Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Ben Jabbawy - CEO of Privy, an email marketing tool focused on Shopify and Wix e-commerce companies, with over 600,000 clients generating in excess of $6 billion in sales between them. We hear about focusing on a niche, and not being afraid to take risks and grab opportunities.
Hear how successful B2B SaaS companies and agencies compete - and win - in highly saturated categories. No fluff. No filler. Just strategies and tactics from founders, executives, and marketers. Learn about building moats, growing audiences, scaling businesses, and differentiating from the competition. New guests every week. Hosted by Peep Laja, founder at Wynter, Speero, CXL.
How Privy's Ben Jabbawy succeeded by focusing on a narrow niche
Ben Jabbawy (00:03):
If we had big merchants coming in with 100,000 plus lists right when we started, they would've written us off, but because we were starting with small and a focus on quick time to value, amazing support, it all really worked well together.
Peep Laja (00:21):
I'm Peep Laja. I don't do fluff. I don't do filler. I don't do emojis. What I do is study winners in B2B SaaS, because I want to know how much is strategy, how much is luck, and how do they win? This week, Ben Jabbawy, CEO of Privy. Privy is an email marketing tool focused on Shopify and Wix eCommerce companies. With over 600,000 clients generating in excess of $6 billion in sales between them, Privy has become a go-to name in eCommerce email marketing. In this episode, we talk about switching focus when an original strategy didn't play out. We hear about following customer demand by integrating with major platforms. And we hear how focusing on one very specific niche can unlock huge opportunities. Let's get into it.
Peep Laja (01:11):
So you started Privy back in 2011 and the idea was that you're going to sell to old-school brick-and-mortar businesses. What was the product exactly back then?
Ben Jabbawy (01:23):
Yeah, so the original concept behind Privy was a self-serve dashboard where these brick-and-mortar businesses, like restaurants or dry cleaners, they could log in, they could create coupons, they could put those online and they would be able to use those as a way to track the effectiveness of your Facebook ad or your Google ad; how many leads and how many customers did that actually drive in your store, when they come in with their phone to use the offer? So the idea was closing the loop between online and offline for brick-and-mortar; big idea, but there were a lot of challenges with it.
Peep Laja (02:02):
So initially it seemed to work, two years later you raised a seed round, but then a slowdown came. What was happening?
Ben Jabbawy (02:11):
Yeah, so we found success the old-fashioned way, just walking down the street, talking to business owners, cold emailing, cold calling, it was a grind, and we ended up winning a handful of regional businesses that had multiple locations. And that got investors excited, it also had us excited, we were like, "Wow, we can actually do this!" And so we raised some money and we built a small sales team and built out the product team a little bit, and we were trying to replicate that, and what we found was just: it was too big of a slog, candidly, because you're trying to sell to either an owner or a marketer a product that impacts in-store operations, and the sales process was like an enterprise sale for a small business-size contract, and it didn't end up scaling up for us.
Peep Laja (03:05):
So you hired all these people with the venture money, but sales were not catching up.
Ben Jabbawy (03:11):
Exactly, we were up to, I think it was 10 people at our peak, so it wasn't huge numbers, and we gave it a good shot after the seed round for about a year and a half and felt like it wasn't really scaling the way we all intended.
Peep Laja (03:24):
And then you thought you might sell the business. Were you thinking of selling because you had given up and it's like: I don't know what to do with this?
Ben Jabbawy (03:34):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, at the time it felt like it was just going to be a huge lift to figure out what to do next. I mean, we were also running out of money, right? So I wasn't going to be able to ask investors for more.
Peep Laja (03:50):
Right. You had to let go some people and you ran out of money, but for some reason you still decided to keep going.
