Media Measurement and E-commerce Optimization with Mike True of Prescient A.I. - 99

In this episode of the D2Z Podcast, Brandon Amoroso sits down with Michael True, the co-founder and CEO of Prescient A.I., for a great discussion on the evolution of media measurement and optimization in the digital age. Mike shares his journey from the realm of big tech giants like Oracle and IBM to the founding of Prescient A.I., offering invaluable insights into the platform's transformative trajectory. From predicting profitable tours for midsize record labels to its current focus on media analytics for the music industry and e-commerce, the conversation delves deep into the challenges and innovations driving ROI in today's digital landscape.

Explore the nuances of advertising measurement across various platforms, from the complexities of attributing sales in the music industry to navigating the post-pandemic e-commerce terrain. Brandon and Michael dissect the differences between selling on Amazon versus Shopify, unraveling the intricacies of customer acquisition strategies and brand margins in an ever-evolving market. With candid reflections on agency growth and product development amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Brandon shares his journey from freelancing at USC to spearheading a tech startup, while Mike True offers invaluable insights into aligning teams and gathering user feedback to sculpt product features.

From roadmap visibility to the importance of strategic conversations in shaping product direction, this episode offers a holistic exploration of media analytics, e-commerce dynamics, and entrepreneurial wisdom. Join Brandon and Michael as they navigate the digital landscape, offering profound insights into adapting to change, driving innovation, and staying ahead in today's competitive market.

Timestamps

• 🎙️ Introduction and background of Mike True and Prescient A.I. (00:00:00)
• 🎵 Transition from music industry focus to e-commerce (00:06:55)
• 📈 Challenges and opportunities in measuring advertising impact across channels (00:13:22)
• 💼 Ideal size of merchants for using Prescient A.I.'s solution (00:17:35)
• 🛒 Challenges of customer acquisition and brand margins (00:18:58)
• 👥 Prioritization for CEOs and team building (00:22:14)
• 💰 Unexpected challenges in startup fundraising (00:24:17)
• 📢 Acquisition of early adopter customers and roadshows (00:26:12)
• 🤝 Importance of relationships in the e-commerce community (00:27:23)
• 🔮 Exciting prospects for the future and research-driven approach (00:29:07)
• 🎓 Brandon's beginnings freelancing for small businesses during college at USC. (00:31:50)
• 💼 Reflections on the differences between agency revenue models and tech product development. (00:36:00)
• 🤝 Importance of aligning people with the vision and gathering user feedback for product development. (00:39:18)
• 💡Plans for the future, including investing in ventures and helping entrepreneurs. (00:42:21)

Maichael True

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

Prescient AI - https://www.prescient-ai.io/

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 into 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 as well as HR platform, scaless, and today I'm talking with Mike True, who's the co-founder and CEO of Prescient AI, which is a leading platform in media measuring and optimization for e-com brands. Thanks for coming on the show.

Speaker 2: 0:39

Thanks for having me, brandon, good to see you.

Speaker 1: 0:42

So, before we jump into all the various things that we want to cover today, can you give everybody just a quick background on yourself and Prescient yeah?

Speaker 2: 0:50

of course, background of myself. I started my career. I've always been in big tech, started my career at Oracle working on their Exadata platform.

Speaker 2: 0:58

So large volumes of data across the public and private sector, specifically in healthcare. I went over to IBM from there and that's where I started to get my feet wet in artificial intelligence on their Watson team, working predominantly within the healthcare sector. I was out in San Francisco. I was flying all around. I took like 134 flights in that last year. All my friends were having fun at startups and so I joined this really cool company called App Annie which was doing actually they just got acquired last week by Sensor Tower but we were doing essentially analytics across the app stores and they wanted to. They just signed some deals with like Google and Uber and Nike, mcdonald's and said we want to go do some larger scale contracts. And that was my job was to work with these new clients and expand those relationships and it's a fun time Really got my experience within the startup world and then from there I had the itch to go start something, and so that's where I started what was called Vibin, which is now called Prescient AI.

Speaker 1: 2:09

What was the Vibin to Prescient AI sort of trajectory and story there?

Speaker 2: 2:15

Yeah, I wanted to go work for a record label but I wanted to sell a technology to them and so we built a model that was going to predict the most profitable tours for midsize record labels, Tell them which city to go to, which venue to open up at local artists that they should have perform that has strong affinity with their fan base. And we're going to try to turn it into kind of a commerce platform for artists to manage relationships with their fans while touring. And then COVID hit and touring went away, so it was back to the drawing board. But it was a blessing in disguise, because the next phase of Vibin turned into what Prescient does today with media measurement optimization specifically for the music industry. On Spotify streams, Apple streams. How do you measure the impact of what is actually driving the performance of those streams when Google analytics does not exist in music? So there's no last click. It was an inherently challenging problem.

