Recharge: Fueling Subscription Success with Oisin O'Connor - 82

Oisin O'Connor is the co-founder and CEO of Recharge, a leading platform powering subscription growth for e-commerce brands. In this episode, Brandon and Oisin explore entrepreneurship, customer insights, and the evolving e-commerce landscape.

One of the central themes of this episode is the significance of listening to customers deeply. Oisin and Brandon stress the importance of understanding not only the surface-level problems but also the underlying issues that customers face. 

Scaling an organization takes center stage as Oisin shares his valuable experiences and insights, emphasizing the need to adapt the organizational structure and attract the right talent to fuel growth successfully. The episode also sheds light on the pivotal role of founders in shaping a company's culture through intentional actions, including the innovative strategy of polarizing job postings. Throughout the conversation, the importance of maintaining alignment within a growing company resonates, with a focus on identifying and retaining team members aligned with the company's vision. 

This episode is packed with valuable insights, real-world experiences, and thought-provoking discussions that will inspire, inform, and entertain. Don't miss this opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of entrepreneurship and the ever-dynamic world of e-commerce.

Oisin O'Connor:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/oisino/

Recharge - https://rechargepayments.com/

Brandon Amoroso:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonamoroso/

Web - https://brandonamoroso.com/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bamoroso11/

X - https://twitter.com/AmorosoBrandon

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

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 talking with Ashene O'Connor, co-founder and CEO at Recharge, a platform that powers subscription growth for e-commerce brands, and actually one of Electric's longest time and longest term partners to date. So really excited to have you on.

Speaker 2: 0:41

Hey, thanks so much for having me on Brandon.

Speaker 1: 0:44

So before we hop into all the things we want to chat about today, can you give everybody just a sort of quick background on yourself and how you ended up here today?

Speaker 2: 0:53

Yeah, totally Well, I've had a definitely not a linear path. My original background was like architecture, and then economics and art, and then I became a software developer. So I taught myself to code lots of different software products over the last 15 years and then that period had a lot of failures and I probably had like six companies that didn't work out, and each time I learned a little bit different lessons from those and in that process I realized, like the biggest thing you have to get right is the macro wave, like what is the big thing that you are a part of and taking advantage of right? And so, about you know, 12 weeks, I don't know I'm getting old. Just the very fact, brandon, that I'm on a Gen Z podcast and I'm like a millennial. I feel old. I used to always be the youngest entrepreneur and now I'm like not. So, anyways, it was a little trippy. I feel like you're like Gen.

Speaker 1: 1:54

Z. I feel I feel old because I I joke that I'm not a real Gen Z and I think they need to change the way that they look at generations, because I think right now the standard is like almost 15 years. Like they bucket generations into 15 years. I think it needs to be more, like five, because I'm on the older cusp of Gen Z and when I talk to you know family, friends, kids who are on the younger side of Gen Z, there's like there is no similarity in any way whatsoever. Like these kids are weird. They just like you know, they live and breathe TikTok and I don't even know what they're. They don't speak English, they speak like a different language. It's crazy to me.

Speaker 2: 2:34

But anyways, but I digress. But yeah, 10 years ago I saw this. I saw the begins of this wave of social media advertising. You know, facebook had just launched lookalike audiences. In that. I also saw the way, the beginnings of DC commerce. So now that you had the advertising, you can actually sell products to the end consumer. And so that's when I started getting involved in Shopify and e-commerce and, you know, over a period of a year and a half, launched a lot of different products. I think we launched seven different products, something like that and recharge was the seventh product, and once that hit, we kind of dropped everything else and just do that. So that's a little bit of my background at a high level.

Speaker 1: 3:17

So you taught yourself to to code what was. How long did that take? You know would you have, but you didn't have a background in in in software development before that at all.

Speaker 2: 3:27

No, I did not. You know, my background was like basically art and building physical products and economics, right so. But you know this was 2008,. Right, and you know, saas wasn't a big thing, right, salesforce was the big software company or cloud software company, and it was funny Like you still had companies that were selling physical products or products one off in a software perspective. And I just looked around and I'm like man, software is going to eat the world, right, and you know, mark Andreessen came out with a famous blog post a couple of years after that about that, that insight, and in that I was like, wow, you know, if this is the new way that you build and create things via software, you need to understand, like, how to build it from the fundamental levels.

Speaker 2: 4:19

And so that's when I was like I got to learn how to code, I got to learn the technology behind that. And it was pretty painful because at the time there was no like coding academies and coding classes. So I had to like find someone on Craigslist to be like a tutor of mine. I had to like read Stack Overfill had just launched.

Speaker 2: 4:40

Yeah, it was a weird time right, like there was no way to learn a code, like there was like a couple blog posts I had, like Stack Overfill had just launched right, and so you just finally had the beginnings of, you know, people sharing coding knowledge on the internet. It's kind of it's like weird to talk about because now it's changed so much. But yeah, it was a pan the fucking ass. But what I realized is like there was a cohort of people like myself in the you know the 2000s that didn't learn coding in school and learned after the fact, and those were all, like a lot of times, the best coders because they're just so determined they overcame all these things.

