eCommerce (R)evolution with Marco Marandiz from Elliot

Kristen:

Hey, what's up Marco. Thank you so much for being on the show today. How are you doing?

Marco:

I'm doing well. Thank you for having me. It's been a long time coming. I feel like we've been kind of beating around the bush here for awhile, so let's get to it.

Kristen:

I know. We've been going back and forth on Twitter, kind of talking this up. We're like, "Ooh, we got cool stuff coming." Now we're doing it and I'm excited. Just to start off, I think everybody who listens to this podcast probably knows who you are, but for those who don't, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're working on these days?

Marco:

Yeah. So my name is Marco Marandiz. I work for Elliot and I'm the head of marketing there. I've been doing a lot of stuff recently, but my little brief history is I went from software engineering into product management at consumer tech companies. And then I left and did some consulting. Then I moved into DTC and was consulting there and did a lot of interesting stuff. Met the Elliot team and decided to join officially about two months ago. But yeah, it's really exciting. We're doing some cool stuff and I'm just really excited to dive into it with you.

Kristen:

Yeah. We're going to dig into the Elliott stuff in just a second. I do have to ask, do you think that there's a correlation between your past and kind of engineering and then product management? Do you think it led you into DTC in a really interesting way?

Marco:

Yeah, it's actually been ... I don't even know how to say it. It's been a journey that seems nontraditional, even in the techie space. I wouldn't necessarily consider DTC techie. It's kind of like tech [inaudible] as a platform. But coming from software engineering and product management, every touch point that we have with customers is online. Every single thing is an app. It's a website. It's marketing through paid acquisition channels. So we cared a lot when I was at Capital One, when I was at Expedia, we cared a lot about every digital touchpoint and making sure that the messaging from the advertising and our emails was the same stuff that when you clicked through on the site, it all made sense. It was coherent. And then now checked out, you got a good email that actually told you what happened.

Marco:

And then we would do things like, "Maybe we should change the copy here to say this slightly different thing than that thing." And we'd see like a 3% lift in conversion. And those things are amazing. But when I started consulting with DTC brands, they're like, "Oh, I got a logo and I got a good product. That's enough. Right?" And I was like, "No, there's a lot more that goes into this to make a digitally enabled experience really pop."

Marco:

So you can have a good product, but if you're selling a story online that doesn't match up with the product that they're going to get at their door, then you're kind of letting them down in one way or another. Either you're overhyping the product online and underdelivering with the goods or you're underhyping it online and the goods blow them out of the water. [inaudible] So for me, consulting was really an easy transition because I was like, "I got all this experience in digital product. I actually know all the technology that powers all these experiences." And I could just give some quick hitting wins for a lot of brands that I was working with. So I didn't feel especially qualified, but there's nobody talking about practically, how do you build great eCommerce experiences online? So I was able to help really easily. And it kind of gave me an opportunity to build a platform around that aspect of operations in direct to consumer businesses.

Kristen:

Yeah, it's super interesting because I have a very similar past that before I got into DTC, I was doing just specifically B2B SAS marketing. And it was all around the same stuff. We were talking about retention in the SAS space. And it's funny, I just had a guest post of mine that I wrote last year at some point kind of came back and got republished. And I'm reading it and I was like, "I was writing this stuff two years ago for the SAS space." And now it's just, I'm just rewriting it for eCommerce because it's the same idea that SAS really gets the idea of kind of like doing all these digital touch points, making it very cohesive, because that's where the entire product lives.

Kristen:

DTC I think is just now kind of coming around to the idea of just because we have a physical product doesn't mean that the online experience doesn't have to be kind of a product and experience in and of itself. And I find it so interesting that you had that past. Because when I saw that, I was like, "Oh, we're going to connect on this because that's how I look at things just because of my past in SAS and B2B marketing instead of eCommerce marketing."

Marco:

Yeah. I would say that for direct to consumer as a space, the DTC space, space, industry. I don't know. Whatever you want to call it. The whole thing is pretty nascent as far as good content and general understanding that there are best practices. There's a lot of debate around stuff, but coming from consumer tech or coming from SAS, there is more than enough content, blogging content, newsletter that you can just absorb all the time.

Marco:

I worked at an Expedia company that had 75 product managers. Most of them were older than me, more experienced than me. I just happened to, through some other content that I had written before, I got hired by the CEO and worked directly under him to work on a lot of building out apps, doing a lot of global activations and stuff like that.

Marco:

So it was really interesting, but I was like, "I'm not really that experienced in this space. There are so many people that are so much smarter than me." And after two years at this company, I was like, "Am I even good at what I do?" And then I left and I was like, "Oh my God, there's so much opportunity over here that nobody's even looking at." It's just, honestly, I would say this for anybody listening like, "Oh, I don't know if I'm qualified for this," you'll find your niche. You just believe that you actually have value. And if you know your shit, you'll get there. You just got to kind of look around a little bit. And I mean, it took me quitting my job and jumping from one consultant game to another for six months to really land in the space that made me stand out with the way that I can communicate, with my experiences.

Marco: 

So yeah, it's been an interesting transition. But I wouldn't say that we're necessarily exceptionally smart. We're just in the right space at the right time to say things people need to hear. And yes, I am more experienced in some aspects than maybe a lot of DTC founders or leaders of these companies in maybe the eCommerce space or like digital product experiences. But that's just where I'm at right now. So yeah.

Kristen:

Yeah. So what was it about kind of the DTC space that has made you really stick with it for as long as you have?

Marco:

The opportunity to help honestly. I was kind of hungry for that when I left my last gig. I was working at a company that was doing $13 billion a year in sales. And yeah, I could do a lot of stuff there, but everything took six months to kick off and you make some conversion improvements and they have huge financial impact. Like, oh, half a billion dollars annually. But then I don't feel it when I just get my regular salary and my 10% bonus that is pretty much guaranteed. And there's no skin in the game really.

Marco:

So when I was able to help direct consumer businesses, it was like, well, I was always interested in the brand side, but I didn't realize that I'd been working on brand in a different way with thinking about digital product and communication and user experience. And that all actually plays into the brand about how easy is it to use? Are you creating friction in places where you don't want people to use that feature as often? There's a lot of consumer psychology that goes into building digital experiences. So when I looked at direct to consumer, I was able to help these businesses really easily by saying like, "You should just do these things. Don't ask questions, just go do it and it will help." I mean, that's not trying to be condescending or paternal I guess or maternal in that way. But just like, yeah, these are just best practices that have been vetted in another space, but because direct to consumer and the media buying space and all of that, it's highly measurable, but it's measurable on the things that have a direct correlation with financial gain in that moment.

Marco:

But there's a lot of other things that actually, through user experience, can actually build brand equity and things that aren't necessarily as measurable. And that's the thing that I found really interesting is that my conversations and the stuff I started writing online about brand, which I was just thinking was product, like digital product, ended up being people like, "You're a brand marketer." I was like, "I guess."

Kristen:

I guess so.

Marco: 

"I guess if that's what you want call it, but it's just doing the things and caring about the customer experience at every touch point." And that's really what branding is. It's actually thinking about which channels and what tone of voice and what is the purpose of each one of these channels for my customers and how do I play with them, tweak them and adjust them so they're actually valuable to them and create some tension in relationship between my product, my business, and my customer? Maybe that's a more technically minded perspective on brand marketing, but for me, it's very practical. I'm like, "Okay, I'm looking at these channels and that this channel is flooded. And the only way that we can stand out there is to either just completely not do it at all or do a completely inverse relationship on this channel." There are a lot of ways to mix and match the way that you engage with your audience. And I think that's important to think about not being everywhere, but being where you need to be.

Kristen:

Yeah. Being in the right places at the right time. It's funny you bring up kind of the brand marketer thing, because when I started getting into DTC, just because of my background, same as you, is always how I thought of things. I mean, I wrote a post in SAS a year and a half ago that literally just turned prevention throughout the customer journey. And it was an infographic where I point out all these moments that like, "Okay, are you staying brain consistent here? How about here?" And so I got kind of put in the camp of brand marketer as well really fast. And I mean, I'm kind of on the same page where I'm like, "Yeah, you can call it that. Or I think it's not different from performance marketing per se." It's just, how can we make it all work together in one holistic experience for your customer? Because that's going to build brand equity, customer loyalty, customer attention, and then everything else is going to follow that.