Speaker 1: 3:19

Yeah, how did you end up making the transition from music and record labels into e-commerce?

Speaker 2: 3:28

I'm sure this will resonate with a lot of people here, but April 26th of 2021, apple announced this thing called iOS 14.5. And we made the bet. So my co-founder, cody, and myself made the bet that the world not just e-comm, but was going to move back towards these probabilistic models right, Because the data privacy was only going to continue to enhance. And so we talked to a variety of industries and it was COVID and e-commerce was absolutely exploding. And so we said let's build a platform we can allow brands um brands to onboard all of their Shopify data, ga, all of their ad platforms, and just a couple of clicks and um, there was really no additional. The model is significantly more sophisticated now, but that the inputs and the outputs um inputs are a little bit different, but the outputs and the optimization models are made the same.

Speaker 1: 4:28

How long did you spend building before you actually launched with that first beta customer?

Speaker 2: 4:38

In music or in D2C D2C yeah, we started researching the model. I got to give a shout out to my co-founder, cody. He was by far the best research scientist that I've ever come across. We're in all of Grubhub's research, science and ML, where they would actually use marketing spend to predict orders by zip code in New York City to properly staff their drivers. So the food didn't show up cold. But shout out to Cody, he's a great co-founder and just a brilliant human being. He has researched and built this model since August of 2020, and we released it to the market in February of last year, and so there's been a lot of collaboration from you know, the team grew support, grew on the engineering side, product side and, yeah, I mean just a lot of time and reiterations of the math until we felt really good about getting into the marketplace moment where you realize that this was actually something that had product market fit, that was going to be a business that you could grow and scale and raise money against.

Speaker 2: 5:53

September 29th, I would say the aha moment was on our seed round, where we're pre-revenue, pre-product launch, but we're able to raise $ and a half million dollars based off of large due diligence. On the math. That was the aha moment of like all right, we have some outside expertise that have ripped this apart and said this is some of the most sophisticated math we've seen for reliable media measurement and optimization forecasting modules. But the oh shit moment of which led up to our latest seats series a, was september 29th. It's a very specific date.

Speaker 2: 6:29

When we launched we launched this optimization model. Um, I had done a road show for like 30 days, you know, kind of letting people know what was coming and um, when we, when we demoed it on september 29th, I was working with one of the biggest brands showing it to one of the biggest brands in e-commerce and three hours later we had an order form signed and the business just absolutely exploded. We did close to a million in net new ARR in 53 days with some of the biggest brands across e-commerce and it was just like a surreal feeling after putting so much time and love into this with the whole organization.

Speaker 1: 7:11

For those that are listening, just sort of in layman's terms, what exactly does Prescient AI do? Like? If you're a Shopify brand and you're listening to this, what would it look like for them to actually leverage and, like, use your solution?

Speaker 2: 7:25

Yeah, the onboarding takes about 15 minutes, and so you get an invite and you have to think of it as like an app store, a marketplace of Shopify, even for the Salesforce commerce cloud folks up there, if there are any. You plug in Shopify, your Amazon seller central, your Amazon ads, ga and then all of your different ad platforms, ranging from everything from, obviously, meta and Google to Grin to Mountain and everything in between, and essentially, we take all of your historical data and we see if we can predict your past using your spend to your revenue. Right, so it's not like traditionally, like you'd see, with a pixel trying to track clicks. This is what we call media mix model, right, it's a statistical model, right, that is trying to understand the relationship in between your spend across each campaign. And then how does that spend impact your revenue on Shopify and Amazon, what we call the halo effect? Right, that's our first model, and so when you look inside of your platform, you'll look at a retargeting campaign on Facebook and you'll see, all right, well, it generated $200,000 on a Shopify store.

Speaker 2: 8:29

But the halo effect, right, people know that there's that relationship between your spend and people going to Amazon. Right, you see a prime deal and you're going to go take that and you'll also see the quantification of the impact of that campaign on Amazon as well. And then we just released that second model, on September 29th, where essentially you can go in, select a variety of campaigns and we're going to try to find points of diminishing returns, right, and if you're overspending or underspending, what is that sweet spot? And it'll recalibrate all of your spend and recommend how much you should spend by day based off of a confidence score right, being like, hey, we're 71% confident that this media mix is going to forecast or generate your ROAS or your revenue by this much over the next 7, 14, 20 days.

Speaker 1: 9:21

Yeah, that is incredibly valuable. Yeah, that is incredibly valuable. I mean, I know one was working more closely with the agency and its clients. Everybody would say, oh yeah, you know, Facebook spend is going to sort of lift all channels was, and whether or not there really was this much cannibalization of one channel from another. And one thing that's completely a black box, at least to me at this point, is retail sales as well, Because we work with a lot of brands where they'll be in Whole Foods or they'll be in Costco or Target or whatever it may be, and when you know when they do these launches, usually they're in specific regional areas and you need to have as much sell through as possible so that you then get taken, you know, to other areas or even nationwide, and you know we'd be running campaigns on Facebook, whatever it may be. And who really knew whether or not that was actually being impactful or not? So are you able to help on the retail side of things as well?

