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This is FERMAT Fridays, your backstage pass to what’s going on at FERMAT.
Join us every Friday as we chat about what we're cooking up, the strategy behind it all, and of course our general musings.
Expect juicy insights on new features, our latest experiment results, and whatever else is making waves in our world. Whether you're an existing customer or just a little FERMAT curious, this podcast will keep you up to date and entertained.
Alex McEachern (00:01.053)
I feel like I need to remove that countdown. It's just like so ominous of us about to talk here. But hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of From Up Fridays. Today I have a very, very special guest. I've got Shereeus joining us. Shereeus, you wanna just give everyone listening the quick rundown. Who are you? What do you do here? That might be a loaded question.
Shreyas (00:21.966)
Oh man, yeah, hey everybody, I'm Shreyas. I'm one of the co -founders and the CTO here at Forma. I do all sorts of things, I think. Nominally, the CTO is how I often describe myself to customers because for the last year or so, I've been spending a lot more of my time on the sales and post -sales side. But thankfully, now that...
you know, we've got this crazy marketing team and we've stand up our account management team. I've been able to start spending more and more time back with the product again. So, yeah, that's me.
Alex McEachern (01:00.189)
We love it. And me being on the product marketing side of things, I feel like Shreyas and I, our Slack DM is just a constant string of, yo, look how people are talking about us. Look at how this person's interpreting this. And we just kind of go back and forth on that. And that's actually what I was ultimately hoping to jam on with you today is kind of like this journey, how people think of us, like whether we think that is like an accurate representation of who we are and what we do and like,
It really doesn't matter if that's accurate or not. It's just kind of how people perceive us and perception is reality. So I think like one of the best places to start there is I think the one thing that you and I come up against the most is, oh, how are you different than a landing page builder? And I feel like for ma always kind of like the default anchor spot is landing page builder. Like, what are your thoughts on that?
Shreyas (01:32.878)
is.
Shreyas (01:55.598)
Yeah, it's interesting. So first of all, I think low -key you joining the team has been one of the more exciting things that I've been waiting for because...
I think there's just a lot of content that we need to be putting out there that we haven't had the time to, to help sort of put out our point of view from a product perspective. And so excited to be doing things like this. I think, look, when you category create, I think it's just very, very difficult, right? The honest truth is that there's nobody who's doing exactly what we're doing, for better or for worse. And...
the closest anchor that exists to what we do is a landing page builder. And it is true that if you wanted to make landing pages with Format, you can. And the reason I think a lot of that terminology uses and our sales team and other folks lean on that terminology, I think we even had it on our site for a long time, is because it's much more important that people actually have some sort of understanding early on when nobody knew who Format was. But.
But the real power of Format, though, doesn't come from building a landing page. And it's really more of a philosophy question of how do you believe you should be iterating on your post -quick experience? When I hear landing page, and I think when most brands hear landing page, what they hear is this cycle where you spend, I don't know, between two weeks and two months coming up with a concept.
doing some creative, your creative team design some experience, you've got a dev team or somebody who's like a rep expert or some other landing page company expert who's gonna go build this out. And then you launch it and then basically you hope that it works, for lack of a better word, and then you have that as the destination from a bunch of different ads, a bunch of different destinations, and it works in some cases, it doesn't work in other cases.
Shreyas (03:45.102)
And that's closer to the way in which you think about your website, where you have a website concept, it's a big rebrand, it's just on a larger scale of six months, three months, whatever it may be, and then you launch it and then you hope it works, and Aeroba has this constant thing of, hey, there's not been a single website overhaul which has gone well on day one, right? Because it's just very difficult to get right. I think Format kind of flips it on its head, where what it says is, hey, like...
If you're able to turn the velocity dial on this all the way up to max, what actually happens? Well, we've got customers who spin up 40, 50, 60 of these in a morning.
have hundreds of these live, right? Not all hundred of them get traffic because it's up to the Facebook gods which ones actually get traffic and which don't and things like that. But they actually have a hundred of these live. And these are a hundred distinct experiences. They're on like various axes that we can go into. And what that allows you to do is it allows you to learn much faster and it allows you to triangulate things that are working much more quickly. And it makes you much less opinionated a priori.
but what's going to work, right? And I think what Formada loves you to do is actually adopt approaches that are closer to the edge of the spectrum where you have 100 of these experiences live than this world where you go through this concept, design, development, release, that sort of cycle.
