Challenges and Myths of E-commerce with Ben Sharf - 91

In this episode of the D2Z Podcast, Brandon Amoroso, engages in a compelling discussion about the world of e-commerce with Ben Sharf, the founder of Platter, a Shopify theme and app bundle. Delve into the world of e-commerce optimization from a Gen Z perspective as they discuss the challenges of app overload, consolidation, and enhancing the customer shopping experience. Discover how Platter simplifies e-commerce functionality, saving money, and boosting conversion rates.

Ben Sharf shares his journey, from his college hockey days to his involvement with an early-stage COVID testing startup, and later, his experiences at Gopuff, which provided him with valuable insights into the Shopify ecosystem. The episode dives deep into several crucial e-commerce topics, including the overwhelming issue of app overload and the pressing need for consolidation within the industry.

The conversation highlights the significance of optimizing the customer shopping experience and the role Platter plays in streamlining e-commerce functionality to enhance conversion rates and save money. Furthermore, the episode underscores the value of productized delivery and explores the scalability of Platter's solutions, making it an informative and engaging discussion for anyone interested in e-commerce.

Throughout the episode, Brandon and Ben also touch on the concept of "bad revenue" and how Platter leverages client requests for research and development. They provide insights into the delicate balance between customer demand and a brand's vision for product development. Additionally, the episode delves into the potential pitfalls of making last-minute changes before critical shopping seasons like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, offering valuable lessons for businesses.

The discussion wraps up by examining the pros and cons of headless websites in e-commerce, shedding light on when and how brands should consider adopting this approach. Overall, this episode of the D2Z Podcast offers an in-depth exploration of the e-commerce landscape, providing valuable takeaways for entrepreneurs and businesses looking to navigate the complex world of online retail.

Don't miss this enlightening conversation for e-commerce enthusiasts seeking to navigate the complexities of the industry. 

Timestamps:

🌟 Ben Sharf's background and journey to founding Platter (00:00:00)

🔥 Challenges of app overload on client websites (00:02:54)

💡 Debunking the myth of expensive and time-consuming storefronts (00:05:16)

🌐 Market trends towards app consolidation and simplification (00:08:56)

🤔 Handling pushback from new clients (00:09:52)

📊 Variations in brands' pain points and opinions (00:10:14)

🚀 Upcoming self-serve option for the Platter app (00:18:50)

💼 Scaling the team and building processes (00:19:11)

🔄 The process of scaling and team building (00:19:35)

🤝 Balancing white-glove service with scalability (00:19:11)

🛠️ Leveraging client requests for R&D and product improvement (00:20:37)

💡 Discussing the challenges of product development and client requests (00:21:45)

🗣️ The importance of listening to customer feedback in product development (00:22:15)

💻 Pros and cons of headless websites in ecommerce (00:23:21)

🔄 The value of incremental improvements in storefronts (00:24:04)

🌐 The role of high traffic and high volume in considering headless websites (00:24:39)

🧩 The complexity and challenges of managing a headless store (00:25:26)

🤯 The drawbacks of managing large teams and meetings (00:26:37)

🤔 The misconceptions and complexities of headless websites (00:31:54)

🌐 Get in touch with Ben (00:40:10)

Ben Sharf

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, the 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, oletric. Today I'm talking with Ben Sharf, who's the founder of Platter, which is a theme and app bundle for Shopify brands used to build high converting websites that drive profit. Thanks for coming on the show.

Speaker 2: 0:38

Ben. Thanks for having me, Brandon.

Speaker 1: 0:40

So, before we dive into all the new e-commerce things we want to cover today, can you give everybody just a quick background on yourself and how you ended up being the founder of Platter?

Speaker 2: 0:52

Yeah, definitely. So a quick backstory on myself I played Division 1 hockey in college, ultimately decided that I didn't want to pursue professional hockey, was planning to take a corporate job, which then I gave up 12 hours before my first day, ended up joining an early stage COVID testing startup that scaled to 50 million in revenue in five months, where I met one of my two co-founders of Platter. And then, before starting Platter, I spent a year at Gopuff building out a business unit that essentially unlocked instant delivery for DTC websites, which is where I got my start in the Shopify ecosystem, and from talking to brands over the course of that year, I realized there were a lot of things wrong with how brands are managing their storefronts today, which ultimately gave me the idea for what is now known to be Platter.

