Hello everybody, before we jump into today's episode, we have two sponsors we want to say thank you to for supporting the show. The first one is routine. You guys have heard me talk about routine, honestly, back from the early days of the podcast, and it's still a product I use every single morning. They have a prompt for me here. I'm going to do a little impromptu on this ad read today because honestly, this is a product that I truly believe in. And so I'm going to I'm just going to tell you guys exactly what I think in why first and foremost, this is a stat that they shared, but when you sleep, you lose between a pound and a pound and a half of water. And most of that's just sweating while you sleep. I used to not know if that was actually true to be honest, I felt like a pound to a pound and a half water seemed like quite a bit while I slept. 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So when I am good about doing this consistently, I will take one of those single serve packets, I'll throw in my mixer bottle and whether I also put in a pre workout or something like caffeine or I just drink that separately, I try to drink that first. And the days I do that, I do genuinely feel hydrated and just have a different form of clarity all morning. A lot of people have tried to make their own homemade versions of routine, right? You see people making, they take a shot of the apple cider vinegar and they put a little sea salt, a little lemon in a drink. This is essentially that, but in a product that you can take with you on the go, have it ready for you first thing in the morning. I know me personally when I'm groggy rolling out of bed, the last thing I want to do is, you know, squeeze a lemon, cut lemons up, go get the apple cider vinegar, find my sea salt, I just ripped this packet open, throw to my water, drink it and it's good to go. You can try yours today, if you haven't tried it yet and you've been listening to this podcast for years, just try the damn routine, give it a shot. You can use code Shane white 30 and get 30% off your first order. So you get 30% off by using code Shane white 30 and go to your routine.com to make it even easier. I've added the link to your routine.com in the show notes. So just click on the show notes for this episode. Click on the link to your routine.com and don't forget to use code Shane white 30. Alright guys, today's episode is also bought to you, but bought to you. It's brought to you by NeuroRost. Again, I'm going to go a little off script here. NeuroRost is a product that I also came across during this year of 2023. They are a coffee brand coffee company that's helping you optimize your brain function overall well being. This is another product that to be honest with you when I first started working with it, I was a little on the fence. I was like, do I really want to have mushrooms in my coffee? Well folks, I will tell you when I use NeuroRost, one of the things that has stood out to me the most is in. Well, I'll back up. People that know me know that I have way too much caffeine typically one of the things this year I've done a good job of is cutting out alcohol, not completely, but predominantly I don't touch a lot of alcohol anymore. What I think I've actually done the other way though is that a lot more caffeine. So I do I do definitely drink too much caffeine that something I need to work on next year is to try and minimize how much of that but NeuroRost is something that has actually helped me. Because of the way they formulated their coffee like unlike regular coffee, which is, you know, still something I consume. But NeuroRost specifically doesn't cause jitters or crashes mushroom coffee provides more balance and sustain energy allowing us to stay focused and productive throughout the day. 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Don't forget to use code just Shane White and you'll get 30% off your order. Hope you guys love both these products. I'm trying to not only bring you guys products that I use but that I believe in on the podcast. I'm not taking ad reads for any brands that I don't really believe in. So anyway, hope you guys love both those products. Your routine.com and NeuroRost.com. I've added those links to the show notes. Hope you guys love it and I got an awesome guest coming up right after this. All right, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Shane White show. I am pumped today to have Ben Sharf on the podcast. Ben, welcome to the show. How are you? Doing well Shane. Appreciate you having me. Absolutely, man. For everyone listening and I gave a little bit of a background of why I wanted to have you on but I'm just pumped it in general to have you on the show today. For everyone listening who doesn't know who you are and doesn't know what platter is. Would you mind just giving everyone a quick little intro about you and the brand? Yeah, totally. I'm one of the co founders of platter, which is a storefront accelerator for Shopify brands. So effectively what we do is natively build a lot of the most popular app functionality in the marketing and conversion category into one solution to unify support teams costs and unify your tech stack. And then we layer in best practices around increasing your average order value and conversion rate so we can actually quantify back to brands making them money and saving them money at the same time. Love that. I mean, for me, Ben, when I first came across some of your content on LinkedIn, the reason I thought this was so interesting is my background's been in finance. So most of the things that I remember back in my days, even at our X bar. I was very scratch my head sometimes when I couldn't calculate an ROI, whether it was something with