Alex McEachern (05:09.596)
You said a few things in there that I really love like category creation It's always hard to like for better or worse like it's interesting to be the first person who does something and like the anchor point is Important because if you can't anchor to anything then it's just like what is this? So like I don't think you or I are like mad about people thinking for mot is a landing page builder in the sense that like hey it allows someone to get close and then we can change how they think about that and everything that you just said there right it's like
I actually have like a very similar view is like landing page builders are more for when like I know I want to do something and I have like this very buttoned up way that I want to go do it. And I can like you said like go through the planning cycle of it's going to look like this. It's going to do this. It goes through this and then like ends up being strapped onto the site where what you were saying with us is like the velocity at which I can create. I can create a hundred of these in a morning. Like I don't have to be as opinionated because like
how fast, how quick, and how risky this is isn't the same. So I can just keep on spinning those up and making them as I need. And I think the one really interesting piece about this, and you and I have kinda started to talk about this, is like, oh, it's like, once we start talking about this, the words I hear back from people are like, oh, it's like micro -sites or self -contained experiences. And I think that's a really important thing about what you said there too is because,
Most of the time these landing page builders just get strapped to the site. So they end up having to be like the PDPs, the offers, the tools that you have on the site are all being applied to those pages, which like sometimes is a good thing. Sometimes it's a bad thing. I had one experience earlier where I hit an ad that was talking about 15 % off.
Shreyas (06:38.702)
Yeah.
Alex McEachern (06:57.18)
hit the landing page and the landing page tossed a pop -up at me that was for 25 % off. And I was like, Oh man, these guys could have had me at 15 and now they changed it to 25. So like this idea that it can live separate from the site, I think is like one of the key differentiators of like, we're not building. I mean, there's, there's a lot more than that, but like, we're not a landing page that's strapped to the site. We're, we're something more.
Shreyas (07:06.99)
That's right.
Shreyas (07:21.422)
100%. 100%. I think that's, from a technical perspective, I think that ends up becoming like probably the single most important piece. The fact that it's completely separate from the site. It's just always been a mouthful and it's been difficult to get across, right?
I mean, like, rubber has this, I don't know if it's great, I hated it when I first heard it, but it seems to be sticking, this analogy of having, you know, this physics of earth and these satellite sites. And I think that's like roughly right, which is that the second piece from a technical perspective of landing pages is that they're one point of the funnel, which is you interact with the person at one point, whether, you know, whatever you're changing, it's just at one point.
And that means that you cannot have congruence across every step of the consumer journey. And more importantly,
Dependence on the primary site means that anything you do is actually kind of risky because you just cannot change things on the primary site. At this level of speed, you're sort of constrained by the physics, so to say the layout is the same. If you want to add a quiz, like what happens if somebody finds the quiz on the primary site, et cetera, et cetera. You have to worry about your returning customers where you don't want to piss your returning customers off because they're used to a certain specific flow and that's a big part of your revenue. And you've got all of these things which are very legitimate.
concerns. And sort of our approach just sidesteps all of that because we say, you know, don't worry about any of that. This is just completely separate. It doesn't touch any of that, which basically means that if something goes wrong, the impact is very, very small. It is like completely just restricted to the set of traffic you choose to point against that, whether it's an email sequence, whether it's an SMS campaign, whether it's, you know, a specific Facebook ad.
Shreyas (09:13.806)
And so I think that, like a very large part of the value of Fermat comes from the fact that it is not your site, that you just happen to have this property, which is not your site, that now you can do whatever you want with.
Alex McEachern (09:28.572)
Yeah, we've been kind of talking about it as the hub and spoke methodology where it's like, I can have all these self -contained experiences and then there's just like one point in this experience that is shared across all of them. And to date for us, that has been basically like the checkout conversion, right? So like, hey, all of this happens, it gets kicked back to Shopify as like a system of record to actually transact. And I love one thing you said there. It's like, yes, it lowers the risk, but on the flip side, like it all like...
Shreyas (09:44.91)
That's right. That's right.
