Cade Proulx, Head of Partnerships at Sendlane, joins host Brandon Amoroso to delve into his fascinating entrepreneurial journey and the dynamic world of e-commerce partnerships. Cade's journey spans from brokering a $10 million series C deal at a young age to his current role at Sendlane, where he spearheads partnership initiatives. He shares insights into the challenges of pivoting a business, the critical role trust plays between entrepreneurs and investors, and the evolving dynamics in the post-COVID business landscape.
One of the key takeaways from this conversation is the emphasis on quality over quantity in partnerships. Cade highlights the importance of fostering meaningful relationships where there's a mutual exchange of value and trust. Whether partnering with large agencies or boutique firms, Cade believes that the percentage of business contributed to each other is more valuable than sheer numbers. This perspective offers valuable insights for businesses seeking to establish and maintain strong partnerships in the ever-evolving e-commerce ecosystem.
The episode also sheds light on Sendlane's unique position in the email marketing landscape, with its competitive pricing, robust features, and strong support system. As businesses explore alternatives to other email marketing platforms, Cade discusses Sendlane's growth and its commitment to building a partnerships program that collaborates with more agencies and tech partners.
For professionals in the tech startup and e-commerce space, this episode offers a wealth of insights and lessons on navigating these dynamic industries. Tune in to gain valuable knowledge and stay tuned for more episodes like this.
Cade Proulx, Head of Partnerships at Sendlane, joins host Brandon Amoroso to delve into his fascinating entrepreneurial journey and the dynamic world of e-commerce partnerships. Cade's journey spans from brokering a $10 million series C deal at a young age to his current role at Sendlane, where he spearheads partnership initiatives. He shares insights into the challenges of pivoting a business, the critical role trust plays between entrepreneurs and investors, and the evolving dynamics in the post-COVID business landscape.
One of the key takeaways from this conversation is the emphasis on quality over quantity in partnerships. Cade highlights the importance of fostering meaningful relationships where there's a mutual exchange of value and trust. Whether partnering with large agencies or boutique firms, Cade believes that the percentage of business contributed to each other is more valuable than sheer numbers. This perspective offers valuable insights for businesses seeking to establish and maintain strong partnerships in the ever-evolving e-commerce ecosystem.
The episode also sheds light on Sendlane's unique position in the email marketing landscape, with its competitive pricing, robust features, and strong support system. As businesses explore alternatives to other email marketing platforms, Cade discusses Sendlane's growth and its commitment to building a partnerships program that collaborates with more agencies and tech partners.
For professionals in the tech startup and e-commerce space, this episode offers a wealth of insights and lessons on navigating these dynamic industries. Tune in to gain valuable knowledge and stay tuned for more episodes like this.
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. A lecturer Today, I'm joined by one of my good friends, cade Prue, who now oversees partnerships over at Sendlane, but who I previously worked with in his role at CARO, a cross-selling collaborative commerce app for Shopify.
Speaker 2:So thank you so much for coming on the show, excited to have you Thanks for having me, brandon, excited to be here on this beautiful Sunday morning.
Speaker 1:This is the first podcast that I have recorded on the weekend.
Speaker 2:Honestly, it's kind of live, because we feel like we can do whatever we want. We got the whole day. I'm going to grab my breakfast burrito and make it a whole thing. Man, I got my coffee here. I'm ready to go.
Speaker 1:That's a good way to start the day, all right, well, before we dive into things, can you give everybody just a quick sort of background and intro on yourself?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So I have a fairly, I guess, entrepreneurial background. How far do you want me to go?
Speaker 1:Let's get the whole thing Okay whole thing Okay.
Speaker 2:So I grew up internationally in Brazil, so I had a certain perspective going into college that I wanted to go into political science, but, as luck would kind of have it, I ended up taking a different path. When I was 20 years old, I accidentally brokered a $10 million series C deal between a venture capital firm up north in Silicon Valley and a fitness equipment company that was basically building the digital interfaces for modern ellipticals, treadmill machines, so that you can access your Netflix account, itunes at the time, all that good stuff. It's kind of a funny story, but I happened to know the son of the chairman of the board of the VC firm and pitched him a deck and they loved it, and so that was a very interesting process that opened up my mind to tech and entrepreneurship, which was extremely exciting. It was 2012 and there were so many emerging technologies on the horizon that I started to get involved with. One thing led to another. I started off two different projects. One, the cloud computing space. This is pre-AWS. We had a sort of interface to be able to leverage cloud storage and access across different devices. Grew that into a decent lifestyle business?