Marco:

Yeah, I think, like I was saying, it's kind of a young world, this DTC space. And I mean, we've seen this pendulum swinging of brick and mortar to fully online to now starting online so you can get into brick and mortar. Then like, "Oh, Target's playing into this and Walmart and neighborhood goods." And there's all these different players [inaudible] toeing the line or actually is [inaudible] both sides of online and in store experiences. And the idea of a store has changed as well.

Marco: 

So now if you're looking at all this across a multiple channels, digital channels, as well as physical spaces, the way that we can communicate with our customers and really tie together every experience to be coherent, to be something that is a value add at every touch point instead of independent experiences. I think that's just something ... It's not even different than it maybe was 20 years ago. It's just the technology and the data that we can tie together has allowed us to look at it in a holistic way. And we're just, we're maturing in our understanding as a community in the DTC space.

Kristen:

Yeah. I think you just ... I'm going to transcribe this episode and then just call it the gospel. You just laid out everything I'm constantly talking about in such a perfect way. So I want to kind of talk to you about Elliot. I'm interested to hear kind of one, can you give us a little bit of background on Elliot and how it became a thing? And then also really, what was it when you looked at the platform that made you go like, "Okay, I want to work on this and I want to work on this full time"?

Marco:

Yeah. Okay. So let's start with what is Elliot and kind of why I was attracted to it.

Kristen:

Yeah, I just asked you like, four questions.

Marco:

Actually, we'll go back a little bit. I'll give the story. It's actually a little interesting. And I got to say this now. Dinners are the shit. If you want to connect with people, if you want to have an impact in your space and your community, have a dinner where you're not pitching your product or anything, you just want to connect with people. Because that is how I built all the relationships that I have right now. And the reason why I've built a community and people want to follow up with me and call me and give me opportunities that I just never would have even seen is because of dinners.

Marco:

So in July I hosted [inaudible] in New York, I hosted a dinner and I invited a bunch of people that I thought were really interesting in this space. And I've been engaging with them online and they have a lot of followers that say interesting things. And I invited nine other people. And those people have become just really close. One was Sergio, the CEO of Elliot. The other one was Clayton Chambers who's now the head of growth at Elliot. I also invited Helena from Houzz, Paul Munford from Lean Luxe, Ben Witte from Recess, Reza from Shoelace. Nick Sharma was there. And I don't know. I was like, "I don't know. These people are saying a lot of shit online. Let's see if they were actually about their shit."

Kristen:

That's the fam right there. That's the whole Twitter fam.

Marco:

Yeah, it was a free dope crew. It was 10 of us that had a dinner in the East village. And I mean, that crew is just, we've been tight and we help each other. And what happened, so basically I met them there. Or I talked to them online, but they all came to the dinner and we connected. Sergio was kind of being real quiet about what he's doing. And he's kind of humble. Didn't say much about Elliot. He wasn't saying anything at all actually.

Kristen:

Yeah. That's kind of how he was when I met him too. I was like, "Dude, you're doing some dope stuff. Come on."

Marco: 

And that's what I really appreciate about him when he's like, "Okay. So, Hey, why don't you come hang out with me here?" And then he asked me a little bit later, "Hey, can you join as an advisor?" I thought, "Okay, sure. I'll join you as an advisor." And then I started looking at what he's doing. I said, "Okay, I'll invest a little bit of money." So I came on as an angel. Then he said, "Hey, actually, can you help me with some consulting stuff here, here, and here?" So I helped them with that. And then I was like, "My God, this platform is sick. How do I join this?" And then we launched the storefronts and product on Product Hunt in October. And then I joined as head of marketing in December with Clayton. We actually started the same day, but I think he signed his paperwork before me. So he's officially employee number one and I'm number two.

Marco:

So I don't know. We just started working together. And the interesting thing is, so Clayton comes from this ... My God, I'm actually getting completely off track, but I don't even care. I'm going to keep going.

Kristen:

That's good. I love it.

Marco:

Clayton from this fashion background and content background. He was on Instagram building ... He was one of the first men's clothing blogs back before it was the idea of Instagram that it is today. He was doing that stuff. So he's really in the fashion and consumer space. So you can check out his Instagram. He's got some dope swag. And then Sergio has been an eCommerce engineer for the last five or six years. He's also somebody that I call inevitable. He was a starting safety for again, when he played college football with [inaudible], he's one of those guys that's an expert in the best of what he does, no matter where he's at.

Marco:

So he was working with eCommerce. He had worked, he built the tech for Sonos, Toyota, Lexus, Chubbies, Crocs. He helped them all go international. Billions of dollars of sales on his tech alone. And then he was like, "I want to do something more product type." So he built that out into a productized version of the tech that he'd built over and over again for scale the brands that wanted to go international.

Marco:

The first version of Elliott, which he started building in 2017, it was really an enterprisey focused about getting you into all the international marketplaces. So getting you into [inaudible], getting you into ... I don't know. Amazon, like all these channels that you'd basically manage all your product information from one place. And it would distribute you across hundreds of marketplaces all over the world.

Kristen:

Yeah, it's like [inaudible] feed for your products.

Marco:

Yeah, pretty much. It was really enterprisey. And he was like, "I don't really like this. This doesn't serve what I want to do." And what he was trying to do is really help anybody who has an idea has an audience and knows how to market to get their product in front of people and let them make sales. And the way that we've talked about Elliot is it's a platform for technical marketers. So a technical marketer is somebody who understands the data, who understands how to get their product in front of people, but they don't want to spend ... I mean, I know Shopify is supposed to easy, and it is. Technically you can set it up in a day and start selling stuff. But if you really want to have the brand experience, you want to have all the customization features that you want, you kind of got to set up for two to three months.

Marco:

At the dinner that we had yesterday for Elliot, talked to somebody who said, "Yeah, we've been working with an engineer for three months. We're not technical. And we don't actually know any of the stuff. Like what is eCommerce? We don't really know what it is. We have 200,000 followers on Instagram. We are influencers ourselves, and we want to sell our product to them. We don't want to set up 30 different apps. We don't want to optimize and customize stuff." All of that stuff was baked into Elliot from the go.

Marco:

So what Elliot is is it's a global eCommerce platform that provides you shipping labels, packing slips, HS classification, duties, customs forms, all of that stuff. You don't have to worry about how am I going to ship this? How much is it going to cost? You get a no-code visual builder, a landing page builder. You can upload your products. You can assign your own domain. You can make it your own brand. And it's completely free to sign up and use. It just cost 1% of sales. So that way, as you scale, we scale. We grow together. We're incentivized to help you succeed. But you don't have to worry about all the logistics on the backend. All the stuff that we knew we wanted, "I want an email capture. I want analytics. I want an exit intent," all that stuff, we're building those marketing tools into the platform, baked in, instead of you having to plug in third party apps.

Marco:

So all of that to say the platform is built for people who have audiences or want to build audiences and know how to get in front of people and want to focus on making a great product and communicating their story clearly to their customers. That doesn't really exist right now. Now it does, but it didn't exist. And what we've been trying to do ... And that's really what excited me about it. It was like at 1% of your sales, it allows a business in North America to grow from scratch without having to pay for three to four months of Shopify. It's like their monthly subscription fees, plus all the other apps and you're paying for this stuff and you haven't even made a sale yet. Right? Okay. So that's expensive for a start up.

Marco:

And now think about if you're in Nigeria and you are making all your sales through WhatsApp and you're sending payment links back and forth. Well, you would like to have a Shopify store, but the buying power in Nigeria is 20% of the American market. So now when you're paying for a Shopify subscription, that $30 Shopify subscription is actually more like $150 a month because you don't have the purchasing power there. So it's actually limiting to your ability to start a business. And for these emerging markets in developing countries, you actually ... I mean, that's going to stop you from getting off the ground. And entrepreneurship is pretty vital to the ecosystem of life. Like here, we can just, "I need a job," and you go to Starbucks and you can just whatever, right? I'm talking to here in the States, North America. But in other parts of the world, you need to make your own shit happen.