Alex McEachern (09:56.86)
lower risk, higher freedom. So like when you're out, when you're operating outside of the site like that, like one, you can play around with more things, but like two, you can just kind of like that off the wall idea you've had that like, again, is you're like, it's risky, but like the freedom that exists inside of Vermont to play with something like that is insane. Like I, I was talking to a brand the other day that sells stuff for men, but they've found that the majority of their buyers are women.
buying for their significant other. And they've like, they've always known this and they're like, oh, we don't really know how to like capitalize on this though, because like, as soon as we send them back to the site, it's this very specific experience. But if I wanted to go after that persona, then like, I can actually just build this self -contained experience where they're not necessarily seeing all that stuff that is pointed towards the male audience. They're just getting this, this.
experience that they can then check out somewhere else and like never actually have to interact with any of the other stuff.
Shreyas (11:00.174)
Exactly, exactly. I mean, like, another example that comes to mind is this Indian packaged food brand who we work with, right? And they have, you know, they do really well with Indian Americans, but they're trying to figure out how to market and sell this food to non -Indian Americans. And, you know, for them, it's a major risk factor because they don't want to appear inauthentic on the site.
And you know, like, and so for them, it's actually been really interesting because they're trying these different bundles of different ways of talking about the food and so on, that they can now completely isolate to the format experiences without diluting the authenticity of the brand on the site. And in fact, like, you know, often people ask me, hey, like, do, am I going to be able to promote these changes to the site? And well, you know, in some cases, yes, if that's what you want to do, and it makes sense to, but there are many cases where,
guess what, you're never going to promote it to your site and that's actually the decision that you will come to because it's actually worth it to have these different experiences and the men -women's example or like you know women buying stuff for their partner or whatever you know having those different flows are going to live in perpetuity and in fact that is the better experience for the consumer having those two than bifurcation.
Alex McEachern (12:19.9)
I love that. So one thing that obviously at the beginning of this, we were saying like, Hey, it's exciting to start talking about the product in a different way and like starting to get some of our POVs out there. And like, I think one of the things that you and I have been talking the most about lately is just kind of like the value props that we want to live inside of as a product. So like, obviously like we're, we're releasing things at a great velocity. We have a ton of great features. Like people are going to come because they want to.
have a better conversion rate, higher AOV, they wanna push people into subscription. Those are the end states of being able to build this way. But I think you and I have been trying to put our finger on what those product value props are. So I wanna share how we're kinda thinking about this right now and maybe how we got there. So yes, we want performance, but ultimately what we're building into, we've been starting to think about it in three, but kind of two.
Shreyas (13:07.566)
Let's go.
Shreyas (13:12.846)
Thanks for watching!
Alex McEachern (13:18.364)
different value props. We have like this coherence where it's, hey, let's keep the same experience from click all the way to conversion without any sort of like bottleneck or drop off through that experience. And then we have like the experimentation side of this. And we've been talking about this in two areas. We've got experimentation speed or velocity, which we talked about, like spin up as many of these as you want, as quick as you want to learn as fast as you want. But I think like the thing that I'm most excited about,
Shreyas (13:41.646)
Yep. Yep.
Alex McEachern (13:47.26)
about everything that we're doing is that experimentation surface area. Like you have more things that you can play around with across more of that. I'm just gonna use the word funnel. I don't like using the word funnel, but just for to illustrate is like, I can play with more pieces of the funnel with Fermat than I can with just operating on my site. Maybe I have the same as on my site, but the site is a lot more expensive in all facets of that word to do.
Shreyas (14:17.006)
I love the framing. I love the framing. I think coherence, velocity, and surface are, at least in the context of experimentation, I think those are three axes that make a ton of sense. Coherence, I think, is probably the easiest to understand. Motion has this great coherence core notion. I think there are other people who are thinking about this. I would say that the...
Alex McEachern (14:37.148)
Yeah.
Shreyas (14:43.918)
thought on coherence extends beyond just like the first point of engagement post the ad click. So like the discount example that you gave is actually perfect because it actually ends up impacting the backend. And then you've got like other simpler or more obvious cases, right? Where you land on a collection page and you can't find the product which you clicked on on the ad. And as a consumer, you're like, come on, like, just take me to what I want to go to, et cetera, et cetera.
Alex McEachern (14:48.764)
Yes.