Speaker 1: 5:18

So yeah, that's interesting, and I you know Craigslist for coding. That is awesome.

Speaker 2: 5:25

I mean there was yeah, it was a weird relationship I had with my coding tutor too. It was like, oh, that's awesome.

Speaker 1: 5:36

So I mean, once you figured out that recharge was the product that you were going to go all in on and was, you know, looking from the from the outside looking at it seems like the growth was sort of slow and steady and then sort of became like meteoric. Is that inaccurate? You know sort of depiction, or how did it? How did it go from you know, you and a couple other people to now? What is? What do you have like 400, 500 team members?

Speaker 2: 6:05

Yeah, totally. You know it's always funny. It's like people are always like oh, you know, x thing was like overnight success, or you know it was meteoric, and I think you know it never is like that.

Speaker 1: 6:17

I love my buzzwords yeah yeah, totally.

Speaker 2: 6:20

I'm like, oh my fuck, I never felt like that, never felt like there was just a moment where it just kicked off. So, you know, I think it was like one of those things. So we launched these seven products before recharge in the e-commerce landscape, right, and so we kind of knew what the go to market motion was at the time. We knew what, like success looked like and what the merchants needed. And when we launched recharge, it was just super clear that this was like a pent up demand was like hey, I have physical products, can I sell them on subscription? It was as simple as that. And so when we did it, it was like you hit a vein and you just knew, like this is right, this is working.

Speaker 2: 7:01

So I guess it was meteoric in the beginning in that perspective, because it was a very different experience than the other products In that, you know, I think we had a period, like every year we were growing 100%. You know, again, at that time Shopify was also growing at a very fast clip. Like when we started working on Shopify there was 100 employees at Shopify, right. Like we knew a lot of people there because it was just such a small company and DC was way smaller of an ecosystem and so it was growing a very fast clip. I would say during COVID was probably the fastest growth because it was just like this artificial inflation in the economy and you know everyone was locked up so they had a buy shit online. So maybe that was the meteoric point that you're thinking of, brandon, but you know it was still very fast growth before.

Speaker 1: 7:52

What was it like having to work within an ecosystem that wasn't necessarily ready for your product yet from like a technical standpoint, because there was a lot of workarounds that you had to do with the platform to make it sort of work within the Shopify structure at that point?

Speaker 2: 8:14

Yeah, I mean. So I think like it was like. I mean like everything in business is a schlep, right, you know, like it's like work, right. So it's like you have to be willing to do the work and oftentimes the best opportunity is it's like everybody sees the opportunity right. It's not like you have an amazing idea that no one else sees. It's just like you're the one that's willing to like get in, the get in the muck and do the work right.

Speaker 2: 8:39

So I think, for you know, subscriptions like I can't tell you how many people were like, oh, I thought about that, or you know I was gonna do that or whatnot. And the reality is like, at those early days it was just really hard from a technical perspective and a product perspective to make it happen. Right, like here's a little antidote of like how hard. So when we launched, there was like I don't know maybe eight or nine competitors in the market and at the time merchants just wanted it to be easy, easily installed, right, like that's what they cared about. Like these were small merchants getting going. They're like I want to click one button, I want it to be installed, I'm launched, I'm good. I never think about it and At the time, there was no way to do that right. So the way that every other competitor did it is they put manual. People would basically look at your JavaScript and your themes and they would insert the code and they would install it right, and what would happen is that that would be like a two-day process right.

Speaker 2: 9:38

And what we decided is we're like hey, there's about 400 or so themes on Shopify. They're popular. We're gonna reverse engineer every single one of those themes of where our code needs are gonna be. We're gonna build our own theme engine so Shopify had this like theme engine. We're gonna build our own way to handle front-end code and we're gonna be able to inject exactly where it is, and then we're gonna have a testing framework to make sure that we injected it properly.

Speaker 2: 10:02

So what happened was we and this is like a huge project, like it took like four or five months to build and it was like it was like painful work because you have to like look at 400 themes and like see where the code needs to go and you got to test it because it's like if we break someone's site, their checkout works no more right, and so people get super pissed.

Speaker 2: 10:21

So it's like something that has to be bulletproof, and so we made it basically, long story short, we made this process so that you could click a button and the code was just installed for 90% of stores. So what happened was our sign-up flow. People would have this instant, like I've launched a subscription program, while every one of our other competitors it took multiple days and like that was like our secret sauce early days, right. So it was like a huge slept from a work perspective and a technology perspective, but because of that, we unlocked the value right, and I think you know, even today, a lot of the stuff that we're working on is like really hard Because like and it's really obvious what people want, it's just like executing is really hard, right.