Marco:

And that's what's exciting about Elliot is that at 1%, no matter where you are in the world, we can help you succeed with giving you the same tools, the same enterprise tools that let you ship across borders, let you ship internationally, get you get a visual builder up and running, don't have to deal with the complexity of the back office. You just get up and you get going, regardless of whether you're a startup in Africa or you're a venture backed startup in New York.

Kristen:

Yeah. I mean, you're giving people the same opportunity to find entrepreneurship and to find success through it. You don't have to hit some level of, this is such a trigger word, but privilege or status or location or the perfect fate coming together where you can start this business. You guys are giving power back to people to actually invest in themselves in a way that doesn't lead them to be in this panic state of having to pay for things before they're making the money back.

Marco:

Yeah. I mean, even now, so I'm full time on Elliot and I still have my consulting business up. I'm not really doing much there right now because this is really crazy. It takes a lot of time, but-

Marco: 

I'm a little busy. But every day I get like, "Oh, Typeform just charged me $30. Pipe Drive just charged you $30." I'm like, "Damn, I don't want to pay for this." And I think about it. For somebody who is starting a business, that has to do some B2B sales, that has to negotiate rates with FedEx and DHL and USPS and needs to optimize the weight of their shipping and know the dimensions of their product, and also manage social media, there's a lot going on. And honestly, most people just want to build their shit and get it in front of their customers and not worry about the logistics on the backend. So anyway, I don't want to beat a horse to death over and over and over again. But you kind of get what I'm getting at.

Kristen:

Yeah. I mean, it's as simple as, like I believe that if I wanted to, by how much I've investigated DTC and learned, I could probably launch and grow a somewhat successful DTC business that at least my family could live on. However, I could not go code 8 million things. I could never build the customer experience that I want because I don't have those technical skills. And it's really cool. I've even wanted to develop a blog. And I stopped because I get to a point in WordPress where I'm just like, "I don't want to do this. This isn't what I'm here for. I don't want to learn how to code just to get what I want to out in the world." So I totally feel this need because it's something that even I've run up to. And it's cool that you guys are giving that opportunity for people. I'm curious to hear if you think that desire is really what's kind of driving this no code revolution that's kind of happening.

Marco: 

Well, I think there's the gatekeeper mentality, the whole gatekeeper conversation. Like, "Oh, if you haven't gone to school for computer science, then you can't be an engineer. And then you can't really learn this stuff." But what we've done is give you the ability to use a no code visual builder, plug everything ... Everything is integrated through Zapier. So when you create a store, when you make a sale, all of that stuff can get routed to whatever third party tools you're using. It can connect straight to your Klayvio. It can go to, I don't know, whatever you're using. Airtable, Notion, whatever is connected on Zapier, you can make that happen.

Marco: 

So you can set up a store really easily. You have no code abilities. It makes people be able to automate systems and actually build businesses while being more capital efficient. So, yeah, I mean, I'm very bullish on what we're doing because it serves a need. And actually, so as a consultant, I first started out and I was like, "Yeah, I'll help these small brands. I don't really have much of a name. I'm just going to ... I'll run some Pinterest ads for you." I'll do whatever it is they needed help with. I'm technical and I'm smart enough. So I was like, "I'll do this." But then as I started going, I realized I could charge more money and do more strategic work. And now I have people coming to me like, "Hey man, I made $300,000 last year. Can I hire you as a consultant?" And I'm like, "My last client was paying me as much as your full month's revenue. You can't afford ... That sounds fucked up, but I don't want you to pay me so that you turn your strategic problems into financial problems. That's not what I want.

Marco: 

But actually joining Elliot allows me to help founders, help brands that say, "Look, I want to get up and running and scale my business. How do I do this [inaudible]?" Look, all that stuff I would recommend you to build on your landing page, make your experiences more streamlined. You don't have to be this crazy designer. You just got to have your logo, your color, your product images and your descriptions. You can upload those. Those are all the things I was going to say to you anyways. Make it simple. Make it clean. Put it up there. Because that's what I would say to people, but I wouldn't be able to actually help them do that. With Elliot, I could do that because the platform already services them for that.

Marco: 

And this is the one part about Elliot that, this is my personal thesis. And I think we're seeing this happening more and more. We're already seeing it in China right now is the decision to purchase is not happening on your website. So it's very cool that Everlane and Away and Warby Parker have these great customizable experiences and quizzes and nice parallax, blah, blah, blah. This stuff is happening all over your page. Awesome. But the person that bought a product saw it on social media. They heard a podcast ad. They heard the interview with the founder. They had some conversations with their friends. 

Marco: 

So the decision to make purchasing decisions happens at the top of the funnel. People aren't making decisions to buy on your website, they're making decisions to buy like on your social media site because that's where you're building relationships with your customers. So you want to make the experience to buy the product as simple and clean as possible with as little friction from gleaning on the pay to checking out, and Elliot gives you all of that stuff.

Marco:

Now, other platforms also do that, but we're trying to make it as easy as possible. We're providing instant payouts, so when somebody checks out, you get your money, your Stripe account right away. That's pretty good.

Kristen: 

Yeah, that's pretty nice.

Marco:

So instead of having to wait like two to five days for whatever platform you're using to release those funds to you, we give those things to you right away. We give you charge back guarantees. All of those things are great for people getting up and running, and the thesis is that your brand and the way you communicate with your customers is more important than the site experience.

Marco: 

Have you been in like Kanye site ever, Kristen?

Kristen:

No, I haven't.

Marco: 

It's trash. It's the worst thing.

Kristen: 

That doesn't surprise me.

Marco:

It's the worst thing ever. And Frank Ocean's site, it's hard to look at. I love their music, they're awesome and they do drops, and I'm sure they're selling millions of dollars of stuff every time they drop a product, but I don't actually care if it's hard to check out because I've already decided I'm going to do it. I'm already going to buy that product, and that's the type of relationship you want to have with your customer.

Marco: 

Who are the best storytellers right now? They're artists, they're musicians, the rappers, they're the best storytellers that connect with their audience and their audience is going to buy whatever they say they want them to buy. So if you're trying to build that brand relationship as a brand with your customers on these social channels, or through your music, or through collaborations and sponsorships, then you just want to make it as easy as possible because they've already decided before they got to your site.

Marco: 

As long as you don't completely throw them off when they land on the site, you're pretty good. So that's part of the thesis a technical marketer can sell to their audience and the technology should not be the limiting factors to success.

Kristen: 

Yeah. I love that because you're totally right, once you're getting into a checkout process, you've already made a decision 99% of the time, unless something weird happens then you already know you're going to buy that product. So I love the focus on brand. Now, I think we have a really cool thing we can dive into today and as you described it a little bit meta, but we have a cool opportunity and that you are currently at the very beginning of building a brand. And that's something that all of our listeners are doing.

Kristen: 

It's really the biggest question in D2C is, how do you build a brand from the ground up? And how do you make it this brand that when someone gets to your site, they're just going to buy because they know who you are? So I'd like to just dive into a little bit of how you're approaching branding, and audience building, and community building with Elliot.

Kristen: 

So when you day one you show up to Elliot, when you're looking at, okay, we got to build this brand up, what did you really start with? How did you approach this massive thing?

Marco:

Well, Sergio is no dummy, so he basically hired two guys that already have audiences in the direction- I have an audience, people like my Twitter threads which I just love write them and I don't really spend a crazy amount of time on them, but they do well. And then Clayton has his own audience as well, and Sergio is building his also.

Marco:

So we have a personal audience, and I will say this before I actually go too far into it, I think building a brand, being a marketer is completely contingent on your experience and your understanding of the market. It's not that you can be a marketer in B2B SaaS and all of a sudden be really good at, I don't know, marketing like a dentist office. You don't know the space, you don't know the industry and you don't know how to communicate with the customers or... Yeah.