Speaker 1: 1:42

Awesome, and for everybody that's listening who isn't familiar with what Platter is, can you give just a quick sort of TLDR on Platter?

Speaker 2: 1:51

Yeah, platter is a theme and app bundle. Effectively, what we've done is we've natively built a lot of the most popular app functionality around marketing and conversion into one theme and one app. The thesis of the business is that a lot of apps in the ecosystem are features, not products, and so brand owners get stuck paying for too many apps, dealing with too many support teams and having a slower website experience because of a bloated tech stack. And so by natively building a lot of that functionality into one solution, we're able to consolidate your tech to solve those issues and then layer in best practices around increasing AOV and conversion from a CRO perspective so we can quantify making money and saving you money at the same time.

Speaker 1: 2:34

Yeah, the sort of app overload is a real thing when it comes to a lot of our clients' websites. They'll have 70, 80 apps in some cases and it slows down the site. It's expensive. Most of them aren't being leveraged in the way that they should be being used, If they're being used at all. It's sort of a blessing and a curse the Shopify ecosystem and how easy it is to download functionality onto the website via some sort of plugin.

Speaker 2: 3:04

Yeah, I think there's a couple pieces to unpack in regards to the apps. I think the first one is. One of the other things we noticed when talking to a lot of brands before we went really deep into building Platter was that there's a huge drop-off in terms of utility on a lot of these apps after accomplishing the core functionality. What I mean by that is, let's say, you're using an app to accomplish upsells in your cart and then a certain app then tries to sell you that they use AI to service the best product and so they increase the price. From the merchant's perspective, they really just wanted to ensure that the core functionality was being accomplished, and so they can't necessarily justify paying that incremental cost. If you take that concept and extrapolate that across 50 to 60 different apps, you end up stuck with a ton of apps where you're only using a very small percentage of the functionality offered within those applications, which is why we felt there was an opportunity to consolidate a lot of that functionality into one solution.

Speaker 1: 4:09

As it relates to the fact that you're entering into this ecosystem that is accustomed to dealing with all these different plugins and apps, how has it been like your sales process or your messaging to customers, Because there's not really anything at least that I'm familiar with that is like your solution In a lot of cases. Let's say you're looking for a quiz builder for Shopify. There's like 15 of those and I feel like this is easier for customers to attach to that. How have you gone about sort of architecting the messaging and what's it been like selling into these brands who are yet to dealing with this?

Speaker 2: 4:53

Education has been a huge focus of ours within our business. I always joke that a couple of years down the line. If Platter was successful, it's because we debunk this myth that building a high converting storefront is super expensive and takes a really long time. I think there's nuances around that statement, but there's a lot of brands that overspend and take longer than they need to. As you become larger and you get into brands that are doing high eight figures, of course there's going to be a lot of bespoke customizations that are required, but for brands out of the gate, there's ways that you should be able to have storefronts that are still high converting that don't take a long time. The way that we're solving that for brands is by giving them an out of the box solution that has a lot of functionality built into it to try to minimize the amount of customizations. They need to get to a point of a store where they can go live with it or reduce the number of applications that they need to put on top of the base store that they've built.

Speaker 2: 5:52

In terms of the education, it's really getting brand operators or owners to look in words in terms of how are you managing your store today? Are you using a ton of apps? Are you using an agency? If you are using an agency, what are they actually doing for you? What is the base infrastructure of your storefront? Are there ways to improve it, et cetera? Because I think what we've come to learn is that there's a time and place for brands to use agencies. There's a time and place for brands to use a ton of third-party apps. There's a time and place to use a healthy mix of the two. What we realize is a lot of brands are doing the wrong thing for what suits their brand, which is where we come into play.

Speaker 1: 6:36

That makes a lot of sense, and I think the timing is right for the market as well, too. Based off of all the consolidation that I've been seeing with apps in general and brands trying to simplify things, Are you able to aggregate it all across however many store fronts you're not powering? You know things that work very well from a conversion rate standpoint versus those that don't, and then you can share those learnings across all the clients.