Speaker 2: 10:27

This is a core focus of ours. It's expanding across not only retail but different marketplaces as well. Right? Because if you think about it, if you have some sort of awareness event, exposure event, whether that starts in retail and then it goes to D2C, whether it starts in D2C or it goes to retail, whether that's paid or it's some sort of virality moment, this is where these halo effects were built for is looking at all of this exposure and then looking at the sales by each channel and trying to get as statistically confident as you can, but what is actually driving the relationship between those channels right To your advertising channels, to your revenue channels, and so this is what we're going to be focusing on throughout this year and into 2025. And with Shopify POS, if there's any Shopify POS folks out there, do give us a shout as we look to some design partners here over the course of the year.

Speaker 1: 11:21

Yeah, they're really pushing heavily on the POS course of the year. Yeah, they're really pushing heavily on the POS. Me personally, like as a consumer, I think that integrated experience is so much better than some of the brands that I've shot from, where they've got a completely separate POS from the actual online storefront and there's no integration. And even the simplest thing, like you know, being able to do in-store returns or having you know the loyalty program go across both programs, is not, you know, out of the box or simple in any way whatsoever.

Speaker 2: 11:52

A hundred percent and like, think about, like, how do you get a retail impression? I know there's some folks out there that are. I'm very curious to see how this plays out. But, like, having a retail impression how that is defined will be an immensely valuable data point to have into these sort of models, and so we're keeping a close eye on some of those vendors out there looking to do that as well.

Speaker 1: 12:13

I figure that a solution like this can also even help when it comes to things like inventory where you should be staging the product If you have multiple warehouses across the US, how you should be staging the product. If you have, like, multiple warehouses across the U? S, you know how you should be buying and thinking about sourcing and things like that, as you're able to sort of plug in inputs and see, you know, hypothetically, this is what sales should look like if we do this for our media mix.

Speaker 2: 12:36

Yeah, I mean there's a my co-founder said this for two, three years. He's like it's kind of like marketing to marketing based demand forecasting. Kind of like marketing-based demand forecasting, right, like your marketing should be able to. If you understand how your marketing is going to perform in the future with a certain level of confidence, based off of individual SKUs or even the categories, right, that should be able to help with that inventory planning for sure.

Speaker 1: 12:59

Yeah, that was a nightmare during COVID, with the massive over-ordering, then under-ordering, and I I feel like this year is maybe the first true baseline year since COVID where you can actually maybe start to think about doing like year over year comparisons, versus literally just living at the seat of your pants every week, you know, trying to figure out what the hell is going on. It's it is so true.

Speaker 2: 13:24

With our models. When we started thinking about building the model, seasonality obviously became a huge component of that. But COVID was a long season in the landscape of e-commerce brands, so having the ability to model out what was lifelike for a brand and their data and right and their operational just decision-making was largely tied to you know exactly what you just said like what was life before COVID, during COVID and then when can you start to normalize out that data after COVID, for which life is hopefully going to be like moving forward?

Speaker 1: 14:00

We'll see.

Speaker 1: 14:01

I feel like, you know, the brands that have been most successful over the last two to three years are those that are able to very quickly pivot and also just sort of throw away the whole playbook on what had been working for them up until that point and not get stuck in their ways.

Speaker 1: 14:20

Correct, pretty much there's been a gamut of things that have had impacts over the last three years and if you are still doing what you were doing even three months prior to that, you're going to be left behind. But with all this change, there's also a lot of opportunity for the brands that are willing to put themselves out there. Dive into things like TikTok, for example. Tiktok shop has been crushing it over the past year, but I still know brands who won't even touch it. So that just goes to show you know there's those that want to be leaders and you know try and have. I forget what the term is, but you know there's like a period of time before everybody starts doing it where you can really just sort of arbitrage that opportunity, and we've been seeing that on our end with things like TikTok shop.

Speaker 2: 15:02

Yeah, I mean, fortune favors the bold, and what we've seen is, as brands start to grow, right, you're looking and saying, well, we're getting sort of tapped out on. You know the meta audience here. Where can we go to find new audiences? You know they have lower CPMs. But it creates a more inherent challenge of you. Know how do you measure CTV with a pixel, right? And so, as you start to advance and your business starts to grow, what we've seen be effective is really this method of triangulation, right.

Speaker 2: 15:32

So I'm a firm believer that our platform is not the source of truth. An MTA isn't the source of truth. An incrementality test is probably the closest thing you're going to get, alongside some post-purchase survey stuff. You have your platform reported, but the source of truth is the marketer, right. But as your business grows and you go into new channels right, you're going to have different methods of measurement that are going to provide a more clear picture of that Right TV and podcast. That's where a model like ours really shines. But we see a ton of our clients that are using our source of measurement alongside or taking that triangulation method, and so I would encourage brands, as they start to scale, to think about leveraging new forms of measurement alongside their historical ones where they're just using, really predominantly just on Meta and Google, using um, really predominantly just on meta and Google.