Ben Jabbawy (03:59):
Yeah. I still think back to that moment. Honestly, it's as simple as: I don't think I could have gone out and got a job, after. We kind of... We had the conversation with our investors, we told them exactly what was happening, when we were going to run out of money, and then all the pressure came off and I pitched a few of the people that we didn't let go: hey, we've got a little bit of customer revenue. We don't need to shut down the product. I have a idea for how we can shift the business and pursue a couple key things differently to give this a real shot. Would you be willing to stick around? And one of them at the time said no, and that was totally fine, but two of the developers said yes. And we basically said, "Okay, let's change everything we want to change," and I'll walk through that in a sec, but we took about 30 days and we built a new version of the platform that we thought might have legs.
Peep Laja (05:01):
How did you know what to build? Where did that come from?
Ben Jabbawy (05:05):
We talked to a couple of our customers that were happily using the product and paying for it regularly, and I'll never forget those conversations. One of them said, "Hey, it's great that you can close the loop between online and in-store, that's awesome, but no one really gives a shit about that inside my company. The thing that I love most about Privy is that I have never grown my email list this quickly." And she walked me through how long it took her to get the size email list she had today before Privy and how fast it's growing with Privy. And that was a by-product of the first version of Privy that I knew existed, but that was a key insight, and then we spoke to a couple of the other customers that were still using and they pretty much said the same thing. We said, "All right," or I pitched them, I said, "Hey, why don't you consider paying upfront for the year at a discount? We'll keep the product as is, you keep using it, and we'll basically use that money to go build V2 of Privy."
Peep Laja (06:08):
And so what was the idea for V2?
Ben Jabbawy (06:12):
So it was basically moving away from trying to change the world and closing the loop to just honing in on the customer pain point that we heard time and time again, that we did better than anyone else, which was growing your email list.
Peep Laja (06:27):
When my first startup failed in 2011, it was for many reasons. I had no name recognition, no audience to sell to, and no money to buy one. I decided that next time around I'll do it differently. I told myself that, for my next business, I'll build an audience first and then figure out what to sell them. And that's what I did. I started with a blog and later built an agency around it. An audience is a massive asset and the email list is its tangible manifestation. Blog and email list drove the growth of CXL. And when I launched CXL Institute five years later, the e-learning arm of the business, it was to a warm list of 100,000 email subscribers. As Twitch co-founder Justin Kan once said, first-time founders focused on product, second-time founders on distribution, although that tweet didn't age so well for him.
Justin Kan (07:17):
I wrote this tweet in 2018 when I was working on Atrium, and at the time I thought I was super clever because I thought that distribution was the most important thing, and that's something that I only learned after starting my first company. One of the things I think that was an oversight with this... Ultimately, Atrium did not work, right? We failed because I wasn't focused enough on product and we built something where we had partnered with a lot of different channels for reaching startups, we raised money from all these different investors, from over 100 different investors, that I thought would be a channel to drive customer acquisition, and at the end of the day we got in touch with tons and tons of customers, but the churn was super high because we did not provide sufficient utility to keep people to stick around.
Justin Kan (07:56):
I guess, in retrospect, this tweet did not age super well, although people still retweet it all the time. The ironic thing is this is probably true, that first-time founders are obsessed with product, second-time founders are obsessed with distribution, but that's the reason why so many of the giant unicorn companies are started by first-time founders.
Ben Jabbawy (08:12):
The other thing was a business model shift. So in our first iteration you had to talk to Sales, you had to sign a contract, there was no free version or self-serve version to let you see value quickly. So that was the next big shift in this second iteration was list growth and the ability for anyone who wants to grow their email list to come in, to start doing it for free, without talking to a human. We really wanted to show value to our users before we asked for any value in return. We also wanted to prove to ourselves that we could find people that were interested in growing their list if we were going to continue working on this thing for another couple of years, so those were two really big shifts.
Ben Jabbawy (08:58):
The third was that, luckily, we had one customer that had a brick-and-mortar location but also happened to be selling online through eCommerce. And the conversation with her was: I've never grown my email list this quickly, but also the way I make the majority of my money selling online is by sending email. And so that was my first experience talking to an eCommerce merchant, right? I'd spent years talking to small business owners, brick-and-mortar restaurant, etc. And so those were the three things, right? The messaging and the focus on list growth, being very clear, we want to be the best at that. Self-serve with a freemium model. And then eCommerce.