Speaker 2:At the same time was working with my partner at the time on a social media company kind of akin to a Reddit. We did those for a number of years. Left those started a quick stint in being sort of adjunct faculty at my university. At the time I was 22, had just graduated and had been heavily involved in the sort of angel investment world and the entrepreneurship world which my business program was very excited about. So they brought me in. So I ended up substitute teaching a class one day and then meeting a guy named Jason who ended up starting a company called Viral. And that's where I was for the better part of my 20s. So that was a very exciting company. Viral at the time was an influencer marketing platform, kind of in the days of DJ Khaled holding up a bottle of Sriracoyne, ride the wave with me. That was really the epitome of influencer marketing. But we were focused on the sort of micro influencer economy and the economy of what was at the time exchanging shoutouts, which is so dumb right now, but at the time it was like what everybody was doing. And so we developed a marketplace that pivoted into a sort of connection platform. We affectionately called it Tinder for Invinciz, and that was basically a model with swipe on a photographer who'd swipe on a brand and if everybody kind of like had that right match and kick off this collaboration and it was great. So several thousand users worldwide. We had, like Warren G, the New York Mets, mango International on it.
Speaker 2:We got the internet marketing associations influencer app the year award 2016, raised a seed round of funding and then we ended up bringing on a co-founder who became our CEO, who had a credible entrepreneurial track record, sold his last company, sony, for almost $400 million. Great experience kind of. The guy had kind of come in and teaches how to, like you know, work from going into startup mode into, like, building businesses and building a company and organization. So we ended up transitioning into developing Karo, which was under the umbrella of viral and initially started off as a project that turned into the main focus of the business and Karo it's funny, sometimes I'll bring up Karo and I'll say the name Karo and I'll walk into like an event or a conference and people will be like, oh yeah, like I used to love that product. That was when, you know, I'd install on my Shopify store and it was so cool and you know, originally when we really blew up, we were an influencer discovery platform that when you installed it on your Shopify store, it would reveal to your most influential customers, email subscribers and social media followers. That did phenomenally well. I went from 0 to 8,000 users, I think, within the first like 15, 16 months. But then that's like you know, when COVID happened, lockdowns happened and everything went to shit. So we were sort of strategically positioning ourselves a little bit away from the influencer side and more and leaning into the commerce thing, and that's when we began to develop collaborative commerce across store selling and that whole idea started off as like a way of basically helping all 8,000 of our brands scale their online retail at a time where brick and mortar really just wasn't an option. The first version of that I built into a Google spreadsheet and then I built it into an air table because I couldn't dial for dollars anymore and I was trying to link up bike shops, to link up helmet companies, to link up bike locks and it was just. It was wild, but it went phenomenally well. When they're raising your series B on, that grew our team size and that's the car that you know people kind of know today.
Speaker 2:But you know, I spent eight years doing that with Jason and David and the team, which is an incredibly long time that was my entire 20s and kind of reached this point earlier in the year where I was like, okay, cool, like I'm looking to my 30s, I need to begin a new chapter. And I really loved and had developed a real passion for e-commerce and really saw that's where my friends and my network were. So I was like, okay, let's double down and continue this sort of like path. And you know, not long after I left Karo, I got introduced to Jimmy, the CEO of Sendline, started talking to him with anything like a day or so of leaving Karo. Two weeks later I'm working and have an offer from them and it's been one of those really serendipitously rare sort of situations where I feel like I truly found the right home at the perfect place, at the perfect intersection at the perfect time. And it's like one of those rare companies where everybody I meet I really like and I see myself developing friendships. I've been here for like less than five weeks four weeks and I'm already developing like very deep and meaningful friendships with people.
Speaker 2:So the product isn't in great place. Sendline is exploding, there's this, you know, inflection point that we've hit, and partnerships is really blowing up, and so that's why they asked me to kind of come on board. I'm really sort of the guy who builds things, builds programs, builds departments, and so that's what I'm doing right now with Sendline is I'm kind of like building and you know, creating all the infrastructure and processes and everything else and all of the different inroads within Sendline for the partnerships department and also, you know, getting on the phone with people and doing all the fun stuff within partnerships as well. So that's the long story short, if that is even short. But yeah, thanks, brandon.
Speaker 1:I think it was pretty concise. So talk to me a little bit about the transition from being an influencer marketing platform into being a collaborative commerce platform. Like what was that decision making process look like? Was it, you know? Was it painful? And then was there any sort of like technology overlap, or was it more so? You know you had to create from scratch. Just walk me through that whole process.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really good question, brandon, because it's something that I kind of tell people. I say, like it's one, it's pretty. It's pretty hard to start a company. Having done it a couple of times, you know a lot goes into it. Pivoting a company when you have an active user base who loves a product is even harder.
Speaker 2:And so we were dealing with two different things, I think. One we were dealing with the realization that the, at the time especially, there was a really uncertain future with influencer marketing In general. Influencer marketing kind of goes through these cyclical patterns where companies value and then devalue influencer marketing. It's either the hottest thing in the world and everybody's got to do it, or it's like absolute garbage and there's no ROI that you can prove behind it and marketers don't want to touch it with like a three yard stick. So where we were at in that intersection, we were starting to feel that sort of like ladder sentiment, that sort of resentment towards influencer marketing. And what we had developed, quite honestly, as a business was a product that was really popular but very difficult to monetize the right way, and we were working through what the monetization, full feature sets, were going to be and, you know, hadn't really come to any firm understanding on what the path forward was going to truly look like to be successful and acquired. So, in a way, covid coming in and forcing our hand to look in other directions was really truly a blessing, and we had had this idea for a while.