Speaker 2: 7:05

Yeah, so we're in the process now of actually building out an analytics dashboard to have direct attribution on a feature to feature basis. But I can tell you just broadly speaking, we've come to be able to understand what high level best practices or functionality tend to work just across store fronts. I would say that there is some nuance and variability depending on the price point of your products and the skew count of your catalog, because what we would see and or recommend for a brand that sells like a $3,000 necklace with five skews is going to be very different than a supplements business where their AOV is $60 and they have 1,000 skews. But we definitely see certain functionalities or best practices that we look for when we look at any site off rip, because there's just obvious things that brands aren't doing where they're leaving dollars on the table. I think the first one and the most obvious one is brands that use a page load instead of a cart draw for their checkout experience. We know it to be true that by adding clicks into your conversion funnel is going to result in a decrease in conversion, so to the effect that I've seen brands still forcing the consumer to go through a page load in order to get or in order to allow a customer to check out, is something that still blows my mind. That's like an obvious one where I don't think it matters what your price point is, your catalog sizes, to be able to do it, to utilize a cart draw. So that's one.

Speaker 2: 8:33

I think another one that's more high level, but understanding what kind of social proof brands are putting on product pages.

Speaker 2: 8:39

We always say that social, proven validation is a very good way to get a customer to go forward to buy something.

Speaker 2: 8:44

If they have to leave the product page to go find information that they weren't able to find there whether it's reviews or testimonials or proof of people using the product or FAQs being answered they're less likely to come back to the product page to buy. And then I think the third thing is just understanding information hierarchy and how you're actually guiding customers through a shopping experience. So, for example, we always recommend to our brands to use a mega menu where you can display creative whether that be specific skews or collections or promotions that you want customers to visit. We realize we've learned that customers are lazy. They want to see imagery, they want you to hold their hand through the shopping experience. So if you're making it really hard for someone to find what they want, odds are they're probably not going to end up buying it when you look at the numbers at scale. So to the extent that you can make the shopping experience easier by adding a lot of these incremental improvements, you'll see large impacts in the long run.

Speaker 1: 9:41

Are you when you're onboarding a net new client. Is there any pushback towards some of those things?

Speaker 2: 9:52

Or no. I would say we have brands that come to us with different pain points. Number one, I would say number two brands have different level of opinion, I would say based on their own knowledge base and also based on what it is that they're looking for. We have, oftentimes we have the brand that will come to us that says, hey, I'm doing X amount of revenue. I've kind of hit my ceiling in terms of my own knowledge. I'm looking for incremental ways to improve my AOV and my conversion.

Speaker 2: 10:21

We would like to lead on you as thought leaders to help tell us what we should be doing and how we should be doing. Or I have a brand that comes to us that's maybe larger, that says, hey, I need these three features. It's very hard for us to implement those today on our storefront for X, y and Z reasons. Oftentimes you'll have a brand that has a legacy code base that's just added to over the course of multiple years and then they're kind of stuck when trying to add new things. So they want to get to a clean infrastructure but have a very clear understanding of what it is that they want on their store and we can just provide them a path to getting there for faster getting there faster and cheaper.

Speaker 1: 11:00

I think the time, the value for you guys, is significantly quicker than trying to cobble together all the various solutions.

Speaker 1: 11:08

And that doesn't even get into the fact that each of those solutions has their own pricing model and there's 100% overlap too when it comes to maybe you have three apps taking a percentage of that sale because they all touched it in some way on the buyer journey. It's like the tech stack I think we are using in early 2022 for a Shopify plus store probably around $5,000,000 a month at a minimum, I would say. Once you start to add in all the pieces and the way that they price to, it can get very cost-rehibitive. And the other thing that is frustrating as an agency is not being able to do best practices with all of your clients because they're boxed out of it because of some sort of paywall or they don't have the budget to be able to onboard certain tools or solutions. It's always been a challenge for us and it's one of the reasons that we shy away from certain apps too, like if they don't allow us to be able to leverage it the same way across all of our clients.

Speaker 2: 12:15

Yeah, I think there's a couple things you said that I want to highlight.

Speaker 2: 12:19

The first one is the time to value piece. I think there's two components to that for us. The first one is the time to value and then the second one is the ability to try to get an alternative storefront at parity with what we can offer you relative to the price we can provide it at, because brands are able to benefit from the economies of scale of all the functionality we've been building over the last couple years. So we can deliver you a storefront very quickly with our productized delivery. But if you tried to leave to go build the same exact store we can provide you from the ground up. It's going to cost you way more money to do so, because we've been building functionality for two years. But anecdotally, around the time to value, we actually had a brand go live a few weeks ago that went from signature to live in 16 days and that included entirely new wireframes of the entire store plus all the functionality integrated in QA before being deployed, which was probably a new record for us relative to the complexity of the storefront.