Peep Laja (09:48):
Sometimes people don't value your product because they haven't felt the pain. Think flour. What if it wasn't wildly available and you had to grow your own grain and grind it to make flour? Massive pain. We'd gladly pay more if we had experienced the pain firsthand. Try offering a freemium or basic version of the product or service that includes some pain on their way to value, like having to do some part manually so they'd be happier to pay more for the automation or done-for-you option.
Peep Laja (10:18):
For Wynter, we have a free option: recruit your own panel for your message test and the service is completely free. Guess how many users have managed to recruit the full panel? Less than 10%. Recruiting a panel is very hard. It's a massive pain in the ass. After feeling the pain of trying to get your own panel together, most gladly pay us to handle it for them.
Peep Laja (10:44):
So to simplify, the tool was kind of a email capture popup tool. And even back then, there were 100 tools of WordPress plugins, you name it, already existed. So how did you, back then, think about differentiation, or why would anybody choose your tool over other options?
Ben Jabbawy (11:04):
When we were getting started, Sumo, OptinMonster, there were big names out there. But when we actually looked at the workflows of an eCommerce business, right, and talked to some of our customers that we had, everything was different. What you do for B2B lead capture and what you do for B2C lead capture, it sounds like subtle differences, but they're pretty big differences, right? B2C lead capture for eCommerce typically includes a coupon code, right? Merchants like when that coupon code is unique for each of the people that sign up and they want that coupon code to automatically work with the back end of their store without having to go from this system to that system. It sounds funny, but that single workflow was what made us realize Sumo and OptinMonster, which are fantastic companies, are focused on a very different customer.
Ben Jabbawy (12:02):
And then the other kind of area that we examined from a competitive landscape was Mailchimp, and we started to hear about Klaviyo and some of these other email marketing providers that were eCommerce-focused, and what we did was we looked at the growth tools, the list growth tools, that they were providing; Constant Contact. There was nothing. You were lucky if you could build an embedded form on those platforms at the time. So we said, "Wow, the intersection of eCommerce with list growth can be really powerful."
Peep Laja (12:40):
So you had this new strategy: freemium, cheap, self-serve, small business, eCommerce focus. Once the V2 was out and you started executing towards that new direction, how soon did you get success? How soon did you know that, yes, it's working?
Ben Jabbawy (12:58):
Right away. I'll never forget, we went live with our free version, we didn't even have a paid version yet, but the first month there was 100 stores that came in and started to use it and really see value. The next month it was 200 stores. After that, 400, 800, it just kept doubling. I got chills that first night where there was 10 people using it, because it had taken me months to go cold call and get 10 contracts the other way, so that was huge.
Peep Laja (13:31):
Where did these companies come from? Was it still cold email or...
Ben Jabbawy (13:35):
I would go into Facebook groups of eCommerce business owners and Reddit and [Kora 00:13:42]. Each week I would basically search the forums and the groups looking for people talking about growing their email lists, and the fact that we were doing it for free, I could ask for feedback; it wasn't like I was trying to sell them anything at the time. I was really just trying to prove value, and I think word spread pretty quickly at that point. This was even before we entered the integrations space.
Peep Laja (14:04):
What then? You thought staying within the boundaries was not big enough? You saw more potential?
Ben Jabbawy (14:12):
Yeah. As these merchants, as we call them, were successful growing their list, they started to ask us, "Hey, can you just integrate with MailChimp or Constant Contact or Klaviyo, so that we can move the data over?" Which is natural, right? Of course, let's do it. So we built those and what we found was: wow, we can actually get attention from some of these bigger ecosystem players because the business models line up perfectly, right? MailChimp prices on the number of contacts and Privy grows the number of contacts, right? And ultimately the shared client between us will be more successful the more contacts they have, so what we found is, after we built these integrations, which you can do without a relationship, of course, we started to get some of the attention from some of these bigger ESPs that recognized that Privy's growth tools were far superior to everything they offered, right?