Alex McEachern (15:08.38)
I had that exact experience this morning, clicked on a product and then it took me to a collection page. I'm like, I don't even know where this one I wanted is, peace.
Shreyas (15:15.054)
That's exactly right. Exactly. I think those are the easier ones to understand, but there's a lot about the consumer journey where, you know, like the case of women shopping for their spouses, like, you know, you want the post -glick experience to recognize the fact that the person who opted into the ad opted in on something that talked about.
shopping for your spouse and not drop you on like a you know mail centric landing page that or mail centric product description page or whatever it is. I think that's easy. I think the velocity one is interesting because there are two axes to velocity right. Axis one is how many of these experiences can you have simultaneously and earlier in the conversation I was like hey there are people who are splitting up 40 of these and a hundred of these and all of that and that's great right. I think for the super sophisticated brands of the time to do it I think that's like one axis. The second
The second thing I think which is also less understood is the rate at which you can make changes to a given landing page. Because again, we're not an audience tool, we're not a creative tool. And what does that mean? Well, audience tools and creative tools, because what they primarily impact is how Facebook or any ad platform changes targeting, the lift you can tell very early.
Alex McEachern (16:15.644)
Yes.
Shreyas (16:31.374)
right? Because either it impacts targeting or it doesn't and usually once an ad is exited the learning phase, you know where it's going to be or it never makes it out of the learning phase. But for us, the second notion of velocity is that you come up with a concept.
at least our experience building a company, building product, whatever, is that we're very rarely right on the first time. In fact, probably like 95 % of the time, we're just not right. Yeah, it's just not, unfortunately, this is just not the case. And so what instead happens is you throw something out there, you see what comes back, and then you make a set of changes. And so that comes from having a very strong data underpinning, having access to that surface which we're gonna come to next.
Alex McEachern (16:58.588)
Almost never.
Shreyas (17:19.214)
and being able to make these changes easily without worrying about the risk. And so that's where the fundamental technical architecture comes in of being separate from the site and then having very, very clean data that you can rely on and know is actually true. And so I think that's the second axis of velocity, which is very, very important because it allows you to make something that is mids amazing. And that's not.
I think that's like just underappreciated, the ability to do that, right? Or something that's good, great, you know?
Alex McEachern (17:50.844)
I like the different axes there of velocity because like, yes, spinning up as many of these as possible is like, it's good. But making 400 things and never doing anything with them and just letting 400 things sit there. Like, that was cool that you got 400 experiences live. But if you never actually are like, figuring out which of these is best and like getting rid of some, translate merging some together like this, the concept of like being able to.
quickly create, but quickly adapt, adopt and change as well so that I can find that winning experience. And like shameless product plugs here, like we work on these things all the time, right? Like we just re released forever links. Like there is one way to do this, right? Like, Hey, I'm finding a winning experience. I don't want to go adjust all my ads. I'm just going to change the destination point inside for Mott so that I can adopt winners quickly. I built them fast. And then I picked the winner fast.
Shreyas (18:25.454)
Thank you.
Shreyas (18:50.254)
Exactly right, exactly right, exactly right. And you can roll that out across a bunch of different landing bits, right? Some of the learning stack, some learnings don't based on the context, and you're able to make those changes super fast. So surface is, I think, the one that is definitely the most, has the most unknown to it, right? Because we're building extremely quickly.
Alex McEachern (19:14.94)
Yes.
Shreyas (19:16.846)
uh... you know the a year ago we only had these like video based experiences and of course those work really really well in one subset of cases.
Then we added these advertorials and long form content and that was super interesting and there are a bunch of folks who use that. More recently in apparel we've started to grow a lot of these hybrid templates. Then there were subscription focused things that were pushing specific products. We have quiz flows now which are very interesting for high consideration purchases. The interesting thing is that...
the same brand can be using all of these. And it's actually true that there are same brands are using all of these. And again, this is where like not being constrained by the physics of the site is super valuable because you don't have to care about the layout, the theme, all the stuff, right? Which sort of gets in the way after a certain point when you're trying to do something like relatively radical, like a quiz. So that's like one part of the surface. The other part of the surface, which I think also,
Alex McEachern (19:52.668)
Yes.