Speaker 1: 16:25

What's a typical like tech stack look like for a brand that you're working with? If they're using Prezient like, are they using any other sort of attribution tools?

Speaker 2: 16:33

Oh, a ton of them, man. I mean we sit alongside. You know some, some, some uh measurement tools that I'm not coming from the space of admired coming in there. You know you have the. On the MTA side, you have the. You know the rocker boxes, the North beams, the triple whales of the world. On the incrementality side, you know you have the measuredcoms. And then, most recently, an emerging player in this space that I'm particularly excited about is a is a incrementality solution called House H-A-U-S. I had the chance to meet their CEO at Shop Talk. I had a really good conversation with him just around this notion of triangulation. But I think it really depends. I wouldn't rush into go using a variety of measurement tools Like if you're on just Meta and Google. An MTA is going to do a really good job of giving you the insights as you need, but as you start to scale out to new channels, and the business grows, it's helpful to start looking at or evaluating more of the probabilistic MMM models.

Speaker 1: 17:36

Is there like an ideal sort of size of merchant that makes sense for using a solution like yours?

Speaker 2: 17:42

Yeah, that's funny, man. Some of our earliest clients are sub 5 million that are still using the tool. Today it was, but I think we just got so integrated into their workflows. With them. We're predominantly seeing brands above $10 million that are, you know, going across Facebook or meta Google and one or two other channels we're starting to see we just released the Amazon model last week and the reception has been incredible. And so for brands that are on Shopify and Amazon that are trying to answer that question of, well, what is the impact of my non-Amazon ads on my Amazon store alongside my Shopify, this is where, particularly our model is, I think, going to create a lot of value across the ecosystem.

Speaker 1: 18:29

Yeah, the thing that we've seen on the Amazon front, as the COVID tailwinds have died down a bit, is that there's certain product categories that just don't really make sense for having a Shopify storefront. That just don't really make sense for having a Shopify storefront. You know, maybe it's a heavy item that's a low cost per unit or it requires some sort of, you know, refrigerated cold chain or you know there's like a host of reasons. Specifically, I think of, like kombucha. You know there was a lot of money that was being spent on direct customer acquisition on Meta for the Shopify storefront, but in reality, you know you're better off just buying that through Amazon, adding it to like your subscribe and save box, or just going to the store.

Speaker 1: 19:14

Um, you know, the value prop for a customer and also the margins just don't really make sense for the brand. And you know that's something that I've seen over the past year from brands like a poppy, for example, where you know you can't even buy directly from them. You just go to the Amazon storefront. But I still purchase from them all the time. And you know how did they attribute Facebook activity to what I'm purchasing on Amazon, something that I've always thought about?

Speaker 2: 19:43

Yeah, Vita Coke is a great example of that where, like, I'll subscribe to subscribe to save them on Amazon, but, like you know, after a wedding and I stopped by a seven 11, like that's the first thing I'm grabbing the next morning is, you know, going into, you know, whatever convenience store is going to have that you know coconut water? Um, you're exactly right there. There are, uh, definitely categories that are more conducive to, you know, Amazon versus just a traditional Shopify store.

Speaker 1: 20:11

So you you mentioned shop talk and you've been on a little bit of a conference roadshow yourself over the past two months. Yeah, I guess what was like your, what was your favorite one? And then second question would be out of all those conferences, are there any sort of trends or insights or things that you're seeing for the rest of this year that you're excited about?

Speaker 2: 20:32

Yeah, we, we threw Nick Shackelford and I hosted a golf tournament down in Scottsdale. It was about 16 of us and it was just a really great curated group of people that you know are still today staying in touch on group chats, and so that was just a remarkable experience. I just got back this morning from a shout out to Barr from no Commerce. He hosted a great event in Aspen called Dita Ski and, again, just some wonderful people there. They had sessions going on, uh, in the mornings. We're talking about media measurement, optimization or attribution, if you should say, um, and then some more creative strategies, uh, shop talk.

Speaker 2: 21:14

Uh is our second one. I'm a big fan. It's just it's very overwhelming, and we, we had dinner out there. So I mean you, you, you, you got the experience as well. It's like you do the speed datings it's one-on-one, it's 15 minutes and you're just running around from place to place like crazy and in all places of Vegas, um, but I would say some of the more curated experiences where people were just really digging in and talking about their businesses and their strategies, I think there was a lot of knowledge sharing between everybody. That was impactful.

Speaker 1: 21:43

When it comes to being able to sort of balance your time as the CEO. There's obviously like an endless amount of things that you could be focusing on or an endless amount of shows that you could be going to. What are some of the things that you do to help with prioritization as you continue to build out not only the team but also your product offering and start to scale?