Ben Jabbawy (15:11):
So there was just so much really tight alignment between the shared value of Privy working with a client, and we actually ended up getting distribution from a lot of those partners early on; Constant Contact would send emails about us, Mailchimp would include us in some of their docs. That was when we said to ourselves, "Oh, wow, we should go out and build integrations with every single ESP for eCommerce." And the list was big. So there was 30 integrations that we built. Some of those would drive us zero new installs a month. Some would drive us hundreds. For every integration it was like an experiment, let's just do it and see what happens, and it just started to steamroll from there.
Peep Laja (15:55):
Lots of companies have grown on top of app exchange marketplaces. A young startup called SuperLemon, bootstrapped to 350K in ARR, has more than 500 five-star ratings on the Shopify app exchange, getting most of their business from that app exchange. Supermetrics bootstrapped to 25 million ARR, before raising money and growing even bigger, and that early growth all came from Google Workspace Marketplace. Basically, it was a Google Sheets add-on, today having more than 330,000 downloads.
Peep Laja (16:23):
TSheets got acquired for $340 million, dominating Intuit's app exchange. If you're building a SaaS product, it's important to consider app exchanges in your distribution strategy. These platforms can open up access to thousands of potential customers. If you get big on that app store, the platform owner might acquire you, which is what happened to TSheets. While the app ecosystem isn't the new model, it is starting to grow rapidly, as industry leaders capitalize on the opportunity and create a more competitive mode. Over 70% of the 20 biggest public SaaS companies have an app store. Some of those app stores are already very competitive and some have a ton of untapped opportunity, like the Zoom App Marketplace. Platform owners invest in your success there. Shopify thinks of their app ecosystem as a moat. Here's what their VP Growth, Morgan Brown, said.
Morgan Brown (17:14):
One of Shopify's incredible advantages is the ecosystem in which it exists, right? So Shopify app developers, Shopify agencies, Shopify experts; there's a whole ecosystem of capability that takes this kind of core product and extends it in many different ways, and you get this really powerful flywheel of more people contributing to the ecosystem, which creates a stronger product offering. That's one of the big advantages that Shopify has.
Peep Laja (17:48):
Was the competition sleeping? Did you get a lucky break, or were they paying attention and being fast followers?
Ben Jabbawy (17:55):
No, the world at the time was sleeping on Shopify. I don't know what you feel about this, but Shopify as an eCommerce ecosystem, I think so many big companies out there, namely B2B, I think their DNA... They just didn't understand what eCommerce was and how it was different from B2B. There were some small apps that were a part of that ecosystem that we competed with, but I don't think they understood the value of the freemium model and the support model we had, so I think for a while we were one of the only ones that was focused on list growth for eCommerce.
Peep Laja (18:33):
At what point did you feel that you can become more than just a list growth tool? What were the signals? How did you come to that decision?
Ben Jabbawy (18:44):
So the list growth product, paired with a lot of integrations, got us from zero to four million in revenue. At the time we had a really small team, I was doing a lot of the support, and the DNA of our company is small business-oriented, right? That's my parents and my wife's... It's just what I know. And so, especially coming from the world where I had to cold call my way in, now having all these, even free, users that were engaging in LiveChat, to me, was a blessing. It was a gift. So I was talking to every single one of them. And what they said repeatedly was, "Privy's easy to use, we're growing our list and you have great support. So why do we need Mailchimp?" As an example.
Ben Jabbawy (19:32):
And we had a lot of those questions come in early on when we were just building confidence in ourselves, and we were like, "No, we couldn't... Why would we ever do that? They're great partners of ours and they're supporting the customers too." But a lot happened in the ecosystem that shifted the strategy. There was a pretty public breakup between Mailchimp and Shopify a few years ago, and when that happened, because Privy was an integral part of the Shopify and Mailchimp customer base, all of Mailchimp's customers, not all of them, but a lot of them, were coming to us with questions. And so we were like, "What's happening here? Why do we have to be the ones to support this?" And that was a moment where we said, "You know what? The opportunity's ours; we just need to take it. And let's deliver on really easy-to-use, small, eCommerce-focused email marketing platform. And that was amazing, and I was just looking at the numbers this month, Privy merchants sent 60 million emails through the Privy email platform, and there's really no turning back.