Marco:

If you don't know how to [crosstalk] with the customers, understand their needs, then it doesn't matter what your experience is. So for me, my background; software engineer, product manager in consumer tech, D2C consultant, and now head of marketing for a software E-commerce platform that sells to direct to consumer founders.

Kristen: 

Came- came full circle. That's what it did.

Marco: 

Yeah. Everything I've done here, right?

Kristen:

Yeah.

Marco:

So I'm not a marketer, I don't even consider myself a marketer, but people think I am. I guess I am good at this, so it's okay. So anyways, what I mean there is when I'm marketing, when we're thinking about building brand and community for Elliot, it's based on the space we're in. I understand the community and I understand all of the different touch points to be able to communicate with them about the value that we're providing.

Marco: 

So what we're doing with Elliot is, and I'll just continue giving context as I go, but we're in the E-commerce technology space, but we're not just like an add on you. You can be used as an augmentation, but we're not just add on, we are actually a fully featured E-commerce platform. Now there are other E-commerce platforms, right? There's BigCommerce, Magento, Shopify, Molten, they just got acquired.

Marco: 

There's a lot of businesses in the space already, but I come from consumer. Clayton comes from fashion and consumer. Sergio has launched multiple brands as well as scaled existing billion dollar companies. We've all come from consumer background and I actually don't know how to market B2B software. I just have no idea what I'm doing there. I see it and it looks really boring and I want nothing to do with it.

Kristen:

Yeah, Internet's very boring.

Marco: 

So I look at like Shopify, and Shopify is a great platform, but to be honest, it was built like 10 or 15 years ago in a time when the investors didn't understand what E-commerce was going to look like. So they gave Shopify a lot of money and said, "Look, you're going to build this stuff out." But the Shopify was like, "I don't really know what an exit intent popup is, so I'm not going to bake that right into the platform. I don't really know when we're going to need email capture. I don't know when we're going to do all this stuff."

Marco: 

So they built a marketplace that allowed developers to come in and create third party apps to fill in the gaps. So then you paid for the core platform, Shopify and then you had plugged in 20 to 30 different apps that literally solve all your needs, and that's awesome, and it really worked well. But E-commerce has matured to the place where we know what needs to happen and Elliot just said, "Let's build this into Elliot as the core platform. Let's not make you have to pretend that you know what's going to work on what doesn't work."

Marco: 

Really the critical factor for success is your brand, right? We talked about this, so your brand and then a simple experience that hits the fundamentals hard. So as a marketer I'm like, "I'm not going to stand out from Shopify as on Google. I'm not going to be able to pay for ads on Google and beat Shopify." I don't have the budget for it.

Marco: 

I don't have the budget for going to E-commerce conferences and buying a $200,000 installation with like spotlights on it and some nice neon lights and... This is our space because those don't really create business, they're a signal. They're a signal to everybody around that you're an important business.

Marco:

I don't care because the important people that I care about are the ones that follow me. There's 5,000 people that are founders, executives, VCs in this space that know that I know what I'm talking about and they listen to what I have to say. Why would I go pay for a conference? Right?

Kristen: 

Yeah.

Marco: 

So as far as marketing goes for Elliot, we're building a direct to consumer brand around... Selling to E-commerce platform to our consumers, and those consumers are decision makers at direct to consumer businesses. They're investors, they're founders, they're executives, they're heads of E-comm, they're brand marketers. Those are the people that are making decisions for their company and we're building a brand that speaks to them.

Marco: 

We're building a community, we already have the following, but now we're building a community around that. So this is the angle we're taking is take like not selling to an enterprise. If you think about BigCommerce or Shopify Plus, they're marketing to the organization essentially. And everybody says, "Okay, well, here's the archetype, here is the customer profile of, make the purchase." But [crosstalk] they're marketing to an organization.

Marco: 

I'm marketing to the person that likes the way we communicate, that respects the irreverence and a little bit of the edginess that we have and says, "Look, these guys are doing something different." We're not building for now we're building for where E-commerce is going. Building for the future.

Marco: 

I don't know if you've seen that video of people in China who are standing in a warehouse in front of a pile of grapefruits selling stuff on TikTok or whatever it is.

Kristen: 

Yeah, yeah. Insanity.

Marco: 

That's a crazy video. China's years ahead of us as far as the integration between our phones and commerce. In many stores, there's no ability to use cash, you just have to use your phone. You do everything with a QR code. Elliot is trying to take a lot of those things and apply them to the American market in a way that makes sense and communicate with our customers, the founders and executives that we know what we're talking about.

Marco: 

Not only do we know that we can handle the technical stuff, which we do, but we also understand who you are. You're not a suit and tie square at a company that has no culture, and no vibe, and no feelings or personality, you're a real person.

Kristen: 

Yeah.

Marco: 

Yeah, you might wear a suit and tie occasionally, but really you have your own vibe, your own feel, you have your own way of carrying yourself and you want something that relates to you. So we're building a brand that is not going to be spending $200,000 on an installation at a conference. It just doesn't make sense. We can't actually break through the noise that way because if we go do that, then we're actually no different than any of the existing E-commerce platforms.

Marco:

So thinking about how I'm building the brand past this point of the approach and the strategy, it's the tactics of it. So we're talking about, I know that... Maybe we're getting around to it now, but this idea of retention and this idea of using the right channels for your audience.

Marco:

How would you feel... Maybe you've seen a little bit of the Elliot brand where irreverent, we are like a little tongue-in-cheek, we're like trolled Tobi a little bit on [crosstalk]-

Kristen: 

Yeah.

Marco: 

It would be really weird if I was like, "Hey guys, welcome to this week's episode of Elliot Podcast." Or like sending you like 300 or 500 word newsletter that you got to spend time reading. Those channels are super saturated and to be honest, I don't read any of the ones that the brands that I like send me. And I respect the brand, I respect their branding, but I actually don't care. I feel like it sounds a bit cold, but I don't care.

Kristen: 

But it's not cold, it's the reality of what every consumer is feeling. And we can beat around the bush and say, "Ah, that's a harsh way to look at it." Or we could just say, "This is the reality of the situation we're in. How can we deal with it?"

Marco:

Yeah. So I'm saying like, okay, there's email, there's podcasts, there's, I don't know, what else is there? Like just blogs, just having a blog online-

Kristen:

Yeah, blogs, videos.

Marco:

Okay, so video is an interesting thing and I'll get to that in a minute, but the email, blogs and podcasts are super noisy, super busy. The paradigm of email has not changed at all. Yeah, we added pictures but nothing else has really changed. So from a brand perspective right now, we're like, "Does that even make sense for us to be in that channel or should we be approaching Elliot's brand as an E-commerce platform like a media company?"

Marco: 

Okay, well, we've got people that follow us, they like to hear what we say, they actually want to meet us. They have people that will... I have to turn down coffee because I've had five today. [crosstalk]. Okay? I'm having meetings all the time with people that just want to work with us because they like what we're doing, like the way we carry ourselves, and they connect with it at a personal level, so I actually want to be creating content that is maybe educational on Twitter.

Marco:

I want to teach on Twitter, I want to inspire on Instagram, and I want to connect on YouTube. Connect in the way that like Gary V. connects with the uninspired entrepreneur. And Gary V. has his own thing, but his thing is he has content that is like he beats the same drum every day, which is you're sitting on the couch, and you're lazy, and you should get off your ass. But he does that across multiple channels, and he uses the same content, and he uses each channel independently to do different things.

Marco: 

Maybe he's not as nuanced as I would be, but I'm saying like on Twitter, people follow me because they like my threads, so I'm going to do video content from the experiences that we have on Twitter as well as transcribed some of the conversations I've had and put those on Twitter.

Marco: 

If we're onboarding an influencer or celebrity that wants to move their stuff onto Elliot, must film that whole day of us putting them on the platform, getting their products up and running, telling them the capabilities of our platform, helping them through a marketing strategy. That's all stuff that I'm doing every day with the people that I'm onboarding.