Speaker 2: 22:10

Yeah, you're so right, it can be overwhelming at times and I know you get your hands in multiple pots and so you get it right. Since we've raised the Series A, we've continued to hire some great people, right, and so making sure you have the right team that understands the vision in which you want to go, build right and then just getting operational processes around towards, you know, client feedback. I mean it all ties down to, you know, getting new customers, retaining those customers, collecting information and innovating on top of the product, and so we spend a lot of time thinking about how can we improve that framework.

Speaker 2: 22:44

Me specifically, I'm a firm believer that there's going to be a consolidation of tech for any e-commerce. There's an exorbitant amount of tools, right that, some are more pinpoint solutions. I sometimes feel bad for the brands man because there's just a lot of tech vendors in the space, which is a good thing, right, it fuels innovation, but I think it's also going to fuel a consolidation and a lot of partnerships, and so I've been really focusing my time on meeting with different tech vendors, and even some that are within the measurement space as well, and so it's just important that everybody tying it back to your question it's really important that everybody understands what their role and responsibility is in a collective way to drive towards that larger mission, and me helping out where I can.

Speaker 1: 23:35

What's one thing, because this is your first foray into having your own startup right.

Speaker 2: 23:43

Yeah, it was kind of two. It was like the music thing was vibing and that worked out really well. We ended up predicting Cardi B's number one billboard, that up song, based off of our recommended media mix at 96.3% accurate, and that was. We ended up doing a kind of a transaction for that technology and then transitioned into prescient, a new framework, a new industry, but largely, yeah, this has been my first run in the startup space the startup space.

Speaker 2: 24:28

What's one thing that you did not expect at all and you're just and not in a good way either? Wow, that's a good question. I've got a laundry list of them. I'm trying to pick the right one.

Speaker 1: 24:36

You can even do top three. I mean, I've got a laundry list on my end here. Um, you can even do top three.

Speaker 2: 24:40

I mean I've got a laundry list, uh, on my end here. Yeah, I didn't realize, like what went into fundraising. It was a lot right and going through that process and your pre-seed is different than your seed and your seed is different than your series a, and so, um, and series B will be different than your series a, and so I wish I had that experience, because I spent a lot of conversations time just doing a lot of things that you could be more efficient doing on the fundraising process.

Speaker 1: 25:10

Yeah, are you of the mindset that you're always fundraising, or do you have you know, now that you've raised a Series A, you're deep in other things and then you'll circle back on it when the time comes? Or are you sort of in that always on mode?

Speaker 2: 25:25

There's always the notion of I'm a believer of not spending a ton of time still talking to VCs, but I think it's important to understand potential VCs for later stage rounds and so at least kicking off some of those dialogues. But you know, we have a wonderful board and welcome to Taylor Brandt from Headline for joining but you're in constant communication with the board and so there is this notion of it can turn into always fundraising. Our round was preempted last December when we weren't even planning to raise and that was just through communicating with our investors on updating them how the state of the business was. So, indirectly, you are always fundraised, always fundraising.

Speaker 1: 26:08

I feel like that's a good position to be in, though Preempted fundraising versus, you know, the other way around.

Speaker 2: 26:13

I mean it was shout out to some all of our clients and you know the Hexcloud Good American Cozy Earth Nude to some all of our clients. And, um, you know the hex cloud, good american cozy earth. Um, nude.

Speaker 1: 26:22

Everybody across the board who joined on in q4 and helped us get to the point we're at now how did you get those first early adopter uh customers when you didn't have any sort of proof points yet and you were new to the market? Um, what did that look like?

Speaker 2: 26:37

a road roadshow. Man Reaching out saying going to some of the. I went to Jimmy from SendLines Conference out in San Diego and scheduled a bunch of meetings throughout that time. But yeah, I, just I flew around man, reached out to the execs and said I'd love to introduce myself and let them know what we're doing. And so we were kind of timing that with the launch of this optimization model we're doing. And so we were kind of timing that with the launch of this optimization model and when the model was ready they were all really excited to take a look because it was kind of first of its kind to be able to do what we're doing that quickly with that level of granularity.

Speaker 1: 27:13

But yeah, it's a roadshow, lots of roadshows. It's a roadshow, lots of roadshows.

Speaker 2: 27:24

I feel like in this space it's a very relationship space. I've had such a wonderful time joining the e-commerce community over the last year. People just building and innovating amazing brands that just never think of building and scaling the heck out of them. It's been really cool to meet a ton of people and everybody's been incredibly welcoming to meet a ton of people and everybody's been incredibly welcoming to myself and the press in general.

Speaker 1: 27:46

Yeah, I feel like more so than than some other industries. It's very yeah.