Peep Laja (20:44):
So the classic competitive strategy, Clayton Christensen says, "Attack from below, because then the bigger competitor, they don't mind if they lose those customers."
Clayton Christensen (20:54):
Disruption occurs when an innovating company develops a product that is simpler and more affordable than the prior products or services in the marketplace. When this occurs at the simple end of the market, the incumbent leaders find it unattractive to go after them because, given the business model of the incumbent, they want to make better products that they could sell for better profits to their best customers. And when they look down, it makes no sense to go down.
Peep Laja (21:27):
That was true in your case, where you started poaching some Mailchimp's less profitable customers and maybe they didn't mind, they didn't care that much.
Ben Jabbawy (21:36):
Yeah. I mean, I got a call a little while ago from the partner person at Mailchimp and they felt like: what's going on? They considered us a tier-one partner and now we're messaging against them, so I'm sure they didn't love it. What I said to him, I was like, "Hey! Your customers are coming to us asking for support on Shopify integration, and where are you guys?" It definitely ruffled some feathers, and even with some of our other partners it's created more competitive dynamics. That was something that we were nervous about in the beginning, but I think we made the right call there.
Peep Laja (22:21):
The world changes, market changes, competitors evolve. Alas! Most suffer from loss aversion and tend to avoid a possible loss by sticking to the status quo, rather than risking a possible gain by opting for change. Success can make you a coward. The more you have, the more you have to lose and the less risk you take and the less open you are to exploring new directions. If you don't adapt, that's when new hungry players will come and eat your lunch, and five years from now you ask, "How did we get left behind?" I admire companies that abandon the main ship they have been on for years to pursue a new direction; the amount of guts it takes. Better to do it to yourself before they bowl the not yet on you!
Peep Laja (23:08):
When you made the bet to marry the Shopify ecosystem, was that more like: oh, these guys are doing interesting thing, let's try, or were you instantly bullish that: this is our big break here.
Ben Jabbawy (23:21):
As soon as we saw the results of email, we knew there was something here. The other thing that I haven't shared yet is that, along the way, what was happening was our install volume kept climbing. And so we were at a point where we were adding probably 4,000 stores a month that were starting with Privy with basically zero paid marketing; no outbound sales. We effectively became the entry point for customer data within the Shopify ecosystem. If someone was signing up with an email, there was a pretty good likelihood that Privy was the forum powering.
Ben Jabbawy (23:57):
That was important because it meant that Privy was actually building the merchant relationship earlier in the life cycle of that merchant than some of the other email providers out there. We saw people adopting our email solution, we saw our install numbers going up, and we felt, wow, very confident that we could execute on that. Another theme has kind of accelerated in the industry around vendor consolidation. I think a lot of business owners are fed up with having to have 30 apps on their store to accomplish a common marketing automation, so the theme of consolidation was another thing we saw coming, and it was a bit of a strategic move to say, "Hey, we want people consolidating to Privy, not away from Privy."
Speaker 6 (24:50):
If you are a small or growing eCommerce brand, there's two problems you're going to have. One: getting customers to buy for the first time, making that very first sale. Two: getting them to buy again and again, turning them into repeat customers. But that's why we built Privy. Privy is the leader in eCommerce marketing for small and growing brands.
Peep Laja (25:11):
I would think that building an actual marketing automation, email marketing tool, would be, in terms of complexity and size, a much bigger thing than what you were, the list builder. Was there also any doubt: can we do this? Are we technically ready? Do we have enough technical expertise, developers? Maybe we shouldn't, maybe we should do this other thing?