Speaker 2:I was working on a weird skunkworks project with a brand and the person who I was working with made an offhand comment one day about why he couldn't get his product onto other people's Shopify stores. And I remember I was kind of standing there with Jason and that client and you know I was explaining to this guy. I was like dude, look, that's just not how it works. Like that's not where the technology is. We can't just do that, like that's not what our business is and that's not even how Shopify functions. But I looked over at Jason and I just saw these like cogs turning in his head and he was like, yeah, why can't we do that? Why can't we do that? And Jason's like a brilliant idea guy and you know I think that's something that really kind of hit him and baked. And when we saw that sort of like crossroads happening for the company, that's when you know we kind of took advantage. We're like, okay, let's start calling people and seeing if this idea is even viable. And I remember Jason like like kind of disappearing for about a week and then calling me like late one night and going Kate, I think I think we could do this, I think we could do. I was like Jason, what are you talking about? He's like I think we can do this like cross door selling thing. And I was like, okay, he's like I talked to like so and so from that company and so and so from this company, and they're all like looking for ways to do this and I think we can actually build it so a little bit from like the company's strategic perspective.
Speaker 2:What we and people didn't really realize this at the time. But when we initially developed Karo, we had built a sales channel integration with Karo, which is different than just developing an app, or, excuse me, not with Karo with Shopify, which is different than just developing an app with Shopify right, a sales channel integration classification. At the time, it took us like seven months. It was extremely rigorous in doing that with Shopify and it permitted us to do things that normal applications within Shopify just couldn't do. So the effect of that was that we had more flexibility to develop and do things technologically that other platforms weren't in the right headspace to do and also just couldn't pull off, so we had a leading advantage there. So the process was actually fairly complex because, if you really picture yourself where we were at, we were an influencer marketing company. We had already raised a series A on being an influencer marketing company. We were very entrenched within the space and so bringing up the notion that, hey, we might want to transition away, you can imagine that's a difficult conversation to have, not only internally but with the board as well, with investors, and there's really no playbook for how you transition spaces. I think when you're a startup company, that's raised a meaningful amount of capital in a fairly short amount of time.
Speaker 2:But the way that we started to do it was we just basically I think Jason's always had this really good saying, which is he's married to the market, not the product, and so it was through just user testing and feedback on getting validation behind this idea and then realizing that this was open space. Nobody had really done this before and the whole concept can be distilled down to affiliate marketing meets dropshipping. So the way that we did it is internally and kind of within the history of working at Carrow I've been sort of like the Skunkworks guy, the GoFiguredOut guy, the GoToMarket guy Like at the time I was head of revenue operations, which really was just a pseudonym for just fucking do it. So that's when we started to build this big book of business and basically acquiring buy-in from all of our different clients. So that was like the manual matchmaking process. And so if you're not familiar with what Caro does today from a collaborative commerce standpoint, it basically it's a technology that enables Shopify stores to link together so that they can sell each other's products without having to take on physical inventory.
Speaker 2:And in exchange for selling somebody else's product as a quote retailer, you get a near wholesale commission, anywhere from 25 to 30% usually, which is really meaningful, because in the world of affiliate marketing you're talking like single digits, like less than 5% usually. So it sucks and you know wholesale is expensive. Most brands just can't afford to do wholesale because of the upfront capital allocation that's associated with it. So this kind of solves two problems on that front and there's a lot of different playbooks that kind of get brought into this.
Speaker 2:So there were really two challenges and the reason why I'm talking about this brand is because, like one, we were having to pivot and get buy-in across the board, not only from our company and our team, but to our users as well, and the cherry on top was that nobody had done this before. So it's like one thing to go, like you know, from a technology that people recognize like influencer marketing tech, into something else that they might like, want, right, let's just pretend like it would be email. But it's another thing to go. Hey guys, look, we got this idea. It's not really ever been done before, but trust us, you're going to love it. It was really difficult. Finding the positioning, the messaging and knowing how to understand what product market fit really looked like right.
Speaker 1:So why do it within the existing company? Because it sounds like you still had you know product market fit with the existing business. Why not start it as a net new entity or, you know, as an add-on to the company versus, you know, just completely pivoting out of your?
Speaker 2:existing business, but I do want to start back on.