Speaker 2: 27:52

Yeah, or so. I'm like a big healthcare provider, like a big financial institution. It's yeah, it's, it's fun.

Speaker 1: 28:01

So what are you most excited about for for this year?

Speaker 2: 28:06

We have some again tying it back to Cody and the team he's building out. We're a research first organization. We always will be an R and D first research organization and I'm excited to take the feedback that we've gotten from our clients and then apply some of the research that we're doing and seeing what sort of value we can create across the ecosystem.

Speaker 1: 28:29

It feels like there's endless opportunity for you guys, so I'm excited to get to watch it.

Speaker 2: 28:33

I'm excited to be connected with you, man. I've enjoyed getting to know you. It's been fun, especially because we're both in Miami.

Speaker 1: 28:41

I've been connected with you, man. I've enjoyed getting to know you. It's been fun, especially because we're both in Miami. Yes, there's a fair amount of Miami founders in the e-com space. Oh, yeah, for sure. Shopify Plus agencies there's at least four down here and some apps as well. Some recently exited founders as well from apps or agencies. Miami's putting itself on the map, man. Some recently exited founders as well from apps or uh, or agencies.

Speaker 2: 29:03

Mine was putting it in. My first buddy down here was John snow from the snow agency and he really he's the a big, actually a big uh, tik TOK shop proponent. Um and uh, but yeah, that's the. The ecosystem down here is great and for anybody here in Miami or any golfers, we're throwing our next pressing AI commerce cup. Uh, down here in Miami. Any golfers? We're throwing our next Pressing AI Commerce Cup down here in Miami. We're targeting for the week of May 3rd, which is also F1. So, you know, please reach out if you're interested in playing. It's going to be a good time.

Speaker 1: 29:33

That's a crazy weekend. I don't know if you were here for any of the last Miami F1 weekends, but it's one of those where, just like Miami music week, just like our Basil having been here now for almost three years, I think next year I'm going to leave for all of them. Come back after they're done.

Speaker 2: 29:55

I was gone during my music week and I'm like this is such a I'll take all the flights from going to these different places. It was such a blessing. In disguise, it was a madhouse year, and then Miami Tech Week is kicking off over the next two weeks as well, and so I just feel like the Q1 and Q2 in Miami are just constant. Something is going on, yeah.

Speaker 1: 30:22

I think the summer period well, yeah, it's hot, you know, whatever, I don't really think it's actually that hot, but everybody leaves and I think that's almost the best time to be here. You can go anywhere and not have to wait, you know, 45 minutes to sit at the beach, or, you know, get a reservation at a restaurant not 30 days in advance, and there's not all the traffic and and the craziness going on.

Speaker 2: 30:49

The bridge from Brickell to downtown is just absolute mayhem. But no, I agree, I agree.

Speaker 1: 30:58

It's. It's taken me two years to be able to mayhem. But no, I agree, I agree it's. It's taken me two years to be able to basically curate my days around, not having to take that bridge at any sort of time where it might be up or busy. Because what a what a way to like ruin your day if you end up trapped in one of those, like you know, downtown to brickle bridge scenarios and you just sit there, you just like completely shit out of luck and it's just a horror I'll leave 20 minutes early in the bridge.

Speaker 2: 31:22

You have no problem with the bridge and like you show up early and then it's like all right, well, I'll leave on time and you're 20 minutes late for the meeting. Um, I forgot where you said where did you, where did you move from?

Speaker 1: 31:32

San Diego. No, that's right Before that I was in LA, and then it was horrific traffic.

Speaker 2: 31:38

Yeah, and is that when you started the agency when you were out west?

Speaker 1: 31:42

Yeah, uh, at school, at USC, um, my second year there, I just started like freelancing for a bunch of really small mom and pop shops in the LA area, like maybe one or two person uh, shopify storefronts doing anywhere from you know a hundred grand to like a million max. Uh, they all, they hundred grand to like a million max. They all. They all exhibited at these shows called Renegade Craft Fair, like makers and artisans. They'd have like air plants, you know t-shirts, a bunch of other like cool little gadget and widget shit, and so I'd go, I'd like go to those events and basically offer my services for free or dirt cheap. And that's how I got my feet wet and actually learned and uncovered what I wanted to and how I wanted to shape the agency, because to start, we did everything, but that obviously wasn't scalable or sustainable, and so we ended up weaving our way into that customer experience and retention marketing bucket. And yeah, I primarily grew the agency though down in San Diego because I moved there like literally a month or two after COVID hit.

Speaker 2: 32:54

Okay, that's cool man. And what are you most excited about this year?