Ben Jabbawy (25:33):
Yeah. We were all naive enough to think that we could do it, but there were enough signals around us to be really excited about the growth of email within eCommerce. Even though it's a crowded space, we felt like it was pretty greenfield when you look at small eCommerce businesses.
Peep Laja (25:49):
How long did it take you to roll out the first version?
Ben Jabbawy (25:52):
So Peter, my VP Engineering, built V1 of our email offering in a weekend. It was super simplistic though, it was just a email that triggers after someone signs up, we didn't do newsletters and segmentation; we just really wanted to test the demand. And we just put it inside the dashboard and you could upgrade to the email plan for... I think it was five bucks, and scale on contacts, and we just started to see people upgrading very quickly. And so that, then, we started more automation types and then we got to newsletters and then we got pretty heavy eCommerce segmentation and all this stuff, but yeah, it happened pretty fast, but email is complex, right? So it has taken us a couple years since we first launched it to get to a spot where now we're sending 60 million, but it didn't start that way.
Peep Laja (26:44):
So many companies are afraid to say no to a customer segment. It's like email marketing for everyone is not uncommon. You guys are email marketing platform for Shopify and Wix stores to go from zero to one million in sales. That's highly specific. Aren't you afraid to turn away business?
Ben Jabbawy (27:10):
Yeah, no, there, definitely, it was a conversation at the board level; are we really just going to be that specific? But it took getting that specific, when we pivoted Privy altogether, to find growth, and we became known as the best for list growth hands down in eCommerce, and I think taking a very specific similar approach for email really helped us, because if we had big merchants coming in with 100,000 plus lists right when we started, they would've written us off, right? Our reputation would've just gone to zero. But because we were starting with small and a focus on quick time to value, amazing support, it all really worked well together, and now we're certainly maturing those products. We don't want you to outgrow us once you hit a million in sales, right? So we're investing aggressively to get there, and I think we really have, but being very specific actually, especially in a market that has just... not unlimited TAM, but you're talking about millions of potential customers that are small eCommerce stores, it really served us well.
Peep Laja (28:22):
It's highly likely that at some point in the future what made your company money in the past will stop making money. The world changes, the competition evolves, the technology enables new capabilities. New products replace old products. New services will replace old services. New channels emerge and the old ones stop working as well. Your best-fit customers change. New buyers will appear and the old ones will stop buying. So cook up your next competitive advantage while milking your existing one. The age of sustainable competitive advantage is over. It's all transient.
Peep Laja (28:57):
So much of SaaS advice out there says, "Charge more." You guys are cheap. I don't know if you're the cheapest, but you're cheap. How do you think about competing on price as a competitive advantage, or the margins and all that?
Ben Jabbawy (29:12):
We definitely originally rolled out email very intentional about being below Mailchimp, right? They've spent 20 years building the most robust email marketing solution out there. How can you compete with that? We were very confident in undercutting on price, and on the email side, I mean, it's SendGrid, SparkPost, there's so many of these now, it's gotten pretty cheap, so we felt like, if we can win people over earlier in their business life cycle, make them happy with both of our products and an incredible support and educational experience, then as they continue to grow their contact size is going to grow. They will naturally level up in price and over the years, as we've invested more in our email offering and matured that, the entry points and the packages have shifted a little bit to reflect that, obviously, but we still think, if we're the brand for small eCommerce businesses with great support, we have to be very welcoming in our entry points.
Peep Laja (30:18):
A central theme in your case seems to be that you're constantly talking to and listening to your customers, which informs your product roadmap. Did you ever act on any qualitative customer feedback that actually was the wrong bet?
Ben Jabbawy (30:34):
Definitely. Yeah. So we started as a list growth and that had good-better-best pricing models, and then we decided to move that to a traffic-based model. You basically free for a certain amount of traffic and then moving that up based on how much site traffic they get. That was a miss. We did a bunch of surveying and conversations and people understood, but I think at that time we were just so close to moving in the direction of the email that we should have had the foresight, and that's on me to recognize, hey, we should just be moving towards a bundled world where conversion and email go together and you throw conversion in for free. And that's where we've landed now, by the way.