Marco:

But like the same reason I'm on this podcast and I'm telling you what I'm doing, and if people are going to take and pull whatever they'd got out of this and apply it to their own business, why don't I just do that all the time and share this across every channel? Shopify, I don't know, a big pivot here, hard pivot but, but Shopify-

Kristen:

Pivot.

Marco: 

... is a very faceless brand. Tobi's the face of Shopify and Tobi doesn't want to be the face of Shopify. Tobi would rather play video games than to run Shopify. Whatever. Totally good for him. I think he's at the point where he can chill a little bit. But as a brand, he's even said it, I remember listening to How I Built This. He was like, "Yeah, I'm not really wanting to be the face of the brand. I wish people would leave me alone."

Kristen:

Yeah, I remember that in that episode.

Marco:

And that's cool, but I don't think that you or the other D2C founders want to use a platform where they don't know who's going to answer their Intercom message, who's going to reply to them? If anybody going to answer the phone, there's nobody that they can hold accountable for any of the stuff that happens on this platform.

Kristen:

Yeah.

Marco: 

I already am working with these people every day and I won't be able to do it forever, but why not create a persona and experience a personality and actual face of the brand that's a real person. Not just me alone, but me, and Clayton, and Sergio, whoever else comes onto our team to have them or have all of us be a personality that you can connect with on a real level. So that is the way that we're approaching branding Elliot.

Kristen:  

I just got to interject and say, me too. This is the playbook that I watched you guys work out, and when I was getting into D2C I was like, "This is what it is, is we need people who are connecting with the audience and actually talking human-to-human and using that as a way to represent the brand."

Kristen: 

And just to divert us a second and then we'll go back, it feels like there's this consumer shift that's happening both in like our spaces where marketing is tech brands, but then also for D2C consumers, they're expecting a lot more of this. I don't know why this shift started, but even when you're buying from a D2C brand, you want to know the face of the founder. You want to know who's behind it. Pulling the curtain back, per se I think is a really big part of 2020 for D2C and moving forward.

Marco:

Yeah, I think that's just part of being human is... Well, if you think about brand, like brand maybe 50 years ago was really around safety and trust.

Kristen: 

Yeah.

Marco: 

Let's say like if you're going to the grocery store and you're like, "I don't know if I should buy this pack of flour, or this cookie, or this whatever." Betty Crocker, every time you eat it, you won't die of sickness. Great. Betty Crocker, I got it. I'm going to use that.

Kristen: 

Yeah, I'm stuck, good.

Marco: 

Yeah, but brand has evolved beyond safety and trust. I mean it's still safety and trust, but it's actually on a much more emotional and I think visceral level than practical decision making. It's become a way to that you can identify with an audience. You can see somebody in the airport with an Away bag and be like, "Ah, yeah, we're both of the same, whatever."

Marco: 

So I think thinking about brand like that has changed the way that we communicate with our customers across all channels. Across all industries, all channels. Brand is brand, whether you're B2B or you're B2C or your D2C, it's all brand. Like Costco could actually go and build a whole new professional services business around international, blah, blah, blah. I don't know. I don't really know what they would do there, but their Costco brand is a brand that is trusted and serves a certain demographic in a specific way.

Marco:

So the same way that we are trying to build Elliot's brand to connect with the founders of these brands, with the people that are making decisions, we want them to connect with us on a personal level as a person that transfers trust to the product that we sell, whether the product is a digital product or a physical product. Having a face, a real human face to see, a real voice to hear is meaningful, period.

Marco:

I don't think that's a hard thing to understand. I guess, it's not like a revelation.

Kristen: 

Yeah. It's not new and noteworthy idea.

Marco:

Exactly. Yeah. Anyways I don't know where we were.

Kristen: 

Yeah. Where we on this? We were talking about having a human face is not this new idea, but then I guess the thing is executing on that, especially at scale. You and I are talking about it and I feel like in both of our situations it's pretty easy to do this, to represent a brand as a person and have this face and deep connections.

Kristen: 

How do you start doing that as the numbers get bigger and as you have so many people coming in, you can't have these one-on-one conversations? Do you have like a plan for addressing this at scale?

Marco: 

Yeah. Yes and no. At scale, as you grow and you've got to rethink the playbook, but what we're really doing is there's a distinction between the way that we portray ourselves as like a face of the brand, people that you can emotionally connect with versus the way that we actually build our business.

Marco: 

I want to do this, connect with people on a personal level, do partnerships and collaborations with D2C brands. "Hey, any D2C brands that are cool and interesting, hit me up because I would actually love to do some cool project with you." Anyways. Besides doing the branding, the really consumer brand focus of SaaS software or SaaS platform, the... What was I saying? Besides doing the brand... Totally forgot we got to redo this.

Kristen: 

I feel like we both just completely lost focus.

Marco: 

What was I saying? What were were actually saying? I was talking about.

Kristen: 

What were we just talking about? Oh, oh, oh, scaling like the human side.

Marco:  

Oh yeah. Okay. So, yeah, besides doing the brand and consumer side, we also have our sales development reps and our customer success team that we're building out, which requires an actual team of people that will onboard big brands that want to move over or brands that are already grown domestically but are plateauing because they're reaching the edge of the country or they've hit their million customers and they don't really know how to go beyond that without going international.

Marco: 

Well, we bring them onto the platform and have real people doing that. But there's still that difference between a face, who you're connecting with as the brand versus the person that actually helps you do it. I say like Bobby Hundreds right from the Hundreds Clothing. He's the face, he's the brand. His name is actually part of the brand. He's adopted the brand name for his name, but all of that is like he's the face of it.

Marco: 

But you think he's actually going and negotiating each retail and relationship he has? No, he got a team that does that. And the relationship was built through the brand, but there's still a person that handles that business. And what we're actually wanting to do then is remake through our content, through our branding, be able to communicate and educate people who can self serve and get up and running.

Marco: 

And as you get to a certain size and you continue to grow, then you'll get more assistance as you continue. It's hard though because we're building a self serve platform for E-commerce entrepreneurs essentially. The problem with that is that if you have a bunch of people that sign up for a platform the first day and have never sold anything online, but have an audience and they have a product, they might not know what Google Tag Manager is, or they don't even know what the Pixel is, or they don't know how to actually run campaigns, or think through the difference between a product catalog and an experience.

Marco: 

All of these different pieces of the technical side of building an E-commerce business, I can't teach you that. That's the hard part about building a brand like this is I can't teach you how to build a company, but I can teach you how to scale on our platform. So what we're having to learn and adjust for is that we have big brands that are coming onto the platform that don't need handholding, but they do need help transitioning.

Marco: 

Like okay, I'm on Shopify and I want to move on to Elliot for this reason. Okay, great. Well, let's move your product catalog over and get all your promotion and everything in place and get you up and running. And I might take a week or two, three, four big businesses, and you've got to cut over one domain at a time or update your marketing materials and the links on your Facebook ads, whatever.

Marco: 

You might have to do all that and that requires some customer success reps to make that happen. But that's really hard to do when you're like, "I have done three orders ever. I've only sold this product three times and what is Google Tag Manager?" So this is the problem, which is like the people that want our help the most, the people that probably need our help the most are still learning E-commerce, and that's where I'm hoping that the brand and the content can be a way to learn through osmosis by absorbing the brand and sharing it across multiple channels where it's not just educational content on Twitter, it's entertainment on Instagram.

Marco: 

And then also like an episode that you're waiting for and we're dropping features and stuff. It's a thing that you engage with. And this is actually, let's cut back, let's go to retention. This is where I was talking about building brand and using channels wisely. Because for us, email might just be a bloated channel that doesn't get enough engagement or the engagement that it gets is not the engagement we want.

Marco: 

Actually would rather say... I think about this a lot actually. So a lot of companies will use email marketing just to get in front of their customers every week and do a new... I don't know, a new campaign, a new code, just like some update. But you know what's funny is, if say for example, I'm launching a feature for my SaaS platform in the month, E-comm... Not even E-comm, but just any SaaS platform will say, "Okay. Hey, in a month we're going to launch this feature. Hey in three weeks. Hey, in three weeks, we going to launch this feature."