Speaker 1: 13:21

Yeah, that's insane. I don't think we've done anything in 16 days when it comes to like net, new website builds.

Speaker 2: 13:29

I think part of that, though, is two components to how we're.

Speaker 2: 13:34

Different, maybe, from certain agencies.

Speaker 2: 13:38

We won't engage with a client who isn't on our product, so I know there's some agencies who will offer ad hoc work for a client who has a storefront, and you have to go in and understand how the store is built and how you can maneuver within it to be able to add incremental functionality. We only work with brands who move to our storefront, at least for our product, at least for the theme product. We can talk about the app product, which is being released, actually, this month as a self-serve, which is separate, but in terms of the theme product, we only will touch brands on our theme. And the second piece of that, too, is that we've really tried to focus on building a productized delivery over the last two years of building this, and what I mean by that is we have a full design system that works one to one with our theme products, with a lot of the best practices integrated into it directly, and so we're able to build new wireframes that take into account your requirements and then deliver those into a storefront very quickly.

Speaker 1: 14:41

Yeah, the productization side of things is something that I feel like no agency has really done. I mean, you might have like some base templates. I've heard of a few agencies creating Shopify themes, but not. I mean, how would you classify Platter? Because it's a theme, yes, but it's kind of like a traditional SaaS as well.

Speaker 2: 15:11

It's a hybrid model.

Speaker 2: 15:13

The way that I would describe it is a hybrid.

Speaker 2: 15:16

So have you ever used like a pilot or a rippling, where it's like they hold your hand for the first 30 or 60 days, kind of take you through this checklist of requirements and then send you on your way?

Speaker 2: 15:25

I would say that, like the theme product is a productized delivery which has an agency component right, because there's services associated with it. But the app product that we have is traditional software and a lot of the functionality on a go forward basis will be. So it's kind of a healthy mix of the two, where you're paying an implementation fee the way you would to an agency to get up and running, but what we're doing is actually implementing the software product that we built. Because there are software companies out there where, like you can't, they don't have like a self serve option, which is how we are with our theme product, because we've realized that there's just a lot of complexities with it that if you offer it self serve in the current stage, just based on the amount of documentation and tutorials that we have, you end up opening yourself up to a whole series of new issues that we aren't properly staffed to deal with that scale right now.

Speaker 1: 16:19

How has that process been? Like you know, pulling back a little bit from the actual details of your product offering on the business growth side of things and being this is your first startup, right or no?

Speaker 2: 16:32

I would say it's my first real startup. I think most entrepreneurs have I shouldn't say all but a lot. Have, you know, tinkered around with 20 different ideas before they actually found one that had legs, yeah, that's fair.

Speaker 1: 16:47

That's fair. Well, let's just call it the first time startup. Then, as you've been growing rather quickly, what's it been like, scaling out the team, building out your processes? I'm sure you've had to encounter some issues where you could grow more, more brands, but maybe you're not able to onboard them, as you mentioned, in a way that you know was scalable or sustainable. So what has that process been like for you?

Speaker 2: 17:14

I always say that when your team size doubles, it usually like breaks the internal operations and you have to like reinvent how you're doing things as the team grows. One of the biggest learnings we had during the process of scaling was understanding that bad revenue is really a thing. I think in the early days of startups for any startup you're always a yes man where you just want to sign any customer you have because you know that your product is half baked and you want revenue and you want to grow. And we've definitely were guilty of that in the early days where it's like, hey, we have a couple brands that are willing to use this and pay us, but we know internally we're still working through the inner workings of how does this actually work. You know we're talking a couple years ago at this point, but I would say the learnings from that now is just being really intentional.

Speaker 2: 18:03

Number one, unlike what's good revenue versus what's bad revenue, and then also just understanding and tracking utilization to recognize, like, how fast can we grow? I would say we've gotten to a place now where we have a process both internally and externally to be able to like hire as we grow, where we're not really limited from a scaling perspective at this point time. But the nice part as well, as I alluded to earlier, is that our app product is going to be available as a fully self-serve, hopefully in the next couple of weeks, so we'll be able to let that kind of scale infinitely in terms of not having to tie, like a math equation, to number of employees to service a certain number of storefronts. But in terms of like the theme product, we've gotten it to a place now where the unit economics are fantastic, where you really you need to hire like every couple hundred clients like a new pod, I guess would be the best way to describe it which is like very profitable for us in terms of how we've set up the economics of the product.