Peep Laja (31:18):
And so Privy was successful and growing, and then you guys got acquired June this year. Why did you want to make that bet? I mean, I understand from a founder's perspective, there's some chips off the table, but for the business, why did you think that was a good move?
Ben Jabbawy (31:37):
Privy is all about small business. Small business comes with some challenges; it's called merchant death, right? A large number of these stores never get to meaningful scale and they shut down. And so we were out raising and we were getting a lot of questions around merchant death and do we need to move upstream and focus on enterprise? And that's not our DNA, I don't think that's our brand, and so we started to get a couple offers in the door. We spoke about it, and with Attentive, Brian from Attentive pitched me, he said, "Hey! I'm going to give you your series B. Privy's going to remain a standalone brand. You're going to focus on small and mid-size businesses. You're going to do exactly what you're doing today, but we're going to give you a bunch of our Attentive resources," and that was a super exciting offer and opportunity for us, to keep going in building this business, because we feel like we've barely scratched the surface on the opportunity in front of us.
Peep Laja (32:35):
You are here now and somewhere is the dream. What is the gap between now and the dream?
Ben Jabbawy (32:40):
We still have a lot of product work ahead of us. We also have a lot of go-to-market work ahead of us, right? So now we're at a spot we're actually onboarding 10,000 stores a month. It's an incredible funnel. It's all inbound. And I think, as we've expanded our product offering, we have a brand in the market and we're trying to educate very quickly that Privy can actually handle your scale on the email side. We've got some stories to work on there, some customer education, but from a product perspective, we've been building out text messaging, that's taking off like crazy inside our user base and inside the funnel too. And so I think the next big thing for us is thinking about orchestration of marketing automation; these small businesses shouldn't necessarily need to understand the differences between email and text marketing. They should turn to Privy and we should be able to deliver messages to their customers based on where we have the opt-in or where we have the preferences, and they should kind of remove themselves from the complex decisions of what some enterprise marketing automation, retention marketing managers, are doing every day.
Peep Laja (33:47):
So now, looking back at your journey and your whole experience, what is your thesis or philosophy around competitive strategy? So if you had to pass on some wisdom to other business owners out there, what do you need to win on? Product? Story? Messaging? Brand? What's your take on this?
Ben Jabbawy (34:07):
Yeah, I think if you are in a huge market that is growing quickly, we did not think about competition too much. What we needed to focus on was delivering value quickly to the customers that we had. And if you can do that repeatedly, that was what got us to four million. It was pretty scrappy. There was no magic there. You just listen to them, then they will drive you where the market should take you. We weren't looking at competitive features and feature battles. We were just saying, "Hey, if we deliver on this experience and we do it better than anyone else, they'll come to us," and they did.
Peep Laja (34:46):
Awesome. So what are the key factors to separate Privy from their competition? 1) They spotted an opportunity out of a failing business and wrapped it.
Ben Jabbawy (34:58):
We looked at the growth tools. There was nothing. So we said, "Wow! The intersection of eCommerce with list growth can be really powerful."
Peep Laja (35:08):
2) They have carved themselves a niche, which they fiercely stick to.
Ben Jabbawy (35:12):
We became known as the best for list growth hands down in eCommerce. And that was a moment where we said, "You know what? The opportunity's ours; let's deliver on really easy-to-use, small, eCommerce-focused email marketing platform."
Peep Laja (35:26):
3) They doubled down on growing on platform ecosystems like Shopify and Wix.
Ben Jabbawy (35:31):
The world at the time was sleeping on Shopify. There were some small apps that were a part of that ecosystem that we competed with, but I think for a while we were one of the only ones that was focused on list growth for eCommerce.
Peep Laja (35:45):
A final takeaway from Ben.
Ben Jabbawy (35:47):
What we needed to focus on was delivering value quickly to the customers that we had.
Peep Laja (35:53):
And that's how you win!
Peep Laja (36:00):
I'm Peep Laja. For more tips on how to win, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Thanks for listening.