Speaker 1:How do you like basically create a market that doesn't exist yet?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think in retrospect that is what we tried to do. We kept the original legacy influencer discovery platform for actually quite a bit, I think, over a year, after we ended up developing, you know, the cross-border selling platform. But the influencer marketing side of the platform was technically complicated. We hadn't monetized it and there was a fair bill associated with that platform as well. So the idea was that we wanted to kind of like have a company that lived at the intersection between influencers and commerce, and so the original thesis was that, by leveraging sort of the influencer side of the platform and this cross-border selling platform, we started to explore ideas around basically enabling influencers to sell products from brands that they loved right, taking it a step further than being affiliate marketers. Basically, right, that's what influencers really are for the companies that they were working with. And when you bring a product on your Shopify store as an influencer, you're really solving two things via the Karo method, if you will. One attribution is solved right, a company gives you access to their actual products and you're selling it on your own Shopify store as an influencer, and a company wants to go like, hey, how do we do you pull up your Shopify orders, report. Like it's easy and that's never really been done before, so that's kind of cool. And then, two, you've created a sort of like place for influencers to be able to sell these products. So we tried to do both at the same time and what we realized you're still a startup company, so you are strapped, you have limited potential and you've got overhead, so you've got to be able to focus in on doing one thing truly excellent. And so, in a weird way, it was kind of a reboot for us to have to go into this new direction. And what we really realized too, is that there was a lot more potential upside in exploring this new technology and kind of exploring this vision of becoming the connected tissue behind commerce than to try to be just another influencer marketing tool set out there.
Speaker 2:And also, you know, reading the market where it was, you had people like Grinn coming out with insane amounts of funding and like great roadmap, great vision, making all the right moves, and it just kind of became really apparent that, like you know, we weren't really in it, we weren't really passionate about it, and then we needed to truly get out, and that's what we did. So it was a series of continual market testing, validation and feedback, letting our users tell us what they really needed and, at the time, basically creating a solution to cater to those needs, which was online retail scaling, and the playbook kind of derived from that was one of also having to understand who your users were being comfortable with having to, you know, say goodbye to a large section of them so that you could go in and start exploring another set of users and chasing potentially like a different side of the market. And so you know, caro was, and its initial sort of like standpoint, something that anybody could use and install. And so CARO today is really like RICP, like CARO's.
Speaker 2:Icp is different than where it started, and so there are a series of gradual strategic moves that you have to make, not only from a marketing standpoint, sales standpoint, a positioning standpoint, a thought leadership standpoint to start to speak the language of different people within an ecosystem. And that was sort of what we ended up really doing and exploring was how do we bring this new technology to life, talk about it, share it and also position it in a way where the people we want to work with understand its value, leaning in on that sort of e-commerce and Shopify ecosystem.
Speaker 1:And then that conversation that you had, you know, with your investors I assume that took a fair amount of effort as well that like, hey, you know we're going to completely pivot into this new area which I think you know hindsight is 2020, but if you look at the current influencer, marketing, you know, market it's very saturated. You have, you know, grinn, who raised a ton of money at too high of a valuation, and so it's like you know where do they go from here, and so I think the pivot looking back makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:But in the moment.
Speaker 1:What was it like having to sell that through to people who had, you know, given you money for something that you're not actually doing anymore, because you know I wasn't there but drinks? You know who bought electric. They did the same thing where they started as a DTC brand, and all the original investors they invested in a DTC brand. They did not invest in a beverage technology business, and so you know different types of investors for different types of businesses. In your case at least, it's still within technology, like in ours. It literally went from you know an Econ brand to tech, and usually those are two completely different types of investors.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know I wasn't necessarily part of those conversations, but I will say this is kind of like been on in a lot of those types of meetings before and been on the investor side and also been on the recipient side and entrepreneurship side.
Speaker 2:I think really good investors invest in like I think the sort of like adage is like you invest in the jockey, not the horse, and I think we really had and you know Cara still does an incredible team that's been put together, and so I think they saw that we were really onto something and they trusted us, which speaks a lot to like quality of the investors that we had and still do, and I think that they were willing to let us explore this new path as long as the data was there.
Speaker 2:And so that's where a lot of the effort and focus on my part was was on really making sure that we had the buy-in from the market, we had the right positioning, we had the brands excited and actually doing this and exploring this, because, on top of it, like I said, it was a brand new thing that was being brought to market. But ultimately, investors also want to see their investments succeed and there's a real degree of trust that has to be there between you and your investors so that you're allowed to make those strategic moves in those plays that at first, yeah, are probably pretty fucking scary. Right To kind of bring that up and to talk about that. But I think that's kind of, you know, dp and Jason, they're really kind of like they should teach a masterclass when it comes to fundraising and kind of like diligence with board and managing a board, because you know we've done quite a bit and been able to do quite a bit, and a move like that in a really uncertain time is really no small feat.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really that's I mean coming at it from an investor standpoint. I can imagine that at the end of the day, you like, what is your? What is your? What is your recourse if you're like, oh no, like you need to stay with your existing? You know business, I don't know. That's not going to pan out well Like, you want the founder bought in, you need that.