Speaker 1: 19:11

Yeah, I mean that's critical to be able to, because you have, like some white glove components to the product, which I think is also what would makes it unique, but not being too white glove, where you're essentially just like an agency, where you're restricted by people, versus being able to actually scale with the software and technical capabilities that you've built out.

Speaker 2: 19:35

Exactly so. We have like different ways that we've engaged with clients post handoff Right. Oftentimes it's just the occasional support ticket that comes in. Some of them will buy like a couple hours a month of ad hoc work if they want like bespoke customizations, and we've had brands that come to us and asked to be put on retainer. That put us on retainer, which we've done with a couple of brands. But we are very cognizant of the fact that, like when it comes to engineering specifically, there's a number. There's only a certain number hours in the day and a certain number of hours that can be allocated. So you trust your technical project managers, who are assigning tasks and tracking hours, to be able to let you know hey, we have 300 hours of work this month and our engineering team only has 290 hours of available time. We're not going to be able to fulfill this, which is how you are able to track or have the foresight to know when the team needs to scale.

Speaker 1: 20:37

Yeah, we're going through that sort of process or, I guess, dilemma, if you want to call it that, with scaless right now, where we have custom ad hoc requests coming in from a third party who is willing to pay for it, and pay for it in a way that it is profitable for us. But like does that? We only have so many developers, we only have so many resources. Is that the best use case of their time, given all the other requirements and all the other things that we want to block and tackle?

Speaker 2: 21:11

Yeah, I think for us, the only the one value point I will say in that regard is because we're building a product the services part of the business, as we describe it, is R and D work that we actually get paid to do so. Like if a brand wants a certain feature, there's scenarios where we can actually build that feature for that brand and then roll the core tenants of that feature into the core product, which is interesting because it also allows us to just say super close to our customers as we continue to build out, like the future product roadmap.

Speaker 1: 21:45

So you're basically getting your product development to sort of written off by clients who are willing to pay for it, and then you can roll it into the full product that everybody else gets as well.

Speaker 2: 21:57

Yeah, people always ask, oh, like, how do you determine what's being built next on your product? And I was like, well, which feature has been the loudest request from a percentage of customers? That's the thing we're building next. My technical co-founder is great at that where I always say there's a difference between knowledge and belief of like thinking you know it, like thinking you know what to build, versus knowing you know what to build. The product has taken different shapes and sizes because we just listened to our customers.

Speaker 1: 22:26

I guess. How do you balance that though? Because I've heard from a few technical founders or founders of apps rather not everybody is technical, but they have to balance customer demand and customer requests versus where they see the product and vision heading, for example, in subscription programs. There was a bunch of hoopla around the ability to gift an upcoming order to somebody else, and I want to say maybe Ski Elanche with it, or somebody not recharge, like two years ago or a year and a half ago, and we heard that all the time, like you know, as a reason or just one example of why a brand should think about my reading from recharge or think about going with one of those other third party apps for subscriptions versus recharge. Recharge ultimately ended up building it, but now today, like in any of those platforms, less than 1% of customers use it.

Speaker 1: 23:33

If you step back and actually think about it for yourself as a customer, why the hell would I want to gift an upcoming order of, I don't know? Let's just say Oli Pop, like maybe I have my monthly soda coming in. Why am I going to just gift that to a friend? I would just skip the order and have it come at the next month If I wanted to do a gift for somebody, I would go and place like a gift order for them. So that's an example of where they listen to the market, even though they were hesitant and resistant towards it, but because of the sales cycle and just all of the noise they had to build it. But that's one use case, or one example, I guess, where the brand's requesting something ultimately weren't right in their hypothesis of whether or not it would be leveraged or not.

Speaker 2: 24:21

I think it's two fold. It's a really good point that you bring up I think one side of it is tracking quantity. So it's one thing if one brand is like, hey, I really want this feature, and it's another thing if it's like 25% of your customers are all asking for the same thing or asking like, when is this coming where? It's like you got to listen to what's in front of you.