Speaker 1: 11:02

So, yeah, and how do you and how are you sort of extracting those Insights around? What the customer wants are there, is it? Just they're they're very loud with the requests and features that they need. Because I'm sure there's certain things that you know they might be asked for a lot, but they don't actually provide that much value. And one thing I recently ran into, as this whole like gift, a subscription thing, which you know, even I started a phone to the trap I was like, oh shit, like you know, this platform doesn't have it. Maybe we shouldn't go over or shouldn't consider it for this brand who really wants it for some reason. Then you actually look at the numbers and like who's gifting their upcoming order to somebody else? I'm just gonna skip it, I'm not gonna send it, like I'm not gonna pay for an order. Yeah um.

Speaker 2: 11:53

So I think, well, one to give them skip is a perfect example of just like stupid ideas that like get buzzed and don't really matter, right? So like mm-hmm, I think. So I think there's always these, what I consider like class a problems and class B problems. Right, and class a are like the really hard things that everyone can agree on that, like would change the game, and class B problems are like these, like minor things that we and most people and most companies Go after the smaller problems, right, because it's easier, you feel good about yourself and you don't think about how to build the bigger thing, right. And so, like you know, going back to that story is like no merchant asked me to reverse engineer every theme on the Shopify theme market, right, what they they were asking, what they talking to them, is like they, you saw that the problem they had is that it was too much work for them to launch a subscription program, right, you know? And then when I looked at it, I'm like, okay, well, how do I get rid of the majority of that work? Right, and automate it, and that became a huge problem To go after.

Speaker 2: 12:56

So I think, like you should definitely listen to your customers, but you should listen to them deeply and to understand what their problems are. It's like your job. It's your job to figure out the solutions to those problems. Do not listen to like the solutions they give you per se. Go a level deeper and then it's also your job to think about hey, is this something of a bigger system that can build out that solves multiple of these problems, not just one at a time, right? So, yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 2: 13:23

You know, it's so funny, like I just finished the Elon Musk book, you know, and Like, when you hear him talk about product and like building things, you realize like everything he talks about is like obvious. You know, like he's like for, like Tesla, everything he cares about now is like self-driving cars and he's like not listening to like customer feedback. He just know it's just obvious to everyone. This is a class, a problem, like if you can automate cars moving around, that takes a lot of the work.

Speaker 2: 13:51

I'm driving a car, you know. But the thing is like, if you look at car manufacturers, is that the majority of their work goes into all these side things and not into the main thing, right? And people don't realize, like a traditional car manufacturer, like there's like dozens of teams that just work on noises in the car, like how the car sounds when you turn it on, how does it sound when you close the door, how do you know? And like those aren't that important problems, but like they've been delegated to that level right. So I think just looking at what is the bigger thing you're trying to solve and going after that.

Speaker 1: 14:26

I didn't realize that. That's awesome. I'm gonna. I'm gonna listen next time I open and close that Tesla car door and see whether or not it passes the test. So how do you go about, like, when it comes to structuring your organization, and what sort of model have you employed, as you've experienced the growth from you know, just a couple people to hundreds of employees. What has that been like? Because I can't even imagine having as many employees as you do. I only had 50 team members at a lecture, and even that was kind of a nightmare. So how do you deal with it? How do you handle it? How do you delegate? What are some of the you know structures or methods that you've employed to be able to, you know, not go completely crazy?

Speaker 2: 15:20

Well, first, I would say it's been a huge learning process, right. You know, like before Recharge, the biggest company I had seen, you know being part of, was probably like a hundred people, right. So I kind of knew the playbook because I had a good mentor or I'd seen other people built to that, around that size, but bigger I hadn't seen before. So I think it was definitely a learning lesson of talking to a lot of people, looking at the good and bads of other companies. You know, I think there's like a couple of things I think about.

Speaker 2: 15:52

A lot is one in organizational structures, this is this rule of three is, as companies triple in size, they fundamentally need to change how they operate. So you can think about this is like when you start a new endeavor and you have three people working on it, is like so much as osmosis, right, and so much as like everyone's jumping into the same jobs and we're all like kind of tackling the same things together, right. When you get to nine people now you might actually have somebody like oh, you have one guy that focuses on sales and one person that focuses on customer support and marketing, you know, and so you have started to have some specialization and so that size team things need to change again when you get to 30 people and needs to change again when you get to 90 people and needs to change again and so on, right. And so I think, understanding those inflection points where you have to, like, look at the org structure you built and the company and the culture and be like, actually we have changed, we're completely different than we were a year or two years ago and we need to change how we operate, like I think that's a really important process, that's one. I think.

Speaker 2: 16:57

Two is just like, again, like me personally, I hadn't been in that journey before, I hadn't seen a company on that size. So bringing in really good people that you can trust, that have and help you grow into it, I think it's really important, right, it's like there's an old saying if you know, if you haven't gone down a path before, find someone who's gone down that path and they'll be that your guide, you know. And then I think the last is just probably like constant for me is being like constant humility and reflection, right, being humble of like what I know and I don't know, so like hey, these are things I don't know that I'm starting to do on and then reflecting on what is happening in the system and happening to myself, to understand how to do better.