Marco: 

And I'm like, "Oh my God, just come on [crosstalk]"

Kristen: 

Yeah, just come on.

Marco: 

I much rather it'd be like, "I'm not going to use any email. I'm going to keep you engaged with the brand through content that's interesting. Hey, this really interesting merchant on our platform that has an audience and you might know of them is doing something interesting. Let's just share the content of what we're doing." Boom, we launched this feature.

Marco:

That's interesting. I didn't actually know that was coming, but now it's cool and engaging. And then instead of teasing for four months, you're repeating for four months, for four weeks. So teasing for four weeks before saying, "We're going to do this thing," you repeat and educate after the fact.

Marco: 

Drops are way more interesting than teasing a product launch for a month.

Kristen: 

Yeah.

Marco: 

That's why we see this with like consumer brands like Supreme. They don't announce when it's going to happen. You might hear through the grapevine that there's going to be a drop, but you don't know for sure.

Kristen: 

Yeah. They're not doing the fake anticipation buildup, which for some brands might work, but we approach this similarly at Churn Buster is we don't give hard timelines for people if they ask for a feature. If we know we're building something, we have this blanket rule that we're not going to give an exact timeline because what then happens is either we've set their expectations to something where we meet it and it's just good, you met it or we don't meet it and it's a big disappointment.

Kristen: 

And just thinking about it in terms of like, okay, we know we're building for the right customer because like you guys, we're very focused in on our customers. We care about connecting, we care about learning about them so we can help them in a better way. And so then when we do drop things, we can explain why we built it, how people are using it, the philosophy behind it.

Kristen: 

We have a lot of storytelling that goes into that, which I think just for listeners who are like, "You guys are talking so much about SaaS." Everything we're talking about is basically really, really applicable to your D2C business. Maybe instead of doing a really big lead up to a product launch, know that you're building something really good because you've built it based on customer feedback and community, and then find interesting ways to drop it where it's like, "Hey look, this is a huge surprise and delight for you. This is how we did it. Here's a bunch of storytelling."

Kristen: 

It seems to work a lot better or is starting to work a lot better because I think some of these build up anticipation campaigns are getting a little overused and it seems almost fake for a lot of customers now, or they're just like, "Come on. You have a [crosstalk]-"

Marco: 

Yeah, the thing that I remember, and maybe I'm missing this because I'm not an avid follower, but I remember Away did like a minions partnership at one point and then have yellow suitcase with like some eyes on it and I was like, "That's interesting." But for them, I don't remember seeing anything about it. I just got like an email was like, "Tomorrow we're launching minions." And I was like, [crosstalk].

Marco: 

I didn't buy it, but it was cool that they just launched something. I know they've been working on it for a while, but to see that happen so quickly and it doesn't need to be... Not everything needs to be... [inaudible] let's say like this. There are opportunities to do product launches as brand moments that aren't necessarily crazy revenue drivers.

Kristen: 

Yeah.

Marco: 

Building loyalty with an audience of parents that have children that like the minions, when they see that, "Oh my God, birthday, holidays are just coming up, I'm going to buy that product." Now, they are the customers, now they're going to see your product more when they're going around. That's actually a brand moment, and even if Away had only sold a thousand of those products or less, those people are now fans of partnerships or collaborations with Away, and it has a broader impact than just that profitable moment.

Marco: 

So brand marketing is something that is hard to quantify and it's an art. This is not a science, you can't optimize brand marketing, you have to feel it. And oh my God, I hate saying that because [crosstalk] to me like I'm an engineer and a product manager, and I'm a critical thinker and an analyst, but if you have the skills behind it, then you can apply metrics to systems around the way that you understand your brand engages with your customers.

Marco: 

Like I had mentioned, I don't know if podcasts will make sense for Elliot, not that I don't think it would be listened to, but is it the way that I want our customers to engage with Elliot?

Kristen: 

Yeah.

Marco: 

Right?

Kristen: 

Yeah.

Marco: 

And so there's this idea of like omnichannel, and like a year ago it was really sexy and people are still talking about it. I think omnichannel is played. You got to pick your battles because I don't want to see a brand on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, podcasts, blogs, in New York Times, in Washington Post, and in TechCrunch, and is going through VC emails, and, and, and, and, and.

Marco: 

It's like oh my God, they're everywhere and I actually don't care anymore. Versus-

Kristen: 

Yeah. It's too much.

Marco: 

Yeah. Where are your core customers? Where do they exist? And where do you want to engage with them? Because for me, my audience, my whole audience, actually my business and everything and how I got off the ground was through Twitter. That's one channel that I owned it. I went from no followers to 5,000 followers in six months.

Marco: 

Now, that's not a lot, I'm not like flexing there, but 5,000 in the D2C community is pretty [crosstalk]-

Kristen: 

Yeah.

Marco: 

I got some influence, right?

Kristen: 

Pretty hefty number, especially in six months too.

Marco: 

And that's what it's like, you can own a few channels and build relationships and community there using the tactics that are native to that channel. For example, every person that followed me for my first 1,000 followers and beyond, I DMed every single person. I saw somebody yesterday who was like, "Oh I got one of your automated DMs when I first followed you." I was like, "No, that was me."

Kristen: 

Yeah, that's not automated.

Marco: 

He was like, "Well, it was very specific. I was actually impressed because you were like, 'Hey, thanks for liking my thread about this print.'" And I was like, "Yeah, that was me. I did that." Because what it did was it gave me 1,000 true fans that were interested in my content that then engaged with it and shared it. Now I'm at the point where I don't even really know what to do with Twitter at this point, but this is on my personal brand side, but use the channel natively.

Marco: 

Don't try to find hacks, be smart and be a consumer of the channel you're promoting across. I am not a consumer of the email. The only emails I open are from people that email me with my name in the title or my name in the front line and they're actually talking to me about something real.

Marco: 

I'm not actually going to open any of your... Also people stop subscribing me to your newsletters without asking me because I'm going to unsubscribe and I'm very unapologetic about it. It's actually quite [inaudible], I don't care. That's actually ruining your brand.

Kristen: 

Immediately.

Marco: 

These are things that are ruining your brand, stop doing it. Connect with your customers when they give you permission.

Kristen: 

Yes. And on their terms and how they like it. And then also as you're continuing to engage with customers, make sure you're actually seeing how that relationship is being developed, a lot like that Bombas thread, I posted where it was, when I signed up for their emails, I actually really wanted to buy Bombas socks, 25 days later and I wanted absolutely nothing to do with the company.

Kristen: 

I never want to own a pair of socks simply because their emails were so just hammering me with the same thing over and over again and it wasn't applicable to my journey. And it got to the point where one bad touch point and one channel that your customers are not ready for can completely ruin an entire relationship.

Marco: 

Yeah. Again, this is where I'm saying like as far as brand marketing goes and if you listen to this podcast, you know about brand marketing because we're building D2C brand probably.

Kristen: 

Yep.

Marco: 

Brand marketing is important and it's about connecting on a personal level and owning and engaging with the channels in a way that your customers want to be engaged with. And it's as simple as that, there's no other way to approach it. You can't hack it, you can be creative but you can't... Don't use Buffer. Sorry, Buffer. Don't use Buffer for scheduling your posts because it's not... It just says, "Posted by Buffer," and I immediately disregard it.

Marco: 

Okay, this is me, I'm in the industry, but it's not like people on Twitter are dumb. Everybody knows what Buffer is. If you don't have a real person posting it, then... Oh, it depends on your audience, let me be fair here. Maybe you have an audience or a customer base that doesn't actually care about that.

Marco: 

For me, if you're actually trying to build real community and engagement with your audience on Twitter or Instagram, then you use those channels natively. You have to. You have to make content that makes sense for that channel.

Kristen: 

Because it-

Marco: 

Make vertical content for Instagram, make horizontal content for YouTube and pull it over [inaudible].

Kristen: 

Because inauthenticity, inauthenticity, hoof that was a hard one, is very easy to spot on social channels even down to... And not just like shallow level of is the copy underneath your Instagram not authentic to your brand, all the way down to, was this post scheduled three weeks in advance? It doesn't feel very authentic to me as a customer.