Speaker 2: 24:42

I think the second piece to it, too, is we have an understanding of where we would like the product to go. So when you think about certain features that come down the pipe, whether it's through customer requests or from our own roadmap, you want. There's a it's a little bit art, a little bit science of understanding. If we go a little bit off the path because we have a couple customers asking for this one feature, how does that affect us today and how does that affect us down the road? And so I think there does just become a little bit of qualitative decision making that needs to be had.

Speaker 2: 25:15

With that being said, the other caveat that I'll layer in is I think the size of your business has a material impact on how you're able to prioritize customer requests versus not right. So a company in the early stages, where you only have a couple customers, versus a company that's called series B or later when you're getting customer requests. It's a whole different decision making process to know like what to build next, because there's a lot different downstream effects of veering off your roadmap or building a feature when it's for 10, 20, 30 customers versus, you know, 1000 or 2000 customers right.

Speaker 1: 25:51

Yeah, that's a fair point as well. I can't even imagine managing some of the scale that's. A few of these Shopify apps have gotten to where your teams are hundreds of, in some cases, thousands of people. You know there's a lot of power with that, but it also feels like there's definitely a lot of say inefficiencies that can come up.

Speaker 2: 26:15

I think I think a lot of early founder, like new founders or inexperienced founders, for whatever reason, there's glorification around raising as much money as you can and like building as big of a team as you can, because I think I don't know I think there's like this power struggle, association with like I manage a lot of people, I've raised a lot of money, and I think those are two misconceptions when building a business. Right, there's businesses where you need to raise a lot of money based on whatever problem you're trying to solve or you don't have another option. But I can tell you someone who's raised substantially less than some other players in our space. I think there's actually something valuable about that, where you learn to solve problems by doing things other than just throwing money at them. And then, in terms of scaling out a team, people don't understand that the larger your team gets, the more people headaches that you have to deal with. And with every incremental hire to your team, most of the time it just slows you down from trying to make changes.

Speaker 2: 27:13

Like I remember when I was at Gopal, before I left to build my own company, I would have meetings about meetings and in my mind I'm like all right, that's, that's it. Like I want to go build my own thing where it's just move fast, chip things, break things, no red tape, not like. Why are we having a discussion to analyze what we just talked about on that call? This is the most inefficient thing ever, and I think it was Google or someone released like a plugin where you could associate like an hourly rate with every person on your team and then you can look at the calendar invite and see like how much money went out the window by doing like this internal meeting and it like made people realize how much money was being wasted just like talking about things. So yeah, to your point around inefficiencies. That is so true.

Speaker 1: 27:59

That's insane.

Speaker 1: 28:01

Like I can understand why you wanted to leave for starters, and then I think that's part of the issue with remote work too is remote work lends itself to more meetings.

Speaker 1: 28:14

I remember being in office we didn't really have as many formal meetings because we're just like they're right next to each other, so things that come up, you know, might take two minutes versus, oh, we need to block, you know, a 15 minute call or whatever. And I just remember things better too when I'm in person versus when I'm doing, you know, nine hours straight of zoom calls one day by 6pm, 7pm, whatever it is, I don't care at all. Whatever my 10am call was about, and, like you know, the last thing I'm thinking about at that time then is, oh, let me make sure that I, you know, get all those follow ups and whatnot, and I'm the founder, so I can only imagine how little the employees give a shit about, you know, the call that they did at 10am versus, you know, just being able to finally get off the damn computer and interact and socialize with people. So are you guys fully remote or do you like hybrid and off-sites and stuff like that?

Speaker 2: 29:08

We are fully remote. My head of growth is in New York, which is where I'm based, and we work very closely together, so we'll meet in person periodically. But I would say that one thing we've preached since day one with our team is the ability to work asynchronously. Our team does very well with using Asana, and you know, writing out tasks and messages and minimizing the number of meetings and that you need to have. And every couple of months I go through the calendar and just like strip back every recurring meeting and then like build it back up again, because you realize what we're nice to have versus need to have, and it's something that I'm hyper cognizant of, knowing.