Speaker 1: 17:40

So I think the ability to be able to like completely reshape the organization, though, is something that is like, can be scary and requires you know, the capability to not get stuck in in your ways, which I feel like a lot of businesses are totally a lot of people are too Right.

Speaker 2: 18:03

It's like it's really hard to like reinvent yourself as an individual, let alone reinvent a company. You know of what it needs to be and I think one of the unique roles of a founder is that you have the moral courage to be like this is the path for right or for better or worse. You have the ability to be like hey, we're a 30% company and now we're becoming a 90% company. We need to change how we operate, right, fundamentally, you know, for this new real and you know that takes courage. You know.

Speaker 1: 18:36

And the team members that were really strong in a 30 person, or it might not be the team members that are strong in a 90 person.

Speaker 2: 18:42

Oh, 100%. I mean like that's something like like I deeply care about our team and I want to see people succeed and grow with whatever you know, with recharge and what we build and create. But it has been kind of crazy to me is like how many people like like very competent, great people like just tap out at a certain stage where they're just like no longer the right fit. And you know, in this journey there's only probably a couple people in the whole company that actually like were successful at multiple stages and I think those people were the ones that were like the most open for change, the most open for self-development, probably the lowest ego to become better, you know.

Speaker 1: 19:24

Yeah, how have you gone about building the team? In the early stages Were like did you go about this idea of you know building culture sort of intentionally, or did it happen naturally? Something that I'm fascinated with is you can you can tell when a business has like a strong culture and team and they love working there and you can tell when they when they don't like. How does that happen? Is it intentional from the founders or is it more organic?

Speaker 2: 19:54

Yeah, totally. So I think, like, look, culture is defined by the founders, right, like they're the ones that have the moral authority in the company of like hey, this is how we're gonna act as a company and operate right. And you know, they do that by like you know who they hire, who they fire, who they promote. So, basically, how do they incentivize and desensitize people? And so I think, like, look, I've made probably every mistake in the book in hiring, so I'm not gonna be like I don't think it was like always the most deliberate as it should have been. But I would say what there's like a like Brandon, do you know the Ernest Shackleton, the Art Egg Explorer? Yeah, do you know? Like his famous job posts, like, have you seen that one?

Speaker 1: 20:47

I have not no, okay, well, shackleton, I'm gonna look it up.

Speaker 2: 20:51

Yeah, check out Job Post Ernest Shackleton and read that. So I'll give the little backstory while you're putting up the job post. So Ernest Shackleton was this Art Egg Explorer in like the 1700s and his goal was to cross the Arctic on foot and he basically his boat crashed into an iceberg and he got stuck there for like over two years and all his sailors and him survived. And the way they survived is over the two years was this crazy adventure. But they ended up like hiking for like tens of thousands of miles to get rescue through the Arctic, right, and they had like no supplies and all that.

Speaker 2: 21:29

And everybody's always like, hey, what amazing human beings were these Like? Were these like the most famous Art Egg explorers of our time and like of that time and all that? And actually there were a lot of normal people right, there were a lot of people who had never been to the Arctic, never been in cold climates, never gone through these extreme things. And there's a famous job post of like how he recruited these people and that set that culture that was able to survive this thing.

Speaker 1: 21:52

So I found the job post it says men wanted for hazardous journey small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return, doubtful honor and recognition in case of success.

Speaker 2: 22:12

So that's awesome I think the best thing I've got, the best lesson I've learned from culture is one is how do you polarize things of like what you want and that that endurance job post is amazing thing, right?

Speaker 2: 22:24

He's polarizing like here's the realities of what we're doing, the most extreme Like. Now they actually did go through the most extreme. Most companies don't go through the most extreme situations, but by doing that, you know you want people to look at that at your job posts and be like oh my God, that sounds like a terrible company. I would never want to do that. That's you know. But then you want that one out of a hundred to be like oh my God, that's what I've been looking for, that's the thing I'm going to give my like, my blood, sweat and tears into and like exactly what I want you know. And so I think, like, as a leader, the more polarizing you can be around culture, around you know what is the opportunity, what are you going after? Who are the right people for it? People will opt in and opt out, and that will do a lot of the work for you.

Speaker 1: 23:11

Mm-hmm, sort of making sure that you're weeding out. You know everybody rather quickly in getting down to the, you know the 5% that might actually be yeah or the right and it's better for everybody, right, you know?

Speaker 2: 23:23

it's like it creates alignment, right, like I think we're all like on this earth to do something great and we all need to be like the right situation and not every company is the right situation, and I feel like too many people are afraid to be that polarizing force of like hey, this is what we're going to be great at. And like if you want that, you should join us.

Speaker 1: 23:43

And how do you manage, you know, keeping your team aligned on what the goal is, what the vision is, because obviously, Recharge has evolved as a company. I mean, a couple of years ago it was just subscriptions, Now you're more of a platform for increasing LTV and improving retention, with all the various, you know, components that are going into it. How do you maintain that level of you know everybody's rowing in?