Speaker 1:And so I think you know, depending on the structure, as a founder you probably have more, more power than you think you might. But I that would be an interesting book because I haven't really had to do it yet, but we'll have to if we'll scale this and then your future here. Like deal with the dynamic between investor and founder and it's like a constantly swinging pendulum of a balance of power, in the same way that there's a balance of power between employers and employees, and that has shifted dramatically over the course of COVID and, I think, actually in parallel with the balance between investors and founders. Because, like you know, peak COVID, when employees could jump to a different job every two days and get paid an extra $100,000, that was also the same time period that you as a founder, could raise from 25 different people who were just like throwing money left and right, and now it's the exact opposite for both where it's, you know, it's a lot more challenging to find employment, but it's also a lot more difficult to find investments as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well said. So what has it been like on the partnership side of things and how did you, like you know, find your way into that? Because you obviously were more on like the the founding side of things with the original businesses and then now transitioning into this partnership role Though obviously there's a lot that goes into you know, building and running your own business with partnerships. I mean, I think literally half of my time with electric was spent on partnerships because of how important it was to our company. But, yeah, what does that transition looked like and how much value do you think there is in staying within one particular vertical in industry versus hopping around? Yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker 2:I don't know how typical of this sort of like experience I had with partnerships is to kind of how partnerships is today. I think that there's a few different things going on. I think one the partnerships ecosystem has really evolved in the past, like three to four years, right. Partnerships went from being kind of the superfluous department within tech companies and organizations that leadership may or may not have gotten and you know, there may or may not have been value, and you know, playbooks were really put together. The tools and infrastructure within the ecosystem wasn't really there, and so it was mostly like okay, you know, let's figure out a couple of integrations potentially, and you know, let's let's, you know, work with a few agencies that might be interested in selling our service, but it just wasn't as
Speaker 2:robust as where it was today. The reason why I got into it was that, you know, one of the really nice experiences about, you know, doing Karo and really being there since the beginning was that I kind of got to pick and choose what I wanted to do and as we entered that, as we left that phase of figuring out the collaborative commerce component after having raised the Series B and, you know, the company was entering this new sort of like era of success and stability I realized that, as we were getting more concentrated in the world of e-commerce rather than influencer marketing, that we weren't as familiar as we needed to be with the world of the Shopify ecosystem and that I also saw as being in a very interesting position where we were the sort of categorical leaders in something that was brand new and we had a giant, we had a giant lead on everybody else and I knew that there were going to be competitors and copycats and clones. There are, of course. I mean I don't need to name them, but you know people are familiar with them and Shopify made a big feature release and everything else, and so what I realized was that it was going to be critically important for Karo to be positioned and surrounded with other top players in the Shopify ecosystem, but that there was this whole community and network to really break into and it was really imperative for us to start playing game with us. So I basically wanted to create a strategic mode of the right relationships within the Shopify ecosystem, of the best technology businesses and agencies and influencers that were out there, thought leaders, and I also wanted to get to know, like how the game is really played within. You know the sort of like in-sealer. You know Shopify e-commerce world, and so we had like a partnerships department, but apparently not really.
Speaker 2:I just dedicated my time into it fully and allowed myself to. Basically, whenever I'm trying to figure something out, I just turn on the fire hose like 100% and go all right, I'm going to just take in as much business as we can and then figure this out afterwards. So I just started taking meetings. A lot of inbound was going on and I had a sort of like target list of people I wanted to talk to as well and I realized like pretty quickly, like it's a small world. So, as the inbound really naturally grew, I was able to find this sort of like web behind the network that I was creating, to be able to open the right doors for the people that ultimately I really wanted to connect with, platform wise, and so I then went through the process of taking all this. You know I think of things always like within proportions and funnels, and so, like, I created a funnel behind the experience of like all right, everybody wants to talk to Karl, let's just do it.
Speaker 2:But along the way you start to qualify out and see why certain types of categories or size of businesses or what other factors of businesses you can kind of identify, are either good fits or not very good fits at all. And then you kind of like to still down like your pool of like people that you really like to work with, not only from a personal level but also from like a company level as well, and you sort of go, okay, cool, like that's not my ICP, right. It's this process of like creating sifts and sifting through all of the different opportunities that are out there to find truly like what is your partner ICP. In doing so I realized something that was really interesting about partnerships. It's that you know, in life you sort of like have this like 80 20 rule of things right In partnerships. In my opinion it's like a 95 five rule, and I've always kind of learned through that that it's better to go deep than to try to go wide, and so I just really focused on my ICP, the people that we're working really well with, the technology businesses. That made a lot of sense for us to like start strategically aligning ourselves with and just doing whatever we had to do in order to really provide a lot of value for these people, a lot of value for these agencies. And so for Karl, it was interesting, you know.
Speaker 2:It really turned into this sort of like play of like helping agencies develop their own sort of you know, understanding of cars so that they could bring that to their customers right Again, and that's one of the sort of like challenges about the car's unique technology is that it's not like email, where everybody needs to use it and it's using it already. It's that, hey, this is actually something that really helps like augment a bunch of different factors within your Shopify tech stack and sort of like your retention and revenue and customer acquisition channels. So that became very interesting, which is like helping these agencies sort of develop like their own in-house playbooks around this and how to like help their you know clients understand the value of this and why they want to do it. On the same, on the other side of that sort of like coin, it was identifying the right technology partners so that we could really build the right types of integrations, explore the right types of integrations to solve, sort of for these problems that you know your platform has. Like every platform, no platform is perfect. Every platform has these sort of gaps into it.