Speaker 2: 29:48

You know what you just talked about where it's like you get this fatigue from so many meetings that effectiveness goes out the window. But we are fully remote. We are on multiple time zones, but we try to at least make sure that certain teams are on the same time zones to work effectively together. Right Like I, it's not as crucial that my sales and marketing team are working at the same exact hours as like our product and engineering team, because they're not overlapping that much day to day, and if there is time where it needs to happen. You know we probably have a meeting on the calendar that accommodates everyone's schedule. But look, the other interesting piece is that I've actually never spent a day in my life at a business with a five day in office mandate, because I graduated during a global pandemic. So I actually don't really have something to compare our output and productivity to, because I don't have the other side of the coin of being in office with my full team every day.

Speaker 1: 30:49

Right, when did you graduate?

Speaker 2: 30:51

I graduated in 2020. I played hockey in college, so people who understand how the whole hockey thing works will be able to empathize those who don't just think that I'm like slow. But I did five years of high school and then a gap year where I lived in Western Canada.

Speaker 1: 31:08

I always like with my hockey friends, depending on when they graduated, like they could be I don't know like 22, or they could be like 30, depending on what they did with the various, like different paths that you can go on. I feel like, of all the sports, that one's the most convoluted in terms of how you could potentially get to like the NHL, whereas it is, and the other issue, too, is the fact that they built this process to be the way that it is.

Speaker 2: 31:34

It's very hard to unwind at this point in time, so it kind of just lives on the way it is.

Speaker 1: 31:39

Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, like for football, you just play at your school and then you go to college and then you go to the NFL or you don't. With hockey, I mean, I feel like some people don't go to college. There's like 87 different leagues that I know of. It's just all over the place, it's true. It's overwhelming. Well, you navigated that successfully to this point, so entrepreneurship will be easy for you.

Speaker 2: 32:04

I appreciate that.

Speaker 1: 32:06

Well, I guess you know you're in a lot of storefronts. What's one thing that you saw work really well for Black Friday, cyber Monday, and what's one thing that you maybe it didn't perform the way that you thought it was going to and you're thinking about that going into this coming season.

Speaker 2: 32:26

So I'm going to give you a crazy answer for what did perform well, and that is brands who didn't think or decide to try and reinvent the wheel right before a holiday and, like, recognize that you have months in advance to plan for these things. Like, don't try and fix something at the 11th hour all because it's the holiday, because then you just expose yourself to issues that you don't want to have. So I would say, broadly speaking, that is probably the biggest thing to call out. But if we're getting more tactical, I would say that something we saw that worked very well, broadly speaking, was just the mechanism of gamification. So we've built gamification into a lot of different aspects of our product. We have a mix and match bundle builder where you can set incentive thresholds based on adding more products to the bundle. We have progress bars and the card experience. You have banners that you can put on the home page that can persist across pages around what type of behavior to enact in order to release certain unlocks. That's something that we saw a lot of success with, I would say, in terms of like negative impact.

Speaker 2: 33:45

It kind of goes back to what I just said was like it was the brands who were coming at the 11th hour were like oh, it's the holiday, I want to try this and I want to change this. And not only are you stressing yourself out, you're then trying to stress out whoever's going to help you implement these things, and then you're going to want to hold someone else responsible if you didn't get like proper QA and implementation of all these new ideas you had at the 11th hour. So I think the learning there for brands is like use the time leading up to the holiday to like figure out what works and what doesn't and have a clear plan once you get there. So it's like you're not changing anything day to day in your process. It's just like another, it's another week. I understand the stakes are higher because there's you know, there's more traffic for certain brands in those days and you see the rest of the year, but, fundamentally speaking, like you got to approach it like any other day in terms of managing a store.

Speaker 1: 34:37

Yeah, no, that's fair. I don't think making changes the day before, by Friday, saturday, monday, is the best, the best idea ever.

Speaker 2: 34:45

You'd be shocked how many brands like week before even are saying hey, we want to add this functionality and it's like something that takes days to implement. It's like well, maybe if you mentioned that a month ago we could have explored the idea. But we're going to do your favor and just suggest you don't do that today.

Speaker 1: 35:05

Some of the brands that we work with have, like, code freezes. But you know, when you have the code freeze, you actually have to abide by the code freeze, which doesn't happen a lot. And then you know there is some gray area too, Like if it's very easy, and you know, like, you know why didn't we already have this to begin with? Then go ahead and implement it, you know, even if it's a week or two weeks before, even though you have a code freeze.

Speaker 2: 35:28

But I think you bring up.