Shreyas (20:18.414)
By the way, I want to be very clear. A lot of these learnings are things that customers have taught us, right? A year ago, if we had been having this conversation, I would not have predicted most of this. So a lot of this is like emergent in a way. But like something that has been very interesting with subscription brands is that it's actually very valuable to be able to run multiple flows on different economics simultaneously.
Alex McEachern (20:24.988)
Yes.
Shreyas (20:44.238)
And so when you think about Surface, it's like, hey, I want to be pushing 30 % of my acquisition towards just subs. And why do I want to do that? Well, I trust Dell TV and all of that. It's great. Subscription, the subscriber is much more worth it for my business and much more valuable to the business. But at the same time, for an econ business, everybody knows cash flow is king.
And so I cannot afford to actually do that for everybody because a subscriber by definition usually does an offer involved. There's, you know, like it's just like a different consumer journey. And so you can now choose to run the remaining percentage of your traffic against the stuff that's entirely just focused on sort of first order ROAS in order to like plug the cash flow gap. Right. And you can do both simultaneously because you can have different experiences. Again, like this is just like.
fundamentally not possible to do if you operate in the paradigm that you have one site and one way in which you do things. And so, yeah, so that's like on the surface, right? Where like, that's not a UX flow like a quiz or a video or whatever. It's actually much more focused on the offer. But yeah, it is something that customers ask us, hey, can we do this? And then more recently, there are things like...
You know, not only do I want to do one month subscription, but can I do a three month, like a quarterly subscription? And you know what? It turns out that many of these brands actually are being successful at doing that on a percentage of their traffic, right? And so that's sort of the thoughts on the surface, I guess.
Alex McEachern (22:19.1)
When you said, hey, a lot of like, if you asked me this a year ago, like we wouldn't have been here. And like, we learn a lot about a lot of this from our customers. I think like that really plays into like why surface is such like a big part of what we do, because like, as soon as we solve one problem, then the problem moves somewhere else. And it's like, okay, well now that I'm able to do this and I'm able to figure out how that was going. Now I want to be able to do this. So like our customers are actually like pushing us to find the next thing, right? It's like.
If we go back, if we go full circle all the way to the beginning, it's like, Oh, well, tell me how you're different than a landing page builder. It's like, well, there's only a certain amount of surface that you can impact when you're just changing, like the look and feel of the landing experience. But like we're letting you try a bunch. Like if we think about it, it's like landing page. And then like you were talking about video, advertorial hybrids, we have all these different like templates that we can use. It's like, okay, try across this. But then we go like a layer down and like now we're in the PDP.
Shreyas (23:12.174)
Yeah.
Alex McEachern (23:15.804)
And it's like, this is something we're working on right now is the ability to change and edit and kind of like have as much surface area as possible in the PDP as well. So that it's like, okay, I'm changing the images. I'm changing the product descriptions. I'm changing the offer that exists on that specific product. It's like, okay, now I'm, I'm, now I'm a layer deeper. And like, I think the one thing that at least from people I talked to that kind of blows their mind is like, Oh, we actually,
Shreyas (23:29.582)
Yeah.
Alex McEachern (23:41.948)
can do specific things at the cart component of this InfoMod as well. It's like, oh, here's the product you came for. If you add this other product that was also featured in the ad, it was kind of like the secondary, then we'll give you free shipping. Imagine how hard that is to pull off going to the site if you want to just have this consistent experience across the surface of the entire thing, not just at the lander.
Shreyas (24:08.814)
100%, 100%. Difficult to do. On the primary site, there are different apps that are responsible for all of these different things. So ensuring coherence is just hard. Not impossible always, but it's just very hard to do. And honestly, the other thing we are discovering is that, hey, when you're running something for acquisition, you're willing to perhaps give up more, right? Because you want to acquire the customer. On our primary site,
It's not all acquisition. In fact, the majority of the traffic may not be acquisition. It may be returning customers. And so the thought of when you want to do that offer, when you want to like...
the notion of what you would do when you don't know who the customer is, the notion of the upsell, it's just different than what you would do when you know who the customer is. And so having the ability to separate that out is just much cleaner when it's just literally a different experience on acquisition or on the specific ad versus on the site or on an email site, and so on and so forth.