Speaker 2:And for us, you know, back in the day with Carro, you know time to value was a really big one, because you know there's a lot of work that needs to be done in order to set up a product initially, which you know the company's getting very good at solving. But you know that's where integrations like with a rebuy, with an upsell mechanism, make a whole lot of sense because it's like you bring a product over, you don't have to think about where you're going to put it on your website, you use a tool, you bring it on board, you upsell on the ad-card level, revise an incredible platform with a lot of capability that helps you kind of like make that decision, complete the look, that sort of a thing. So it was a process of really understanding that, building the right playbook, building the right relationships, building the right strategies with the right people. But ultimately I also saw partnerships as sort of a almost a proxy towards developing really good thought leadership, because what you're doing with partnerships is not only are you building these relationships, but you're also building positioning right. And so that's when I started to kick off the content marketing department within Karo, just as a sort of necessity around being able to really facilitate successful partnerships.
Speaker 2:It all comes back to clients. Clients have to understand the value of your product and they can't just do that by Listening to what you say. They have to understand it on their own, with being able to pick up, you know, several different signals from around the, the ecosystem, and so you have to think about strategically placing these different types of signals, whether that's written content, video content, case studies that you're developing together, pieces around different aspects, around different marketing that Includes what your product and service sort of does. It all kind of fits together congruently. But so for me, in that sort of like sense, within partnerships, I was really looking at it from a sort of like top-level view, holistically going like, hey, how do I just make Karo Embed with like the best, the best within Shopify's ecosystem.
Speaker 1:It feels like this is a very Incessuous industry or like, and I don't know I haven't been in other industries, I don't know if it's similar in others but, like you know, everybody who I work with is still the same people. They might be at different companies or they might be in different roles, but over the four years, five years that I've been doing this, you know, I can look at multiple people who I've been working with since very early on, who are now in their third company or in their you know, their fourth role or whatever it may be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're not really hopping out to another Industry yeah, and I think there's a lot of value to that, right. I think there's a ton of I think there's a ton of value of being able to. I think the thing that I really like and appreciate about E-commerce in general right and I joke about this with, like you, and I joke about this with our friends too which is like If I were in insurance as an industry, I think I'd be so unhappy because of the type of people that I've seen I'd have to interact with what I love about, and maybe not necessarily in such like a negative light, like, but light of that. But what I've seen about e-commerce that I enjoy so specifically is that the people that we work with are the people who are our friends, right, and that's, I think, very unique to e-commerce is that it attracts a certain type of individual from like a certain age range, and the reason why that's kind of special and important is because we all seem to really kind of get it and understand and understand each other, and there's a lot of value behind that, because you have these like deep-seated Relationships with people that you know can move organizations, move businesses, and they can go from an agency that to a technology platform and then hop to a brand, but you've worked with them before and it's all part of this pretty healthy, balanced ecosystem in In the sense where you know what to do together, you know what the value is that you bring and you're able to Kind of bring a lot to the table right out of the gate because you have an existing network, Especially in the world of, like, partnerships right.
Speaker 2:And I think that's one of the unique things about e-commerce and working sort of within the partnerships industry in general Is that when you do transition, you know platforms right. You kind of know what to do already. You already have your connections in place. It's just a matter of making sure that you know You've gotten certain elements of a business like really focused and dialed in on, but otherwise You're ready to go, you're ready to rock, and so that was a really interesting transition for me and realization for me to kind of like have, because in a weird way, you know, working at car was anything like it was eight years. It's all I really knew for like the better part of my career. And then you know, not long after leaving that and jumping into Sendlane, kind of going, oh, you know what actually I'm gonna one of my first calls. I'm gonna call Phil, I'm gonna call Brandon, I'm gonna call this person, and then that person and this person and that person and we're gonna boot back up and you know that's the.
Speaker 2:That's the kind of unique and special thing about e-commerce is you don't have to sweat it too much, you know you. You really, once you start to really focus in and figure out what your personal playbooks and strategies are and you know my case like running a department or, you know, focusing on a Specific specialty, you can kind of like repeat that process that you found a lot of success in, bring that to the table and, immediately out of the gate, bring that value for the business. And that's been actually probably one of the really nice things of working at Sendlane is because of how open and how collaborative the whole process has been. You know the company sort of like saw me and braced me and was like, okay, cool, come in. Whatever you want to build, let's start building, let's start working on it together. And you know, bring over your relationships. We love it.
Speaker 2:And Sendlane has been in such an interesting position as well because fairly lean team Handling, so much inbound business it's it's kind of remarkable, you know, in the, in the team that I kind of like walked into. I found them out of the gate, very talented, very driven, very, very, very hungry, and had a sort of perspective on partnership that you sometimes don't really see with partnerships team, which is, like really viewing it from like a sales edge standpoint, very much focused on like okay, how do we drive immediate revenue and immediate value, and I think that's really where partnerships needs to be today.
