in the middle. What are your thoughts around like getting into that side of things? Because I see the pros and cons of both.
Speaker 1:Like I always thought it didn't make sense to fully have a white glove because, like what happens if the customer had a you know, just a bad experience with, let's just say, the designer. Well, now they're going to turn from the entire software product when that's really more valuable than the design work that's being done. So if they turned off of an agency or they turned off of a I don't know, an employee, that's not as impactful as the business, but then on the flip side, for bigger customers, they affect the level of service that like needs to be provided. So how do you manage that and handle, you know, kind of having like a little mini agency within the software business and all the, all the lovely client problems that come from that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love these questions. You're so like spot on. So I think that for the time being we have a fully managed sort of concierge model. We don't charge anything for it is included in the service and that was really intentional. And I do see that persisting for a while To your point. Like some companies like attentive and other SMS companies, were more hands on when it was a newer channel because people didn't know how to leverage the tool in the channel Effectively. They didn't know best practices. There wasn't a whole like agency ecosystem built out to help service those folks and so they kind of had to do that to help ensure people were make you know using using the channel effectively and getting good results so that they stuck with it.
Speaker 2:I think we take a similar approach here. It's a channel that a lot of our brands have never used before, so they don't know best practices. They don't necessarily have the time or capacity or desire to learn a new channel from scratch and experiment for a while and, like you know, do creative and all that stuff. So we just find let us do that for you because we know what works. We work with thousands of brands. We've done this a million times. We know. We know really well what works. We have a great in-house team. They can do creative strategy, all that stuff and ensure that we're sort of setting brands up for success so that they don't make those mistakes out of the gate, that they do see good results and then want to come back and keep doing more.
Speaker 2:I don't see that changing in the near term. Again, just because I still think we're in the early innings of sort of the channel and brands getting started to adopt it more and more broadly. So I like our model. Are there things that we intend to do to continue to make it more and more like provide more and more insight and easy ways to find new strategies and to use in the channel?
Speaker 2:Yeah, like we just released a new reporting suite that gives Brands insight into like inter-purchase latency data meaning how long does it take between customers making a first and second purchase and LTV by cohort, meaning like what's the first product we should show somebody to drive highest LTV over the first year, things like that. So providing those types of insights and even automating campaigns based on those insights are ways that I think we can continue to evolve and provide like one, more value and two like a more automated way of uncovering some of these insights. But I think we're going to stick with like the service model for a while and I think we do a good job of it, so we're going to stick with it for a while. But I know like having almost like that internal agency presents its challenges, but we've found we've found really good people, so it's working out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, are you? Are you leveraging, as you get larger and larger here, sort of the data that you have across all of these merchants in order to be more targeted with your campaigns and, you know, provide recommendations and insights and and whatnot? I mean there's like sort of surface level of stuff I see in other platforms where you get like benchmarks and whatnot, but always thought, like maybe a five customer of five different brands that are using post pilot, you should be able to tell the six brand more like, basically better insights on me, like you should be sending Brandon a postcard at like day 28 as opposed to day like 60, because this is the way that he purchases and consumes from the other brands that are on the post pilot network. Are there? Are you starting to see like efficiencies like that as you continue to scale?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love how you're thinking about that.
Speaker 2:So and I'll answer it carefully because I want to make sure it's like clear we have we work with tons of brands, so we have lots of aggregate insights into what works best, best practices, best practices around certain categories, certain best practices around categories of product, different levels of AOV, like all these different attributes and characteristics about companies. And we do learn from all of that and continue to sort of refine our best practices and recommendations based on all of this, these insights that we get from running millions of campaigns. But we never, ever, share data across brands ever. So there would never be an instance where you're an apparel brand and I want to and I want to use data across other apparel brands to like, inform new prospects I should go after, or things like that. So we keep we're like total sort of firewall between, like any customer data being used in any way outside of you know, their own campaigns. But in aggregate, yes, we can take a lot of learnings across our large set of data and say like, here's how to apply best practices to your campaigns.
Speaker 1:Got it. That makes sense. One last question I have, for I guess we'll flip it a little bit to go from more Ecom brand specific tips to those who are listening that are on the SaaS side of things. You're obviously still early, but not super early, like you've grown pretty quickly and scaled relatively quickly. What are the things you'd recommend to somebody listening to this in terms of, like top three things you think worked really well in scaling post pilot? Like how have you been able to get such quick market penetration and be able to be this successful so far?
Speaker 2:Yeah, top three, I'd say number one is, I think, is easy. It's having a really really deep understanding of the customer, like your ICP, understanding those pain points acutely, like coming from the brand and operating side for so long, like we are that customer, we're the eight and nine figure CMO or CEO or head of marketing that has been on that side for so long that we know those pain points really really well. We know the capabilities and types of features and type of user experience that someone in that seat would really want. We know, like again with like the service model, like how do we solve for the different pain points that that prospect would be looking for, that brand would be looking for? Like what matters to them most, how do we message to them in a way that feels authentic and credible and I think that that's really really critical for any sort of SaaS brand is not like thinking you know, here's an idea that I think this audience would care about and like but like truly doing a ton of discovery if you don't come directly from that world, talking to tons of those of your ideal prospects and like truly learning what the pain points are, how to speak to those pain points effectively, how to solve those pain points through product innovation. Like that would definitely be number one.