Speaker 2: 24:09

the same direction Totally. Well, I think it's changed because it's, you know, when we were like let's go back to the org structure, the idea, like when we were three people, it's so easy to be aligned because everyone's talking to the customer, everyone's building, everyone's like answering support tickets, right. And then as you get bigger, it changes how you have to align people, right, you know. And then the day I think it comes to them like you have to do a lot of communication, right, you have to constantly be communicating. You know where you're going. Why are you going where you're at today, what's happening?

Speaker 2: 24:43

And I think one thing we've learned a lot recently is just, we do more in persons than ever before.

Speaker 2: 24:48

Like we were always a remote company, but we've realized to create that alignment, especially at our scale, we have to have teams meeting up all the time. You know, and it's also funny. It's like people are like moved out of this, like everyone's been like very anti-meeting recently, like that's like the big ETHOS brand and I'm like and I had a friend recently that joined Apple and like one of the first things they say like in their HR docs is like we love meetings, which I actually love, like that's like a really polarizing thing is to like be interviewing a company and they say we love meetings, you know Cause like somebody was like, oh, no way. But what they mean by that is like they want to have working meetings where people get into the details, people build and create together and get alignment right. And I think for us too, it's like we want more working meetings to create that alignment right. This isn't about everyone just like going off and doing their own thing. It's like, hey, let's work together on this and work through the problems.

Speaker 1: 25:48

Yeah, the in-person experience is impossible to replicate. You know virtually, and it's something that you know even we struggle with now. When you have team members in like 13 or 14 different states, it's very challenging to you know connect on a level that is, you know more than just you know professional, or being able to ingrain and sort of like. When we started Electric, it was originally in LA and then in San Diego and everybody was there. We'd always have you know team dinners or we would do this or we'd do that together and that sort of bonding was invaluable and also just fun like you enjoyed doing it. I thought that was one of the coolest parts of having the business.

Speaker 1: 26:33

But when you're fully remote and you don't put in the time and effort, like you are, to bring those people together, I feel like there's a big gap and I actually have numerous people, especially you know my age and younger, who are like we don't want to work at remote only companies because that's a huge component of your like social environment and setting. If you're just graduating school, do you really want to go back to your parents' house and work from nine to five on Zoom all day and then not have you know friends, that you meet at the office and stuff like that. So I think the it's funny how quickly things change, because everybody's like oh, remote work is you know the future, and everybody's never going to go back to the office. And now, you know, even employees are saying you know, we want to return to the office.

Speaker 2: 27:19

Yeah, no, well one, I would say. If you're just starting your career, I think remote work is a terrible career decision and I think the reason why is that you need to be in the office, you need to be next to other people and learning your craft, you know, and the only way you're going to get that true mentorship and personal development is by being close to people, right, and just seeing, like, what's working, what's not. So, like we actually don't really hire a lot of young people because of that reason, it's just really hard to develop talent remotely, right, you know, and there's certain roles you can do it, but like a lot, I'm just so. I'm talking more in generalities here. So I definitely agree with that.

Speaker 2: 28:00

I also think that, you know, one of the challenges that we found is like is when so much of communication is non-verbal, right, it's like people sensing things. It's people like going on a walk with somebody and just like the way they walk, you can sense like, oh, they're going through something in their life, there's some underlying issue, and when you're always on a zoom call, like, you don't get that same level of communication, understanding with a person, and then you also don't get what I would consider, like you know, there's these things where you, like, you think like, hey, we have to have a meeting to talk about X, right. And then there's things like hey, over water cooler. Hey, there's something on the back of my mind that's kind of been gnawing at me, right, and no one sets up the meetings for those things on the back of their mind, but oftentimes those are the most important things to talk through, you know, and so you know, I've kind of like you know, the only reason, the reason we want remote first, is because we didn't have any money, right.

Speaker 2: 28:54

Like we were like bootstrapping this software company and we were in LA and people were super expensive in LA and we're just like we can't afford this, right, we just we didn't have that optionality. So that's why we started it and I think the reason we keep it is like we still get a lot of great talent and there's a lot of great people all around the world. You know, mainly we focus in North America because, like, once you start going international, it's just really hard to bring people in. But we have to be more thoughtful about getting these people into the room, at least at enough of a cadence where they can build out those connections, they can talk through those items that are in the back of their minds. You know.

Speaker 1: 29:30

Yeah, how are you thinking about international expansion? Because you have some team members in the UK now.

Speaker 2: 29:35

Right, yeah, totally yeah. So I think we're being very deliberate about it. So you know, at first we were like when we were going remote, we're like, oh, we're just going to hire people everywhere. And like I think, you know, when we were like 20 people, we had people in like 13 countries and it just like spiraled. It started to spiral out of control. We're like, okay, we got to stop. This. Like this is like going to be a logistical nightmare.

Speaker 2: 30:01

You know, and we and the time we were inspired by GitLab and Woo, who are both like really or automatic, was the parent company of Woo, who are like the big first remote companies in software. But you know, now I think we're being like very deliberate where we go and we try to get that density. So like we're focusing a lot on the UK. So we have a team of like five people there in London. You know we're not trying to hire people all around randomly, you know, because you want to have at least, if we can't have a whole company meet up, at least that group of people can meet up in person.