Alex McEachern (25:14.076)
Yeah, something you said there like made me think about that. Like when you don't know that obviously like when you don't know who's there, that makes it very difficult to do. And like we talk a lot about the site has to be average. The reason the site has to be average is because I don't know who's there. Now that's not always true. I obviously like sometimes I do, but for the most part, this has to be average. But like if I bring someone in on an ad that is targeting a specific product, a specific problem to be solved,
Shreyas (25:30.414)
That's right.
Alex McEachern (25:42.78)
and I bring them to a landing page, like the upsell, like the potential to get higher AOV is a lot easier because like I know they're coming in wanting X. And if I present Y and Z, I have a very high likelihood of them being upsold into that. Where if you take that same like thinking and apply it to the site, instead of thinking about what's the best compliment to X thing, I'm probably thinking.
Shreyas (25:53.486)
That's right.
Alex McEachern (26:07.58)
Well, I'm going to go look through all my Shopify data and figure out what are my like top five performing products. And then I'm just going to, depending on what they bought, recommend one of these three works in the aggregate, but like,
Shreyas (26:15.022)
That's exactly right. That's exactly right. It's either that, it's either that or it's, there's a lot of personalization which again, like no ding on this. I think it like is very effective on the site where what you do is, okay, you know, I'm gonna look at the first four actions the user takes on the site once they land. And based on that, I'm gonna personalize the op -sol and stuff like that. And that is like another access, which again, it works. It's just both of these are not factoring in.
context of where the person came from, what the notion of that flow is, was it acquisition, was it retention, what was the content that they chose to opt into, right, et cetera. And so, yeah, I think it's interesting, right, when you look at Facebook.
It turns out that the demos that different ad sets have are not the same, and Facebook actually reports back on that. And so if it turns out that your age group is much older, for example, on a certain ad, well, you probably should be upselling them something slightly different, right, if you emerge into the large catalog, so on and so forth. And I think there's that kind of nuance which often gets lost when you have to do the one size fits all, which is what the site is.
Alex McEachern (27:06.204)
Yep.
Alex McEachern (27:25.18)
Yeah. And I mean, like there is our learning, right? Like our customers are telling us something we're basically saying, like, okay, our customers, customers, they're telling you something too. And just be as like adaptable to what you're learning. And again, the velocity, like if you're learning something, apply the learning quick and like do it in a low risk way. So a lot of people come thinking of us as a landing page builder. Obviously it's so much more than that, which we just talked a little bit about that coherence.
Shreyas (27:42.222)
Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Alex McEachern (27:55.324)
velocity, surface area are the things that we care a lot about. I'm putting you on the spot here. I'm gonna ask a question that I definitely didn't prepare you for ahead of time. As we think about those areas of value, what's something that we're cooking up, we're thinking about on the product side that you're really excited on how it plays into that?
Shreyas (28:03.822)
Hahaha.
Shreyas (28:18.766)
I think that...
I'll give you two answers to this, right? Answer one is, I think we're thinking of a bunch of stuff to actually make it easier to do this experimentation. So, you know, often I get asked the question, hey, this is great that I can spin up 50 of these and 100 of these. How the hell do I actually manage this? Am I running 100 experiments simultaneously? Like, I mean, do I know which ones to promote, which ones to not? And so I think a big area of investment that we're
Alex McEachern (28:48.764)
Yes.
Shreyas (28:57.712)
trying to do is like actually just make it easier to run these things at scale and so like examples include running experiments like one experiment across a large number of your shops right and so then and so now you can you don't have to worry about
pointing enough traffic to a single shop when Facebook is controlling how much traffic goes and stuff like this and like getting to stats, et cetera. So there's a bunch of tooling around making sure that you can actually do experimentation at scale and then understand the data and then like proactively notify you when.
hey, you should probably be either running an experiment in a certain part of the funnel or promoting an experiment that you actually already have going given it has reached some level of confidence. So I think this is something that we haven't talked about a whole lot, but is a very real issue in this brave new world of experimenting at velocities. Like how do I just operationally do this? I think that's one which I'm very excited about. I think the second piece that...
I am very excited about is that we're starting to do a bunch of stuff on email and SMS channels. And turns out that consumer behavior is not the same. And this is just a bunch of things that we're learning. And so as I said, hey, one year ago, I wouldn't have been saying all of these things because I didn't know them. I'm excited about what we're going to learn about the consumer behavior and ways in which we can add value and the ideas that brands come with. But also, fundamentally, you actually, in some cases, know who the person is.