Speaker 2: 35:29

Another point to what you just said is, oftentimes brands will actually start to look deeper into their storefront right before holidays, around things like why didn't we have this feature to begin with?

Speaker 2: 35:40

And I don't think enough brands make a point to do these tear downs of their own storefronts on a recurring cadence to continue to make incremental improvements.

Speaker 2: 35:48

So one of the things that we always say about our value proposition for our brands is, instead of getting to like a certain incentive or a certain revenue threshold and then waking up one day and deciding, if there's, you know, strip everything down and start over, because the storefront that you had to support a $5 million store doesn't support the $20 million store, we always say you should be making incremental improvements all the time and constantly looking at ways to get better. So it's an ongoing, ever evolving process, instead of like the stressful biannual meeting where you're like, why isn't this happening? Let's just like reinvent the wheel. So if you're doing those incremental improvements, like I said, you shouldn't get into these situations where you're in a gray area of like this is an easy fix, we have a week to do it. Is it worth it? Is it not? Because that thing, hypothetically should have come up if you were analyzing your store multiple times before that day.

Speaker 1: 36:38

What do you? One last question I have for you is on headless websites. What do you think of headless websites?

Speaker 2: 36:45

Yeah, I would say that our business model is kind of built around being anti headless. Our first product we actually started with before we went to market, broadly speaking, was a headless product, and the first 30 brands we spoke to were like what's headless? So the first thing I realized is that I think it's a couple years away from being mainstream. I think the second thing I realized is there's a misconception around if and when you should be using headless as a brand, right, like to me. Again, this is just one perspective. Headless solutions are there for brands that are doing very high volume and have very high traffic, like the Nikes of the world, and even then, not necessarily is headless the right answer for you.

Speaker 2: 37:27

I think one of the issues we see is that a lot of brands are looking to headless as a solution way too early on in their own evolution as a business, and I've yet to see brands in that middle part of their journey where the value outweighs the challenges in terms of going headless, because there's a whole nother set of complexities that comes with building a headless store that you don't have with the alternatives, but oftentimes you went to headless to get rid of a different set of challenges. So I think there's just like a really long list of pros and cons that you need to understand as a brand before making that decision. One thing I can tell you off you know, off rip. I know there's solutions out there that are trying to make headless easier to manage, but fundamentally it's just a more challenging thing to manage. It requires a lot more expertise to make small changes, so in a lot of ways it prevents you from iterating quickly as a brand as you scale.

Speaker 1: 38:23

Yeah, I've seen brands think that that's going to be the, you know the thing that saves their conversion rate or, you know, magically makes dramatic impacts to their, to their business, and it isn't. And then it ends up adding on like 10x the cost and stress and you know just general pain in the ass that making changes to a headless website entails.

Speaker 2: 38:44

And then you know they ultimately come back from a headless website to go on like a Shopify 2.0 theme with PTSD, and so then they try to get a new store for less dollars because they overspend, with the expectation of trying to maintain parity, which opens up a whole other slew of issues. But the last thing I'll say is when brands think headless is solution for their challenges, again I think you need to look inward at the fundamentals, like do you have a quality product? Do you have repeat purchases, which means people do like it and there's data to protect that? And then are you like incorporating fundamental CRO practices that are less nuanced than, like, going to headless, before thinking about that being the thing you need to fix your your problems?

Speaker 1: 39:33

Yeah, I feel like a lot of brands go to this optimization phase before they look at the actual, you know, core of the business and the products. Like you know, including a bunch of AOV like boosting tactics on site is only great if you know people actually like your product and are coming back and purchasing it, and if that's not a occurring, then you need to be focusing on other things than making tweaks and trying to pull additional revenue out that way 100%.

Speaker 1: 40:01

Well, thank you so much for coming on. This is super fun, but before we hop off, can you let everybody who's listening know where they can find you online or getting in contact with you?

Speaker 2: 40:10

Yeah, you can find me on all socials, at Ben Sharf, b E N S, h A R F. And then my email is Ben at platterco, p L A T T E R dot co. You can feel free to drop me a line via email on Twitter, or you can visit our website at platterco to check more. Check out for more information.

Speaker 1: 40:32

Awesome. Well, thanks again for coming on for everybody listening. As always, this is Brandon Amoroso. You can find me at Brandon Amoroso dot com or electric marketing dot com, and I'll see you next time.