Speaker 1: 30:43

And are you thinking about as most of ReCharge's business still in North America now? Are there specific, you know regions that you've identified as potentially high growth for you? Yeah, I mean, I think we know like I'm sorry I was going to say I know Claydio like has opened up. You know Latin America, you know team they have like an APAC team. They're becoming like boots on the ground in more and more international areas. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 31:13

I mean, you know, I think we mirror a lot of like. You know, let's say, like Shopify represents a big part of the DTC wave, is like, if you look at their business, what 85% of it is North America, 10% of it is Europe and the rest is everywhere else. You know, maybe it's a little bit off from there, but like that's the general ballpark, right? And I think that's kind of like what you know, what we're saying as well, right? You know, I think a lot of these other countries have different modalities for buying, right? So if you go to like China or India or places in Asia, like a lot of it is like WeChat or marketplaces. It's not as much like DTC. You know individual merchants selling to the consumer via their own controlled channels. So, you know, I think right now for us it's mainly North America and Europe is the main focus, got it Okay.

Speaker 1: 32:11

Yeah, I think the cultural differences as well as the differences in shopping. You see, all the time when certain things get hyped in the US, like live shopping, which is huge in China and has started and stopped here, you know, numerous times over the last couple of years, and we just, I mean I would never shop that way. I don't really know anybody else who would shop that way. I don't, I'm just going to go, but that's like an example I look at where you know what works there is not going to work here and vice versa.

Speaker 2: 32:44

Well, that's the thing too. It's also really hard like to build and sell a product for a culture you're not part of right. You know you fundamentally don't get it right. And I think you know if you look at a lot of software companies in the US like they have not done, you know you always look at their like revenue it's like 80% is North America because they they get, they fundamentally get the culture, they get how to build a great product or great experience. They monetize it. It's just really hard else wise, you know.

Speaker 1: 33:15

Yeah. So switching over to you know more of the behind the scenes, I guess, of what goes into building a business. It's like the what is the most. I don't know what the right way to phrase this would be Like what was the scariest or most like gut wrenching moment of your entrepreneurial journey where you were just like holy shit, like I'm fucked, like this is not going to be good.

Speaker 2: 33:49

Well, yeah, so there was this period where, like I had this like startup, that kind of like petered out and I looked around and I was like, hey, you know, what am I good at, skill wise, and what I'm not good at? And I found my co-founder, mike Flynn, and he's really good at like I'm always good at like taking things from like zero to 80. And he's good at taking from 80 to 100. I just like, intellectually, get bored and he's just like one of those guys that could knock through a problem and just not leave his room for weeks right On one.

Speaker 2: 34:21

And I, yeah, but we kind of like we balance each other out, we push each other in different ways. And so it was very clear to me like, hey, this is the guy that I need to build a company with and like this, whatever we do, will be successful because we have the right ingredients. And in that process we were like, okay, you know, we basically were both running out of savings and he was like living in his apartment and he was realizing like he only had like a couple months left of savings and he was going to have to move him back with his parents and he was basically like, hey, you know, once I do that, I'm just going to give up. I'm going to get a job. You know, and it was like I was like fuck man, I really don't want a job. I don't think I'm a good employee, so I really don't want to go.

Speaker 2: 35:06

So we got to make this entrepreneurship thing work and literally like every day when I go to his apartment to work he would pack more things. So like more items at his apartment get packed because he's getting ready to give up. And I could tell when we had like a good week is when less things were packed. But we had a bad week, more things got more packed. And that was the most stressful point of my life because it was like is this entrepreneurship thing going to work or not? And it was like we had to figure out how to start paying for Mike's rent and then my rent at the same time. So we both didn't need to get jobs and at that point you get real bare bones like what you care about, what you're willing to do to make money. So that was the most stressful.

Speaker 1: 35:49

It was like the existential moment you really went for it. That's great.

Speaker 2: 35:56

I mean, yeah, it was like I was trying to convince Mike to become an Uber driver to like prolong the. So he did have to move into his parents and he's like dude, if I become an Uber driver, I've just given up. I might as well be an employee no offense to Uber drivers, but just like that was where Mike's point was. Mike's cutoff point was I was willing to be an Uber driver to make money.

Speaker 1: 36:17

Everybody's got their cutoff point. How did you meet him? How did you get introduced to him? Because picking a co-founder is like getting married, and if you pick the wrong one, it's not going to be a great time. So and you obviously have had a lot of longevity I think recharge is what you technically officially started in 2014. So you're almost coming up on 10 years.

Speaker 2: 36:42

Yeah, totally. So it totally is a relationship, you know, and so I think it's one of those things. I think it's one of the triggers things for entrepreneurs, because most entrepreneurs need someone else to balance them out. We're not the finished product and there's very few examples of the types of people who are like they were the person who created the company alone. Usually those people are just unbalanced and it doesn't work out.