Speaker 1: 33:00

That's cool, man. And what are you most excited about this year? Really not so much. You know, specifically around e-comm though you know the product that I've been building with myaviyo, attentive Rebuy, recharge these partners of ours from the agency front over the last three years on the tech side, who have grown and scaled very successful businesses. I was on the other end of that as an agency partner of theirs, but now it's sort of my turn to try, uh, you know, and be in their shoes with growing and uh, building scaleless. And so, you know, there's a lot that I got to experience and a lot of insight that I get to tap into, but at the end of the day now I have to, you know, go out and build uh, the same sort of structures and um of structures and processes that they put in place as they grew and scale their tech companies. So I'm excited for that and also just being able to get back into something really deeply.

Speaker 1: 34:12

It was like the most exciting time at Electric was when we grew from, you know, those 12 people to 45 and whatever. It was like the 12 months. And so it's not like when I started the it was a little bit of a shit show. But it's not like when I started the agency. I had some undying love for like marketing or Shopify. It was more so I want to start a business, I don't want to go get a real job. So, like, what the hell can I do now to enable that? Um and so, fortunately that worked out.

Speaker 1: 34:47

Uh, but now you know I get to go back into that. You know that growth mode where we've brought on, you know, nine new developers and, like the last four weeks, we're doing that team retreat I was telling you about in Brazil in May, which I'm super excited about, and then we haven't had that oh shit moment yet because we haven't gotten the product in market yet, which will be around mid-May. I personally, based off of all of our conversations, our pre-sales, the waiting list that we have, I feel like it's there and we just need to execute now. But I'm going to find out over the next six to nine months whether my bullish confidence is going to actually be realized or if we're going to have to maybe think differently about how we're going to market here and what we're building.

Speaker 2: 35:35

I mean time will tell. And with your agency before, where you know you were doing a jack of all trades and a master of none, and you said, okay, well, how do we weave into something, right? So you know, it's nothing of making those moves, that's going to be unfamiliar to you. Just it's different on the tech side now, right.

Speaker 1: 35:52

Yeah, I think the two biggest differences are one you know, we don't make money. We burn money, yeah, Whereas the agency was making money since inception. And then the you know. The second thing would be I don't have as much control over the product as I did at the agency, which was, you know, the product was the service itself and I could quite literally do everything that we were providing to our clients outside of, you know, some web development. But when it comes to the product development on this side of things and all that's going on with like AI and ML and whatever else, like I don't, I'm just like, you know, here's the vision. And then, you know, I have to take a step back and hope that we've brought the right people in place to be able to execute and help us, you know, expand upon that.

Speaker 2: 36:35

I mean, the team is so important, and with tech it's different. Right, you, you, you make a bet on spending. We call them sprints. Right, you run through four or five sprints and you, you get the code, you get deployed in the product, and then you come to find out like it's it's not hitting the mark of where the expectation was versus more services side.

Speaker 2: 36:52

You can pivot the human, you can pivot the strategy, you can pivot the engagement much faster. But just based off of our offline conversations, to me it sounds like you're taking a very thoughtful approach to you know, even though you're not actually sitting there deploying the code, aligning the people to the vision, I'm excited to see what happens.

Speaker 1: 37:13

I think the agency to tech partner relationship that we've had over the last four years is very helpful and you know seeing which tech companies have succeeded versus those that haven't, and I think a lot of the ways that they set up you know the feedback loops from the agencies and the customers plays a big part in that, where they don't allow it to completely dominate and dictate their roadmap but they do allow it to help inform. I think of subscriptions and how all of them went and built the ability to gift a subscription to a friend. Not really because anybody actually wanted it more because of all this buzz and hype around. Oh, one of them had it, so now everybody else needs to have it and I was talking with a couple of them a few weeks ago and nobody uses it because maybe, like you know, less than half of a percent of customers actually will click gift to subscribe, gift this subscription to a friend, cause, if you just think about it, you know why the hell would I want to do that?

Speaker 2: 38:11

I would just skip my order. If I want to get my friend to gift, I'll just go get them a gift.

Speaker 1: 38:15

I don't want to gift them my first person order.

Speaker 2: 38:16

The whole concept is super weird, so yeah, I'll buy him a beer, like I'm not giving you this, yeah exactly yeah.

Speaker 1: 38:26

So I think all that has been invaluable.

Speaker 2: 38:28

It's the data too. Right, like for any tech tech builders out there is looking at the product usage data who's using it, why and then talking to folks that aren't using it and understanding why as well. Right and just, there's such a, such a goldmine of product analytics and you can set up something easy with, like an amplitude right On a free version, just to look at like sessions by user, by time, and then start breaking that out by feature and then using that within your you know, customer facing success teams to have thoughtful conversations about you know, the adoption of these features, how they use it, how it goes into their workflows, but also talking with them about your roadmap as well. Hey, well, what do you think about? This here is aligned to our vision. Here's some of the data that we're seeing like would you use this? How and why and what?

Speaker 1: 39:21

is the output of the value. Yeah, the roadmap visibility I always loved from our partners that were able to provide that, especially when you know some of the stuff that we had been bringing to them actually made it on that roadmap as well. And then we could collaborate on it and like, think of. You know, this is what we thought, of what would be useful for us If you didn't. You wouldn't build it.