Speaker 2:Number two is like building that team internally. We talked about it earlier. Like you can't do it all yourself, hire people that are better than you in any area that you can find and like lean on them and try and empower them and trust them and support them to do their job to the best of their ability so that they can help you grow. If you probably not telling folks stuff they haven't heard a bunch of times before, but like obviously you just can't do it all yourself, you are capping your growth if you think that you can.
Speaker 2:And number three like I think constantly sort of innovating but we're not looking at sort of the competitive landscape and trying to think like oh, what feature should we, is this person doing that we should try and copy, or something like that. And this kind of goes back to number one truly understanding the customer. Like we're sort of heads down, listening to our customers, interacting with our customers and learning about, like what is the new pain that they're facing? What are they coming back to us with feedback on and developing our roadmap based on that and not looking at like what some other direct mail printer might be doing with their ink or their paper or stuff like that, and like worrying about those kinds of things. I think you know, developing sort of your roadmap and evolving that way versus ultimately becoming very homogenous and looking like everybody else. If you're constantly worried about what everybody else is doing is like another thing that I would recommend.
Speaker 1:Oh, those are all super helpful. Well, I appreciate you coming on. I know we're running up on time here. Do you have any questions for me?
Speaker 2:Flip this. I mean, how's it been Like you've gone from the SaaS or the agency world on the brand side like developing SaaS now, like what's your experience been like and what's your favorite thing to be a part of?
Speaker 1:Well to be determined on the SaaS side. I mean, I'm getting it with you know, the drinks app with Shopify and then also getting it with the HR product scaleless that's coming out and by the time this releases will probably be like a week out from launch. But I think SaaS is honestly more exciting just because you can achieve such greater scale. Like as an agency, we were capped out at a certain point. There's only so many people that you can hire and I really felt like once we got around like 45 people, you know, to get to 100, to get to 150, like that was going to be just an absolutely brutal grind and was not something that I was necessarily looking forward to.
Speaker 1:I think the sweet spot, at least in my opinion, within the Shopify ecosystem is like maybe 25 to 50 team members. As an agency, like you're big enough to be dangerous but you're not too big where you lose quality control and you have to have all these ridiculous retainers and whatnot to keep that boat afloat, whereas on the software side, it's just really cool to be able to push something live and then you've got thousands of people using it right away and you can have like mass adoption and it's just totally different, but I think the agency experience has been invaluable for me in building out and thinking about how we go to market with both of the software products and because I got to watch Klavia and all the others sort of like build out their tech, build out their partner programs and whatnot. How can I try and take some of that and emulate it in what we're trying to do here as well?
Speaker 2:That's awesome. That's awesome. And what are you seeing working? Because you have good visibility across like a bunch of brands. What are you seeing working in D2C right now?
Speaker 1:So in terms of like growing on the software side or in terms of like what they're experiencing ROI with from a tool set standpoint, Like what they're experiencing, what's working like on the tool set side, on the channel side.
Speaker 1:So, from a retention standpoint, I'm actually seeing brands who think about their retention programs and model it off of. You know, like Uber or American Airlines or like these programs where you have maybe three tiers or four tiers and as a customer you don't really have to do anything to start being rewarded. All you have to do is keep purchasing. So, like I think I'm Uber I don't even know what it is but like maybe Uber Platinum now and there's like a whole host of benefits and perks that come as a byproduct of that. But it's not like I had to, you know, take points and go redeem it or figure out. You know I got to go add this to my next order before the subscription comes out, and a lot of it's surprising to light too. So like maybe, hey, every customer who gets to their fifth order, they get a free like merch box or something.
Speaker 1:Those brands that are being proactive in retention even though I know you're having great results with like the churn subscription customers with the direct mail win backs.
Speaker 1:Like it's so much easier to keep them there before they've done that than it is to try and win them back after they've already canceled. So the brands who are able to think about it in that way and invest a little bit in like proactive retention versus reactive. I'm seeing the best results with, and also just removing as much friction as possible from the customer experience. So there's a whole host of apps that are new to the ecosystem that have built into Klaviyo or built in to Shopify. There may be only like two or three person startups right now, but they're really cool, and that's what I'm really focused on right now is like how do we take advantage of those before they become like widespread or widely adopted by brands, whether it's like AI generated videos and like post purchase, thank you emails or things like that? There's some cool stuff like that, but there's not going to be like another Klaviyo, for example. So it's like what's the next thing that we can leverage for our brands before everybody else is using it?
Speaker 2:Well, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for coming on. We're going to wrap up here, but can you let everybody know where they can find you and post pilot online?
Speaker 2:Sure go to postpilotcom. Give me, email me, michael post pilot. I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Twitter. Hit me up Easy.
Speaker 1:Well, as always. Thank you everybody for listening. You can find me at brandonamorosocom or electricmarketingcom. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.