Speaker 2: 37:07

And so I had had a couple of different entrepreneurs, co-founders before different endeavors, and so I kind of got a sense of like, hey, what was the type of person I needed, you know? And so, like I started doing this thing where I would do barbecues all the time, like I really involved in the LA tech scene and I do barbecues and invite different people over to like hang out Like they were in the tech scene, and it was almost like dating, but they didn't know they were dating me, you know, for me to see, like, would they be a person that I would want to start a company with? And so I, you know, basically found other entrepreneurial mindset, mind to people, and I spent time to build relationships with lots of people to understand who would be the right person I really want to work with. Right, because I, because companies are long right, like companies take, you know, five, 10, 20 years to fruition, right, so you really are marrying somebody.

Speaker 2: 37:58

I see more companies fail because of the found co-founders of issues than other reasons. Right, that's always the top reasons why companies don't work out. So my mindset was like how do I like get to know lots of people that could become that co-founder and build a relationship over time? So then, when I am ready, I have that person to work with.

Speaker 1: 38:17

And how do you delegate responsibility, Like did it evolve over time or did you know? You know pretty specifically, he's going to do this and I'm going to do that.

Speaker 2: 38:27

I think it's like any relationship, it ebbs and flows like who owns what and who does what right Based on the needs of the company. But you know, I think always, like I was more of the product go to market mindset, he was more of the engineering mindset, like I could code and I was involved in the coding in the early days a lot. But you know, he truly enjoyed the craft of coding, like being an engineer, and I, like, I appreciate it. I just don't have the right temperaments. So I think that was always like where the delineation was. And then I think his our roles changed based on the needs of the company. You know, and I think because we had a flexible relationship where we could deal with conflict and we can deal with adversity, we learned to like change how we work together and we changed our roles in the company as we grew.

Speaker 1: 39:20

And are you looking at you know you mentioned 510, 20 years are you looking at recharge as a 20 year company, a 30 year company, like? What's your, your pie in the sky long term vision for and, yes, I love my buzzword. So pie in the sky, what's your? What's your long term vision for for where this is going?

Speaker 2: 39:38

Yeah, totally Well. I mean, I think right now our goal is to be the key platform for subscription first companies. We want to give those companies the insights into their customers and we want to give them basically the automations around retaining, growing and acquiring customers, right, so that's like where our focus is as a product and a company. I think you know how long that journey is. I don't know. I always feel weird with that question, brandon, because it's like I feel like I go back to like my 18 year old self in high school, like what do you want to be when you grow up? You know?

Speaker 1: 40:12

what did you, what did you want to be when you were 18?

Speaker 2: 40:15

I have no clue what I said I don't think I knew. You know, like I thought I wanted to be an artist and then I wanted to be an architect and I wanted to be, you know, economists. Economists lasted for like a fucking month. I just got stuck and then I wanted to get into business. You know that was the path. But you know, I think for me is like, you know, we're 450 people growing fast.

Speaker 2: 40:39

I think there's a lot of interesting things happening in commerce right now. I think commerce is getting reinvented in a lot of ways based on the new world we're in. And you know, I'm just excited to build in that and build a great company, and you know. And then where that goes, I don't know. You know that's always, that's been my thought from day one is just like, how do you build great things, how do you build with people that you enjoy working with? And then you know, because no one can really look beyond, you know, one, three years out, you know, especially in the world, that's changing this quickly, right? Like you even said yourself, like with the Gen Z errors, like you can't think about 15 year old, 15 year tracks of like age groups, now you gotta think about five, right. So it's just like everything's moving so much faster and getting compressed so much more that you have to like your window almost shrinks a little bit because the world is just changing too quickly.

Speaker 1: 41:29

Yeah, I mean, listen, I can see 20 years into the future. So I said unique Gen Z quality of mine. Totally. You mentioned your, so you're excited about, you know, commerce getting reinvented. What are some of the things that you are excited about that is on your radar?

Speaker 2: 41:46

Yeah, I mean, I think one we had, like it was interesting to see commerce before COVID and after COVID. You know, during COVID and after COVID is like I think we had a lot of bad practices that came out, a lot of companies that just didn't make money right. They didn't focus on how to build a great product, how to sell the customer, have a great unit economics. You know, there was a lot of noise in the space and I started to see like everything's adjusting, where people are like, hey, how do I just build a great company, right, that sells a product that customers love, right? And so I'm excited that that noise is leaving the system and people are just focusing on that.

Speaker 2: 42:23

I think that there has been so much change from, you know, with the iOS updates, to advertising, you know, top of funnel to saturation of attention in some ways, to merchants having to go multi-channel now they have to go retail, amazon and Nd to C that really the way that you succeed is changing.

Speaker 2: 42:48

And what are those playbooks are still being determined now, and so my belief system is that the merchants that get born in this new period are actually going to be bigger than the merchants of the previous period because they're going to have better economics. It's going to be harder, which means there's going to be more of a moat, and so the ones that do figure out are going to hit that scale of high levels, and we're seeing this ourselves. There's merchants doing hundreds of millions of dollars in GMV that are profitable, they're making good money and growing at good clips, and they've never raised money, and I think those are going to be more the aspirational than like hey, how do I raise $100 million, $200 million, to juice a company that maybe shouldn't have that kind of capital put into it?