Marco: 

Yeah. It's all lessons that... And this is like, you start to see it. I've seen it with the brands I've been working with. I've seen the way they carry themselves and some of them do a great job, some of them don't. But you start get a feel for what works and what doesn't, and what works for your business. Like I said earlier, podcasting... Marketing, being a good marketer is new loss to your experience.

Marco: 

I have this specific experience for this community with my technical background that allows me to see the way that we should be communicating with our customers. And honestly, I don't know what it's going to look like in six months, but right now the amount of energy, the feeling in that room yesterday at my dinner was so good that now I'm doing something right because people are coming.

Marco: 

We had zero cancellations for a 30 person dinner.

Kristen: 

Wow.

Marco: 

In New York where there's a lot of [inaudible] to do. When you know your audience, and you're communicating to them, and you're actually providing value, and being creative, and interesting, and whatever, then you'll get engagement that is meaningful. You'll get engagement that works and that builds on top of itself.

Kristen: 

Yeah. And it's not always maybe not going to be reflected in some perfect number on a spreadsheet, but like you said, there's going to be some sort of feeling, and I'm really enjoying this conversation because it's so self-reflective. This is what happened to us at Churn Buster too in the last year or so was that we started getting into D2C. We started talking to our E-commerce customers and things just started buzzing.

Kristen: 

And we didn't take a moment to sit back and look really at the numbers until the end of the year. And then we looked at it and we were like, "This is our best set of customers. What we were feeling was right. We can really add value here." And then even beyond that, the reason this podcast exists, the reason we're doing meetups, the reason we're trying to connect and have people meet the team, and meet me, and we're doing these meetups.

Kristen: 

Marco, that's how you and I officially met.

Marco: 

Yeah, I know.

Kristen: 

The reason we're doing it is because we did one on a test. We thought, I think that there's value here and we have a community in San Diego. We did it and we had... We planned it in a week and we had 40 people show up. The energy in the room was insane. The entire company, we walked away and we were just all like, "Oh my God, this is it. There's so much passion here." We're as a team excited.

Kristen: 

And it's such a good example of like maybe there's not a data number to that that says, "Churn Buster, you should be building community first." But there was a feeling and there was something there in the brand feeling and the connection that we made that we were like, "This is 2020 now. This is what we're doing, this is where it is." And I think it's just an important point, especially on the customer experience and retention stuff.

Kristen: 

There's this huge argument of like, well, you can't track it, you can't optimize it. There are ways you can, but also sometimes you just have to go with gut feelings.

Marco: 

Yeah. And I'll say there's a difference between a startup that's early stage and late stage scaling, getting to billion dollar valuation. The speed at which a brand that is doing under a million dollars in revenue can move is insane. You can do collaboration, you could switch your brand up, you could switch your voice up. You don't have a big enough audience yet that it's not personal. And the people that are...

Marco: 

Okay. You don't have a big enough audience that when you engage your customers that they don't... Oh God, how do I say this? You're going to have to work this in.

Marco:  

At an early stage startup, your audience is still small enough that they're forgiving. And when you change your tone of voice, they're actually still fans of you and they like what you're doing. At a late stage start up, you have to protect your brand. And actually this defensive nature at a scaled brand is probably counter productive to your success because especially in D2C, the brand is personal.

Marco: 

It's connecting you as an individual on some personal level. I stay on an Away bag and yeah, there's all this stuff, but even when I travel, I see some people with an Away back, I'm like, "Oh, they're maybe cut from the same cloth a little bit." I don't know. I have no idea, but that's still playing the defensive there is about trying to maximize the upside while minimizing the downside, but a lot of this still comes down to embracing risk and gut when building a brand.

Marco: 

So I think at the smallest stage, brand is still personal. Brand can be forgiven if you're making mistakes and as you grow, you've got to find opportunities to still move fast. For example, if I was like, "Hey, I run another D2C brand and I want to collab with Glossier."

Marco: 

Going to be extremely hard to do, extremely hard because they've got an insane amount of customers, they've got storefronts, they've got a mailed in brand and a collaboration, which I'd actually be good and expand their audience and show that they're still cool and flexible is not really possible because you've got a team of strategists and executives that are trying to protect the system.

Marco: 

Like I said this earlier, the best storytellers I know are musicians. That's why you will buy any emerging, literally traveled to another city to watch a concert for somebody. You'll do that, but think about what a rapper does. Think about how many features are on an album. I don't know, if I'm Kendrick Lamar and I bring another rapper onto my track, I am allowing them to have their voice and say what they want to say in my environment next to me on my album for my audience.

Marco: 

That's actually a risk, but think about a 12 album track, only three songs go viral. Only three songs actually blow up and you know what happens to the rest of them? Nobody remembers.

Kristen: 

Yep.

Marco: 

Nobody remembers. Nobody remembers the mistakes. Remember when Steph Korey was being a little spicy on Slack last month and made her customer service rep stay late into the night?

Kristen: 

Yeah.

Marco: 

Nobody cares now.

Kristen: 

No.

Marco: 

We do on Twitter, maybe we as in like the community of people that care about brand and whatever, nobody else cares. [crosstalk] if you've heard about it, it's over, it's done. Mistakes get forgiven, even at scale. You trying to protect your brand at scale is not actually helping you, it's hurting you. Move fast, move relentlessly because that's where you build audience and that's how you grow.

Kristen: 

And it also shows your human side of the brand if you're willing to take risks, if you're willing to try new things and just keep pushing the boundaries for your audience. I think it's exciting and you're going to have a lot more forgiveness if you're doing that and trying things for your audience rather than just staying behind the curtain and doing the safe plays all the time.

Marco: 

Yeah, no, for sure. I completely agree.

Kristen: 

Well, we've talked for a long time and I think you and I could talk for like four hours, so we might have to bring you on for another episode later in the season, which we can definitely do. We got to do a couple of these because I pulled Twitter and we got so many good questions for you, which didn't surprise me.

Kristen: 

And so I got to ask you a few of these for the audience. You answered actually quite a bit of these as we were going, so that's really cool. This is something that I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this, especially as we're talking so much about the passion and... Oh my God, I did this last week too, authenticity of a brand, and your storytelling, and having a face to the brand.

Kristen: 

How do you do this when you have also a lot of D2C brands looking to outsource, to integrate with outside agencies? How do you work with an outside agency but also maintain that authenticity in your brand? Is it possible or is it something that you even really recommend these days?

Marco: 

It's completely possible, but it requires finding the right team, and vulnerability, and trust, and building alignment with your agent, with the agency or the team, whatever. For example, we are working with a team right now that is actually doing a lot of our creative work, doing posters for us, helping to actually redesign our landing page.

Marco: 

We spent, the core team at Elliot spent two days at my house in Austin thinking through branding exercises, recreating audience profiles, doing this over, and over, and over again. We shared that whole raw document with them and we filled out their thing. Then we had our onboarding, and then we trusted them to take their best shot and they [inaudible] out of the park.

Marco: 

But that only happens when you aren't treating your agencies as subordinates, but instead you're treating them as partners. Actually there's an agency in Austin called SocialWithin friend of mine, Faheem Siddiqi, you might've seen him on Twitter. He's a good guy, but he's just a bad ass. I've just seen him kill campaigns. His agency runs paid media for a lot of really dope scaled direct consumer businesses and he will turn down customers that don't align with his vision of where he wants to take his business.

Marco: 

If they don't have clear idea of where they want to go, then he's not going to work with them. That's the type of partnership mentality you need to be able to succeed by building relationships with your agents. You don't have to do everything in-house, and honestly, I don't have the skills to do everything in-house myself or hire people, I don't know what to look for, but I do know that if I trust somebody and I'm giving them flexibility to learn and experiment without...

Marco: 

Okay, I'll be fair, businesses are financial, you need to make sure that everything's working out for you, and I'm not taking away from that, but don't expect that you're going to go into a relationship and it's going to work out from the moment you start. That's rare that it happens. There will be mistakes, but there's also, you have to trust them as a partner. So that's my approach is that I don't work with anybody that I wouldn't work for.