Speaker 1:In general, it's very focused on like bringing that immediate value, not only from like a sort of infrastructure standpoint, but how much business is truly being driven hmm, and one thing I want to touch on that I think I heard you talk about in passing at the Shopify conference was Like how you assess and evaluate your relationships with partners and and I, if I recall correctly it had to do with something around you know percentage of book of business versus you know number, because there's obviously smaller agencies and those larger agencies.
Speaker 1:And what I've always said to tech partners and yes, it was sort of self-serving as well, yeah was you'd rather work with us Because we're at least at the time when I was saying this, you know we're like 20, 25 people and even now at like 40, 45. It's, in my opinion and I'm thinking about it the same way with drinks and also thinking about the same way of scaleless it's better to work with that size of agency where you're large enough to have you know volume, significant volume, come through. I mean, with certain tech partners that we work with, we've referred over a hundred logos to them over the course of our partnership with them. But we can go deep enough and you're working with the right people Versus just being one of you know a thousand tech partner. You know recommendations that a larger player who's you know 200, 300 employees might have right, but I just recall you mentioning something around the way that you think about you know, sort of stack ranking partnerships.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and and this is something that's really important to like develop internally before you sort of like share externally. But you know, when you're building a, I think, a partnerships department or a partnership foundation, what you're really doing is you're trying to figure out what is your ICP behind a partner and and sort of like being in the space. One of the things that I've seen that's not really healthy in in certain partnership playbooks is a very like numbers only focus, driven for scale, with a lack of support, and other really large platforms sort of adopt this mentality of okay, you know, we're the hottest thing in the room, you're just a number to us. You know we got to push you through this funnel, you've got to bring all this. You know, sort of like you got to bring all this tribute to us because we're the important ones in the room and you know, if you do it, you do it really really well. Then maybe we'll consider you and put you know, petition you to the top and you know you'll get this sort of like classification. I Think those days are people are starting to resent that sort of like, that sort of like strategy to be kind of honest with you and I think, a sort of like more human, personal approach is what people are really looking for, and sort of like the collaboration behind partnerships. And I think to your point and your question, the way that I always assess things right is I never take a look at data or information as standalone. I always try to contextualize it. So when you're looking at things numerically, like that's within proportions and so looking at, you know the value of what a partner brings to the table like one. There are more lenses than just one to look at a partner right Within Sunlane.
Speaker 2:One of the things that we're focusing on right now is building these different set of initiatives to be able to bring partners into. Classic example happened, I think literally Thursday of last week, where our CS team came to us and were like hey guys, look, we got clients coming on board who actually need development help. You know what agencies do you guys have that we can actually bring in and start creating a program around to offset some of the requirements that our clients need. That we can't help with, right, because our CS team it's not full of developers, it's not our job, it's not our responsibility, as much as we would love to help them do that. We just can't. But that's where partners really strategically come in and that's the kind of beauty of having really close relationships with partners is that you find opportunities and ways of being able to include them.
Speaker 2:So the idea kind of comes down to when you are working with partners, how significant of a role do you play for your partners and do your partners play for you? An example, I think, of what you were kind of like like getting or looting towards is like when I see myself working with partners. I don't necessarily care if they're a gigantic agency with thousands and thousands of clients, or if they're a more of a boutique firm and it's like a guy and his best friend working together and maybe they've got, like you know, 10, five, 10 clients or something like that. You know, what I wanna do is I wanna make sure that, to me, when I look at it in terms of asking myself, how healthy is this relationship, I look at it from a perspective of, well, how much business have we brought to them and how much business have they brought to us as sort of percentages? So in the example of that smaller agency, okay, they've got 10 clients.
Speaker 2:Now, if they've got 10 clients and I know that, and they've referred over five Browns. That's extraordinarily meaningful. That's 50% of the total clients that have been brought over to Sun Lane and I love that and that to me means I can trust you to be looking out for me because I've been looking out for you as well and there's sort of that like that real relationship and that real lack of better term partnership that's been built in sort of like a consequence of that. Now you take that example, right, and you have that agency that's got thousands of clients and yeah, they've referred over five clients but again they've got thousands.
Speaker 2:So really like, how much value do they really see my organization as relates to their organization? You know, 5% of a thousand or five Browns out of you know a thousand, right, is 0.5%. That's not something that like really speaks to me, that like you really are invested in me and that I really need to invest into you. And that's just my opinion, you know, to quote the dude, that's just like your opinion, man. But you know, quite honestly, when I am really building the foundation behind a program, I wanna know who's in it for the long haul, right, and I wanna know who's in it and has been bringing over success to us that we can reciprocate and have been bringing over success to them as well, and you know that's kind of the value, again going back to that point, of staying within the industry. When you have these relationships, you can trust, you have these businesses that you know do really good work. You know, like, what the kinks are. You've ironed them out. That's worth its weight in gold. It really, really is.