Speaker 1: 43:32

Yeah, there's no reason there needs to be 7,000 coffee brands. There's no reason there needs to be. There's a lot of saturation in some of these.

Speaker 2: 43:43

Yeah, totally, and it got so cookie cutter. We would see it. We would see someone who's like a market leader that would use recharge. We would then see, like, once they kind of show them the path, they would get like 20 or 30 copycats, right. They would all do the same tech stack, the same advertising strategy, the same like looking field of the website, like everything was the same, right, and they just like kind of like sucked the oxygen out of the room, right when it was, just like it was so cookie cutter that no one made money out of it in the process, right.

Speaker 2: 44:15

And I think that's bleeding away, because to be that market leader, you actually have to work out a different way than you historically did. Historically, you just needed to be really good at acquisition of the customers on Facebook and have a good, a decent product. Now it's so much more right, so much more sophisticated, and so that's when I think the motes have gone up of like how hard it is to scale and be successful as a DC company. But if you do hit that, then you can be. Then you have way higher upside because you don't have 20 copycats that just do exactly the same thing as you.

Speaker 1: 44:47

Yeah, so much more attention and detail has to go into the customer experience now, especially after that first order, than than ever before, and I think that's all, oh yeah, totally Like.

Speaker 2: 44:57

You know, it's like who can have the highest lifetime value, right? Like, if you can figure out how to make the most amount of money per customer in your category, then you can outcompete everyone on the acquisition side, and those are the ones that are killing it right now.

Speaker 1: 45:12

Yeah Well, I'm never starting a brand because it sounds like an absolute nightmare, but for those that do, I wish them the best and sounds like it's a good time if they're willing to really roll up their sleeves and dig into the nitty gritty and they're they're willing to do the work and they can post an ad for a job, like like that guy that you mentioned.

Speaker 2: 45:33

Yeah right. Well, brandon, it's all a schlep. I'm just, I'm just gonna let you know Like I mean like you know, it's so funny.

Speaker 2: 45:40

It's like we had our, like our annual conference, like a couple of months ago and, like I always judge, think about how many people come up to me and say they don't want my job. Like I literally have people on the cover like, wow, you have a really hard job. I really would not want to do it and I think that's just the key with entrepreneurship it's just really fucking hard and you have to really want to do what you're doing. Otherwise, it's like there's easier ways to make money and easier ways to have a better quality of life, you know.

Speaker 1: 46:09

Yeah, but I love being busy. So I feel like I would be losing my mind if I wasn't trying to do four different companies all at the same time.

Speaker 2: 46:18

So maybe one day we'll get you to start a brand. Then, you know, maybe let's change, you know.

Speaker 1: 46:24

Yeah, we'll see. Well, if I ever find something, I will I'll obviously be selling the subscriptions on Recharge.

Speaker 1: 46:30

So that can be my product plug there. I do want to start another podcast, though, about and I want to call it like the dark side of entrepreneurship, where we bring on I think it would be especially good to bring on people who have had exits, because they'll probably be more comfortable talking about the shit shows that went on in their businesses before that exit and like just really get into the some of the horrifying stuff that can happen behind the scenes where, like, you get that phone call and you're just like oh my God, I can't believe that you know this lawsuit is about to happen, or you know we did this for this client. Like I remember we had a team member who was supposed to be this like rock star, you know email SMS person that was going to take over our department, and they didn't check the mobile version of the claveo email. They only changed the desktop version and they had cloned a campaign from like two weeks ago. So they send out this email and the desktop is correct with the you know whatever the black writer promotion, and then the mobile one was some email from from two weeks before that.

Speaker 1: 47:30

And this is when we were like hyper growing and I was trying to delegate and I was like I thought I was going to throw up. There's just nothing that I could say to the client. I'm just like I don't, like I'm sorry we're just going to move on here, but stuff like that. That's what I want to.

Speaker 2: 47:45

I want to. I would love to listen to that podcast and when recharge does a good one day, I'd love to join and tell you, probably like some of the things that are like horrifying my process, so I could not say publicly.

Speaker 1: 47:57

Well, we will. We will definitely make that happen. So thank you so much for for coming on Before we hop off. For everybody that's listening, can you just let them know where they can find? You know, re, you were recharged on online.

Speaker 2: 48:10

Yeah, so it's recharge paymentscom. Also. Always feel free to follow me or hit me up on LinkedIn If you're a current recharge customer. I always love to talk to customers, so feel free to just shoot me a message. Love to jump on a call. Just learn more about what you're going through, how we can help you. And yeah, that's it.

Speaker 1: 48:32

Awesome. Well, thank you again for joining us. For everybody listening, as always, this is Brandon and Moroso. You can find me at Brandon and Morosocom and electricmarketingcom and we will see you next time.