Kristen: 

Yeah. Yeah. That's great advice. For sure, just the trust between both parties is huge. Okay. Let's see. Another one. What is the number one game changer you'd focus on in 2020 for brand building?

Marco: 

Consolidation of channels. Use less, do more.

Kristen: 

Oh, I love it. That's such a beautiful answer.

Marco: 

I won't say any more because I'm going to mess it up if I say more.

Kristen: 

You're like, "That's it. It's good. She said it was good. I've done."

Kristen: 

Okay. Let's see. This is a good question. With increased competition for customers who are tending to spend less time on social, CAC is only moving one way. It's getting more expensive, harder to get in front of people, so what do you think is the future of customer acquisition for digital brands?

Marco: 

That's a good question. So yeah, CAC is only moving one direction, people are spending less time on social. I think honestly it's coming down to community and offline events using physical spaces as conduits for digital growth. We have put on events at Elliot where we gave out $3,000 of hoodies.

Kristen: 

Man.

Marco: 

Okay? Embroidered hoodies that are Lulu and Buck Mason. This is not that cheap shit, whatever.

Kristen: 

No.

Marco: 

I'm flexing a little bit, but it's fun, it's cool to do. And we give it to people because we actually want to build relationships, and they go and they tweet about it, and they wear it around to their office. "Oh, was that on it? [inaudible] with Elliot." "Oh what's Elliot? I going to look that up." It's about taking physical environments, hosting great experiences.

Marco: 

You're not pitching them on selling your product, you're not even giving things away necessarily. You're finding common ground and allowing people to engage in an organic and authentic way, and that is where I think the future of acquisition is. You're not going to acquire a million customers through a 130 person dinner, but doing that and creating a tight knit engaged community that then becomes vocal advocates for your brand is how things will start.

Marco: 

And this is not new, Outdoor Voices did this. They did this already.

Kristen: 

Yeah. And this what they are, Outdoor Voices.

Marco: 

Yeah. Well, it's easier to spend money on Facebook, but regardless... Actually like fuck all of this, this has been happening. This has been happening for like 100 years. Good brands are person-to-person and care about the customer. Maybe we've talked about this before, but the whole Michelin star rating.

Kristen: 

Yeah.

Marco: 

Michelin tires needed to find a way to get people to use their tires and drive places, so they rated restaurants in the countryside with a star rating that you should go drive there. They understood their customer and gave them physical, real world experiences that created momentum around something that is not possible by running ads.

Marco: 

This has been the way it's been done, but we're trying to find shortcuts because we want to get rich tomorrow. We don't actually put in the work to create real brand experiences and audiences that care about what we're doing.

Kristen: 

Mm-hmm (affirmative). And that's not going to work anymore.

Marco: 

Yeah, it's too expensive.

Kristen: 

Yeah. It's too expensive and it's a house of cards at that point. One thing is going to topple the whole business.

Marco: 

Exactly.

Kristen: 

Yeah. Okay. I think we've talked a lot, we've kind of answered this question about the big opportunities for brands this year, but what do you think are going to be the biggest challenges for D2C brands?

Marco: 

The biggest challenges for D2C brands is the desire to scale, really scale. I think the era of unicorn direct consumer businesses is over. Web Smith talks about not this specifically a lot, but like that these direct to consumer businesses are over valued because of the way that they're valuing their businesses that are revenue multiples versus EBITDA.

Marco: 

And if you're looking at the way that a physical goods business operates with slim margins of under 50%, you can't really build a lot of traction there at scale. When you raise 10 million, that means you've got to do 100 million, but then to get there you need to raise more money so you've got to do a billion, you raise more money to get there, so you got to... It's a shell game and you keep going, and going, and going.

Marco: 

The future of direct to consumer and E-commerce is going to be 50 to 60% Amazon, Walmart, Wayfair, Overstock, whatever. That's going to be majority of E-commerce and the rest of it is going to be very tailored, hyper fragmentation of brands. Faheem Siddiqi, thank you that we had this conversation a few months ago and it just changed the way I look at everything.

Marco: 

We're going to see brands that are selling to a group of 50,000 people that are 25 to 34 year old men that are into basketball and internet marketing. That is me. I like that. That's me. They can tell me, that person who nails that brand and nails that customer audience is going to be able to sell me $2,000 worth of stuff a month or a year.

Kristen: 

Yeah.

Marco: 

Right? You're going to see a lot of brands that are doing between five and 20 million and not trying to go further, and they're going to probably stop at the seed round or maybe even just at angel and bootstrap away there. We're going to see thousands, hundreds of thousands of brands at that level that are speaking to a specific audience and people are going to go to the online retailers to get their generic, whatever, their generic bedside table from [inaudible].

Marco: 

But if you want to have something that's like you connect with, then you're going to be getting products that are sold to a specific tailored audience, and that audience you'll actually feel like they're literally talking to you because I guarantee you there are 50,000 people in the States that actually think almost exact same thoughts as you every day. If you build round around that, then you win.

Kristen: 

Yup. Then you're going to be winning. It's the same as like in my experience like Outdoor Voices talks directly to me and my interest and their mission aligns with mine. And I think I've spent a good thousand dollars at Outdoor Voices in the last year and half of my closet is now Outdoor Voices and that's just because they can really speak to me in that niche way.

Kristen: 

For sure, I also agree, I see that's where things are going and it's also exciting, especially with the Casper stuff that's come out. I think you're really seeing how the industry is shifting more towards this, less unicorny, big million dollar businesses and more just niche communities where people are really connecting.

Marco: 

Yeah. It just [crosstalk]-

Kristen: 

It's exciting.

Marco: 

... to engage. So yeah, that's I think the future of direct to consumer businesses. I think somebody else also asked the question, "Who would win in a fight, a whale or a-"

Kristen: 

Yeah, a killer whale and a tiger.

Marco: 

Oh, a killer whale?

Kristen: 

Yeah, for sure. But also it's how do you even have them fight because you got a land animal and a water animal?

Marco: 

No, It's easy. It's easy because the only thing that would happen is a tiger would just be like, "That's a small fish. I'm a hungry." Dive in and then drown, and the killer whale wouldn't have to do anything. And then they get a free meal after this tiger's drowned.

Kristen: 

True.

Marco: 

It's just physics. How is a killer whale going to get onto land? Come on.

Kristen: 

Right. If we were to create some world where they could both fight at their highest potential, I would still choose a killer whale over a tiger because those things are massive.

Marco: 

Oh my God. Have you seen those like pictures of a killer whale snatching a low flying bird out of the air?

Kristen: 

Yes. Yes. Oh God. Where is that? There's like an Island, I think it's off of South Africa. God, I think it's called Seal Island and around it, there's like, they call it the ring of death and it's where all the big great white sharks do those big jumps out of the water and they just attack the seals from underneath. I am terrified of the ocean, I hate being underwater, but I want to go on a boat and watch that happen so bad.

Marco: 

That would be pretty cool. We should do that.

Kristen: 

Yeah, we should. Next D2C meetup, just great white shark watching.

Marco: 

Definitely.

Kristen: 

Lets do that.

Marco: 

Yeah [inaudible]. All right. Well, if it's worth. This was great. I hope this was actually helpful to people, gave a little bit of the Elliot stuff, my approach to brand building. We didn't get to things like too much like metrics and whatever, but I will say this, metrics, and systems, and tools, and I got a couple of questions about that as well, all of those are relative to the size of your team, your capability and your experience in those areas and they're all dependent on your strategy.

Marco: 

Strategy and how they play out into tactics, and then you use the right tools for that. I can't give you like Airtable's the best, I don't know.

Kristen: 

Yeah, don't start with the tools, start with the strategy.

Marco: 

Exactly.

Kristen: 

Yes. Well, this is so much fun. Thank you so much for coming on, Marco. This is an amazing episode and I like how we went a little bit of a different route and did a lot of like introspective conversations about brand building. I think it's going to be really helpful for people. People have been asking me to do this, so thank you so much. This was so much fun.

Marco: 

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on. I hope to join you again in the future.