Speaker 1:No, that makes a lot of sense and that's helpful context and insight. You know, if you had one thing that you are focus on for the rest of the year, that you're excited about, or like just one last thing that you wanna, you know, get out there, what is something that you're that's burning in the back of your mind?
Speaker 2:Yeah SanLion right now is doing. I mean, actually it's possible. So do you mean that like contextually, as like a macro environmental thing, or is this something that she's like pertinent to like what's in my perspective right now, Just in your perspective, so I can talk about SanLion and basically kind of like plug it and talk about all the wonderful things that's going on with it, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I think it would be helpful because usually, like in the past, we've had a lot of ClayVio and attentive folks on the podcast. So it would be good to get and I'm not as familiar with SanLion as necessarily a ClayVio, so it would be good to get the sort of the pitch I guess as your last talking point here. Okay, cool.
Speaker 2:So, all right, Ready, three, two, one, yeah. So, looking towards the end of the year, I feel so grateful in working with SanLion because of, like, how ambitious of a platform it is.
Speaker 1:And I mean that in a number of different ways.
Speaker 2:I mean, first off, I feel like it being the best kept secret of Shopify is now over and everybody's talking about it and it's blowing up online. It's blowing up. I'm sitting on these phone calls and learning like how many people are really genuinely, truly excited about SanLion in general, and learning about the fact that people are getting priced out of the ClayVio contracts. They can't afford $6,000 every month just to send email or they're not hearing from the reps from ClayVio or what have you, or the other ESPs that they're working with, and they're really looking for this incredible low level support. And so SanLion's done an incredible job of really fostering their community, which, as a brand and as a player in the sort of like Shopify ecosystem, is incredibly invaluable.
Speaker 2:And so for us, what I'm excited about personally, too, is like, over the course of this next quarter, it's like, okay, it's Q4 is here, black Friday, cyber Monday is coming up, business that's coming in is still coming in, but it's slower, and people are kind of preoccupied with like really making sure things get across the finish line. But we have this incredible opportunity right now where we're building in infrastructure and sort of like the flywheel internally for our teams and what I really wanna do with this department and with SanLion right now is I wanna take advantage of this sort of Q4 period for the rest of the year, finish building up the partnership program so that we can continue to send out business to our partners, bring in more incredible partners to our platform and help people like understand that, like you're not just stuck with ClayVio. There are great alternatives out there.
Speaker 2:Sanlion is absolutely one of them, and I'm not gonna say here and say that SanLion is the number one ESP in the whole wide world quite yet right but it is right up there with ClayVio and for a number of different reasons that people are may or may not be familiar with, and so knowing things like SanLion's like a tier one ESP, where we own our infrastructure, our deliverability is higher, our support quality is better, our pricing is lower. That's all incredible, but what's actually more interesting about SanLion that people that also don't realize is sort of the way that we're really approaching our feature stack, and what we really wanna do is our slogan is more tech, less stack is we wanna bring on features that companies find invaluable to help run their businesses into the product and into the platform, so that you don't have to worry about paying for X, y and Z. You pay for email, you pay for SMS and the rest kind of comes bundled within that.
Speaker 2:And you get an incredible suite of different technologies, from reviews to pop-ups to more all part of that sort of like selling package with our world-class support. And so building in the infrastructure behind that sort of like partnerships team to kind of help educate and bring awareness to that and bring in more partners to help support those initiatives. I mean that's something that I'm incredibly passionate about, I'm excited about, and that it's so nice to be part of an organization where things are just flying right now. So that's where my head is at. It's gonna be a really busy queue on for us, brandon, looking at how many people we're gonna be bringing over from Clavio and other ESPs, but know we're here for it and we're ready.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a super exciting time and I'm excited for you and for the assembling team as well. And the support thing is one area that is a huge differentiator and that's actually why, historically, like attentive has been such a strong partner with us in the SMS front is because of their level of customer support. And what resonates the most to me because I'm not in the tools on a day-to-day basis and so I will get it more like feature set and other things but the actual agency team, the support, matters a lot to them and so not just in email and SMS marketing, but in other areas, even if I might think, hey, we should be using the solution, instead the team will be like well, no, because their support is not great. Or like we reach out to them about an urgent client issue and we don't hear back for 48 hours, and it's like an email ticketing system versus hey, we can slack this girl and she's gonna get back to us like in 30 minutes. That's a huge value prop. And then also to get the tool sort of sold from below upwards, versus me coming in and saying we should be using the solution. So I think support goes far beyond just the initial like customer satisfaction and has ramifications within agency organizations as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well said. Couldn't have said it better. That's my Sendlane pitch. Well, thank you for coming on the show Before we have off. Can you let everybody know where they can connect with you? Find you online?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, you can find me on LinkedIn under KPru, or you can always shoot me an email. My email is C-A-D-E at sendlanecom.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, again, thank you for coming on For everybody listening. As always, it's Brandon Amoroso. You can find me at BrandonAmorosocom or electricmarketingcom. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time. Bye, To be continued.