And so the potential of the level of personalization that we can push to in a known context versus an anonymous context is just dramatically different. And so I think building towards that world where you can truly just have a completely different experience that's not really constrained in any way based on...
Shreyas (30:46.19)
with the person is interesting. So those are probably the two that I would probably describe as, they're not like specific features, but they're like rather themes of things we're investing into right now over the next three to six months.
Alex McEachern (31:00.508)
Those are two of the areas I'm most excited about as well, for sure, because to date, we've always kind of hooked ourself up to that ad experience. But realistically, we don't need to be very specific that, hey, this came from Facebook, this came from TikTok. What we need to be concerned with is a click happened, you turn the attention into interest, and then like...
will take it from there, whether it happened on Facebook, whether it happened in an SMS campaign or an email campaign. Being able to tailor the experience is important no matter where the click came from. You put all this effort into getting someone to click, make sure you're getting the most out of it. We don't care where it came from.
Shreyas (31:29.326)
That's right.
Shreyas (31:44.59)
That's exactly right. That's exactly right. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I think I severely underestimated the amount of traffic that people generate from email and SMS campaigns. And I guess it's just, you know, people are sending 20, 30 touches a month out, right? And you can get serious traffic off of that. And like always a priori, the reason why we started with that, one is because acquisition's hard and it felt like the bigger problem to solve.
But also second, I think when you're building tools that work at scale, you need scale. And the easiest place to get scale a priori seemed to be ads. And that's of course true. But I think we're learning that, hey, actually there's a bunch of stuff on the email and SMS side which operates at absurd scale. And in some cases, much larger scale than ads for very low -priced number of brands.
Alex McEachern (32:20.06)
Yes.
Alex McEachern (32:37.244)
One thing I used to say a ton is basically like, well, you can't, there's like a balance of acquisition and retention that happens at every single brand. And like you, like you said, you have to hit a certain scale when you can start to like really ramp your retention investment. And like, it's actually a lot later than a lot of people think. Like you, you need a, you need a good amount of scale to be able to like hit my email campaigns, hit those SMS campaigns and have that be like super valuable.
Shreyas (32:51.054)
Yeah. Yeah.
Alex McEachern (33:04.668)
Now, it's not saying you can't get value out of like a small list. Obviously you can, but like it's not just it's just not going to give you the same bump as the acquisition side of this, like the advertising dollars you're putting into it.
Shreyas (33:13.998)
Totally, totally, totally, totally.
Alex McEachern (33:17.98)
All right, this has been fantastic for our listeners that want to follow along with you. You've been dropping great wisdom on LinkedIn. People should definitely be following you on LinkedIn. Where else can people interact with you?
Shreyas (33:26.574)
I'm sorry.
Shreyas (33:31.566)
Dude, like I mean, when Rabah joined the company, he was like, dude, are you like a social ghost? And the embarrassing answer is yes, I have historically been a social ghost because I've hated, I used to hate posting stuff publicly. Like I'm very comfortable and confident offering a point of view in a smaller setting, but I always, I don't know. This is just never something I did. But I'm.
As with anything, you've got to learn and grow. So yeah, start with LinkedIn. I'll probably get on the Bird app soon. I think I was talking to Lex on Twitter and she was...
shocked to see me respond to something. Yeah, exactly. All caps, Shreyas, you're on Twitter. This might be my first post, but I'm going to try to get out there on Twitter, definitely on LinkedIn. But otherwise, yeah, anybody who wants to, anybody's free to email me as well, I actually do respond. Shreyas at firm .commercy .com and would love to chat with anybody who wants to talk about any of the stuff we just jammed on.
Alex McEachern (34:12.764)
She's like, who is this?
Alex McEachern (34:39.804)
Amazing, I'm not a social ghost, but I definitely am not as active as other people here. And I got called out by Rob the other day. It's like, you need to tell the people where to follow you, man. Where can people get ahold of you? So if anyone wants to interact with me on the Bird app, it's Alex MCEA. I am on LinkedIn as well. And make sure to subscribe to Vermont Friday so you get all the musings on what's going on here at the company.
Shreyas (35:07.726)
Amazing.