Speaker 2: 39:39

It's a great feeling when someone's like well, you got to make sure they don't have confirmation, but you don't have confirmation bias as well, right Cause you have to understand your audience. They don't really want to tell you that they think that piece of that product is going to be a piece of shit, or it's just like hey, hey, like being upfront and honest and just really digging in and just making sure, like everybody's on the same page of tough love and feedback on the roadmap.

Speaker 1: 40:05

It goes a really long way. No, no hard feelings, you know respectful feedback, but also very pointed and concise. I feel like I always try to at least give our tech partners that. That because you know the worst thing in my opinion, would be to lead somebody down a path. You know, because you know you feel bad for them. Well, you know, long-term you're going to feel really bad for them because you just, you know, screw them with oh, that looks great, but in reality, you know nobody's going to eat it.

Speaker 2: 40:29

I say it all the time. I was like, listen, you have a group of some of the most intelligent nerds in this room back here and they can build whatever you want, right? So it's going to be most beneficial to say, hey, this doesn't make sense for us as a business, but I'd really love to see this, and you know, you just like you get a free product built for you. Well, not necessarily free, but you're paying also from the product, but you're also paying to have some influence on what you think the product should do.

Speaker 1: 40:56

Next, yeah, I think overall, I'm just excited to to learn again. There's just so much learning that's going into this new opportunity and new business, whereas you know the agency sort of got itself to a place where you know this is what we did and you know there were incremental improvements, but it wasn't the same when I was in my room in 2018 just getting a fire hose of information around Shopify and Klaviyo and all this other shit in the ecosystem. Curiosity is good man.

Speaker 2: 41:29

Curiosity is fun, right? You're now curious about something different. You take a fire hose of new information and you go build something next and I think, the combination of your agency background. You're now curious about something different. You take a fire hose of new information and you go build something next and you know, I think the combination of your agency background in the space and then bringing the tech into that is going to be a nice intersection of of where that could, where that could go.

Speaker 1: 41:47

So I've got one last question for you and then I'll let you run here. But let's say you know you're five years down the road here and you know you sell prescient for a billion dollars. And you know, yes, knock on wood and you're, and you're set for life. Um, are you, you know, going off into the um, whatever the term is? I don't know why I'm blanking on this, but are you sailing off into the sunset on a yacht for the rest of the 30 to 40 years of your life? Or are you, you know, you're going to get that itch six months to 12 months later and have to dive back into something?

Speaker 2: 42:26

I'm probably going to take my dad on a three month golfing trip and then and then go back. That was that was a deal we made a while back but spend some time with my family. What I do. But I already know what I would do. I would go start a venture fund, for you know, I grew up in Maine where we didn't have. I didn't know anything about venture. Growing up there was nothing about tech. In my backyard Every door got told no 112 times before we got like $50,000, right, because you just didn't know anybody. So I would help. I would invest into people that had great ideas, that I saw you know a promising mentality, and help them navigate, you know, their journey into venture and go to market and scalability.

Speaker 1: 43:17

That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for uh for joining me today. Before we hop, can you let everybody know where they can find you? Uh in prescient online.

Speaker 2: 43:30

Yeah, we're working on a new domain right now. It's a botchy one, but it's tough when it's tough, the one we just wanted to go by with. They were like it's going to cost you half a million dollars. I'm like, oh, just because it says AI next to it, come on, but it's prescient. P-r-e, s-c-i-e-n-t, dash A-I, dot, i-o. Try to say that three times fast, but you can do that. Hit me up on LinkedIn. My name is Michael, true? Or just shoot me an email. My emails are always open. It's Mike at prescient, at that long name I just said for my website.

Speaker 1: 44:07

You know, I actually think that could potentially be a good thing, Cause when I've introduced the solution to a few people, they like double take on that URL, but then they remember it. And it's the same thing that we had with electric, with the Q instead of the C really screwed with a lot of people, but then they'd be like oh yeah, Like that agency with that, like with the Q instead of a C versus you know the host of other platforms or agencies that have like easily recognizable names. So maybe it could be a good thing.

Speaker 2: 44:37

People are like is it prescient or is it prescient? And I'm like so that's something that was going around like e-tailers. It's like, do you say prescient or prescient, it's tomato, tomato, whatever is easiest for you to say.

Speaker 1: 44:49

Klaviyo ran a whole campaign around how to actually say Klaviyo. So you know, yeah, that's fair.

Speaker 2: 44:57

They even actually say Klaviyo. So you know, yeah, it's fair. Even got t-shirts for it, so good work.

Speaker 1: 44:59

Creativity man. Yeah, well, again, thanks for joining me. Um, for everybody listening, as always, this is Brandon Amoroso. You can find me at, uh, brandon Amorosocom, electricmarketingcom or scal.