the website or just in general with marketing. And so this was one of the first things I've ever come across from like, oh, interesting. So, you know, people are investing in essentially a component that bolts on to Shopify. And then there's some intrinsic value that they get back immediately. So I guess for the for like in layman's terms, Ben, can you explain to people even to really break it down. I mentioned this to you before we jumped on like my world is a lot more Amazon and 3pecom. I know a little bit about Shopify and enough to be dangerous and like have invested in them for a long time because I'm really bullish on the platform in general. Why is this a problem for a lot of brands like what's platter what the reason you wanted to help start platter what was the why. Yeah, so the best way to explain this in layman's terms if you think about an iPhone in the app store, right every time you want to do something on your phone, you go to the app store and you find an app to do it, right, whether it's a mail app or a calculator app or a social media app. Shopify offers the same ecosystem, but for storefronts. So the idea is that when you want to add certain functionality to your storefront, you have a couple options, right. The first one is you can go to the app store if you want to offer discounts or bundles or incentive bars or cart drawers. Those are a couple examples you can go to the app store and you can find an app that accomplishes that functionality and you can download it. The other option is you can go to an agency, you can pay them to build it for you. The third option is you can either be technical or having in house developer. That third option is the most rare because a lot of brands don't necessarily have the budget to have someone in house. And so they end up resorting to one of the first two options that I alluded to, right. The issue with the first option, which is going to the app store and downloading an app every single time you want to add functionality to your storefront is that a lot of these apps are features not products. And so what happens is you end up just downloading a bunch of apps, which means it's too many apps on your storefront too many support teams, which is too many monthly expenses, which then results in a bloated tech stack, which then results in a slower website. Right. So because of that, our belief is that a lot of these apps that we define as features not products can be rolled into one solution. So what we do is we natively build a lot of the most popular app functionality and the marketing and conversion category into one solution. So we can unify your support teams, we can unify your cost, we can reduce your tech stack. And then in parallel with that, we can provide best practices around conversion rate optimization average order value. And so at the end of that, we can save you money by reducing the number apps, a number of apps on your storefront. And we can also help make you money by increasing your conversion rate and your average order value. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, it makes a ton of sense. And so it's funny, like I have one example of this and I mentioned to it at the beginning, but when I was
that are X-Bar, I do remember, I think our X-Bar must have when we were building it on Shopify. And I know we weren't even actually on Shopify. We were using our other platform. But I remember just like, it seemed like so many plugins. Like, when you looked behind the scenes, there were so many different things that needed to happen to get a website that, honestly, like we all weren't that, but it was a good website, but it wasn't like anything earth shattering. And for like how much we were paying and how much was behind the scenes, I remember when I learned that, I was shocked. Because there were so many little things we wanted to tweak and change. And we were like, wow, we're paying so much for this website. So that makes a ton of sense. So something like platter is actually going to help you get rid of some things to simplify what's behind the scenes. Yeah, and I'll tell you one of the biggest misconceptions that we see in the Ecommerce world today is this notion that in order to build a high converting storefront, you need to spend a lot of money and it takes a lot of time, right? That is not the case in our opinion. And one of the reasons for that is oftentimes if you go to an agency or you go to a freelancer, they're disincentivized to reduce the time it takes to build the store. Because that's where they make their money, right? So they build hourly. And that's not to say that like there's certain use cases where agencies are definitely the path forward. We actually partner with agencies too, which we can get into in a little bit. But the idea is that if we can productize a lot of that initial build out. And the migration process to a new solution like platter. We're reducing the amount of time it takes to get to your new storefront. We're also reducing the cost, but because we have functionality from over 40 different app categories baked into one solution. So out of the box, you're getting 75% of the way there before you're spending extra dollars on bespoke customizations to suit your needs as a brand because obviously every brand has like unique corner cases for things they need. But if I can reduce the amount of money you spend to get to a finished product and reduce the amount of costs they have to put into it to get there. Then it's a net win for the brand. Right. Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. And I know when I was doing some of my own research. Increasing conversion rates is something you just mentioned as well for someone like me who is is a little bit dumb when it comes to Shopify. Why is that so important? Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, like your conversion rate is like how many visitors are coming to your storefront are actually purchasing. Right. So we're shopping versus actually checking out. Correct. And so all the bells and whistles and nuances that we integrate into the storefront are around trying to increase the likelihood that a window shopper becomes a customer. Yeah. And some of that just around simplicity to check out like making things simpler to go from. Ooh, that's a that's an interesting can to actually checking out like is that a piece of this? It's it's a big piece of it. So one of the one of the things I always say to people, which like if you take anything away from this conversation, it could be this. For the amount of clicks you can reduce in your conversion funnel to go from landing on the website to purchasing. You will see a direct increase in conversion. Right. So I'll give you an example. Let's say you have a brand that has one product, right. And you land on the homepage. And then there's a button that says shop now. And you click the shop now by and it now takes you to a product page. You get to the product page. You click the add to cart button. Once you click the add up cart button, there's a button that might pop out and say view cart. Then you click view cart and then you get there and you click check out and then you get there and you pet you enter in your payment information. And then you click buy, right. That's five clicks that it took you to get a customer to go from seeing your product, abying it. Instead, what you could do if you have one skew since there's not that many pages they need to go do to buy you can put a buy now button on the page on your homepage. So I can land on the homepage, see the product click buy now. You can go from the homepage to check out to type in your card information and one click instead of five. Got it. Yeah. Okay. That makes a ton of sense. It's not too dissimilar to what I deal with on Amazon. Right. I mean, there's ways. And friction points. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. Okay. Okay. Very interesting. And would you say the other obvious question that I had is I was trying to do some research is you guys have worked with it seems like some really big brands already, which is really exciting for you guys in congrats. Is there like a certain size of a website in revenue or is there like a pro and con of working with a company like platter like you need to get to a certain scale before it makes sense. It's it's an interesting question because there's I wouldn't say I would say it's not a black and white answer and what I mean by that is that one interesting thing about our product is that the entry point or like the value prop that resonates with you as an individual depends on where you are in your life cycle as a business. So what I mean by that is like if you're an early stage founder, you're doing everything by yourself, your spread thin. You want to look for a solution that has a lot of things baked into one that's easier to use. It might be interesting to you if you're a middle markets upper market brand where you maybe have like an agency that custom built a storefront. And now every time you're wanting to change something if to pay them to edit it for you. It's taking a long time to make revisions. It's costing a lot of money. You have a lot of legacy code from a storefront you built for the last five years. So you're just adding more to an issue instead of starting from scratch with something that's comparable in terms of conversion capabilities, but a lot cleaner and easier to use. So really just depends like what your pain point is I would say that traditionally we work best with brands that are between five and 25 million. But I have brands doing you know 250 K and revenue and brands doing 50 million in revenue. So there is flexibility depending on where you're at in your journey, but like I'll give you an example anecdotally. I don't want to I won't name the brand specifically just for their own sake, but we had a brand that came to us that said, hey, we just got a quote from an agency that was 120,000 dollars and it was going to take eight months for them to build the storefront. We were able to produce that storefront for them and under 60 days for less than 15,000 dollars. And they were live in under 60 days and saw 45% increase in conversion in the first 30 days of being alive. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So there you go. There's actual data points and numbers there to back that up to. And that's because a lot of that work that the agency was quoting them for was work that we've product ties over the last two years. So we could get to you know 80% of the way there very quickly. And then we layer in the bells and whistles towards the end instead of having to rebuild everything. So the idea with our product is as a brand. You benefit from the economies of scale from all this functionality. We continuously building it. You're getting it for one price. And if you're on the subscription, you get access to the new features free of incremental charge. That's the justification for the subscription. You're getting added value, you know, with every quarter that goes by. So is it is it fair to say when Shopify launched I always thought of the same thing. It was kind of like you kind of like the Shopify of Shopify like build on per se. So like I always thought when I launched my first Shopify store, the great thing was they kind of did 80% of the legwork for you to like kind of create a framework of what a website and checkout process functionality does. And then there's always add-ons and it seems like you guys actually kind of do the same thing. It's like a kind of you kind of get someone like further down the path of not just setting a website up, but actually like getting conversions as well. I think one of the challenges that we see is there's kind of this analysis paralysis and information overload. So like brand builders don't know who to trust what to use like Shopify will come up with an update that's got like 95 sections to it and no brand founder is going to sit there and read the fine print on that and be like, oh, that makes sense. I should be using that. So what we tell the founders that we work with is you guys be the brand builders do what you do best will be the e-com nerds will be the ones that will tell you what you should be using before you even knew it existed. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, that makes sense. It is like synthesizing information in a digestible format for you as a brand founder to understand like what you should be doing or what you should be thinking about. We fully understand that it's very hard for you to build a good brand will simultaneously trying to stay at the forefront of like new technologies as it relates to your online story. Totally makes sense and it seems like from what you've told me in from what I've seen it. Does it really matter what type of product it is like we talked about revenue now it's a matter like is it if it's food if it's beverage if it's a hard good. Does it really matter we work with brands across every category. I would say the only thing to note is that we have different recommendations based on category and price point. So like the recommendations that I'm going to give you if you're selling like $1,500 diamond rings versus like you know $20 protein powders. Very different strategy like very different functionality very different UX recommendations. And if you guys gain that knowledge just by working with a lot of these brands or you guys as a founding team do you guys all come from different categories or how did you yeah. Yeah, my my co founders and I have all been in the e-com world in different capacities for the last couple years before we ever started this company. So it was interesting because we all bring a very unique lens and set of insights to the table. Just for context like one of my co founders was working in sales at a marketplace agency selling to brands for four years so he understands like what makes them tick. My other co founder who's the head of product and engineering has been building products for the last couple years. And consulting with tons of e-commerce brands and then I was actually working at a company called go puff working on a neat conversation tool very niche like in the Shopify world every single day. So for us it was like we knew we wanted to start something in our way of starting actually was we started as an agency just working with brand servicing them. And then once we started to gather all these pain points we realized all the different commonalities and the same things coming up over and over.
And ultimately we decided to productize those pain points into what is now platter Got it. Okay, very cool. I was gonna say we jumped right into the product Which is totally fine and I was curious to take a step back and learn a little bit about your career path And how you got here so that's really interesting because I worked directly with gopuff now So I know you know, I know enough about the platform for sure from a front end Is that where you come kind of like started for you? Was it gopuff? It was Very cool and when it what how what stage was gopuff would you say they were at when you first joined? I Mean by any back of the napkin math. They were still technically considered late stage I would say but okay in order of magnitude different from where they were when I left like just for context They were the valuation when I joined was 8.9 billion and then the last round they raised before I left was at a 40 billion cap Yeah, it's they've exploded Yeah, so I mean like I said it was still pretty late stage, but on a relative basis They were still in the impency of like what was possible given like the infrastructure that they had built sure Okay, that makes sense and for you What was kind of the jumping off point of platter like where did the where did all this come from? I'd love to know even just like the timeline of when you and your co-founder started having the conversations You know being a gopuff. I'm sure that was an exciting place that it sounds Similar to what I felt like probably when I joined our act bar. It was you know towards the end before they sold the acquisition So yeah, well can walk the walk everyone listening back a little bit to just when you and your co-founders start talking about platter Yeah, so I'll take it back even before gopuff I was supposed to do M&A consulting at UI Parthenon in 12 hours before my first day. I told him I wasn't coming. Oh Okay, why? Because I just I fell into this trap of like go get the best corporate job you can because everyone else around you is doing it And then I got the job and was like wait a minute. This isn't what I actually want to do with my life And I'm from from Buffalo originally. I played division one hockey at Colgate University Okay, and then was supposed to go to EY after that and told them 12 hours before my first day that I wasn't coming There from there I ended up joining an early stage COVID testing startup Okay, 800 employees and 50 million in revenue in five months. Is this I'm assuming during the heat of COVID? Yeah, and that's actually where I met one of my two co-founders He was the head of product and growth at the COVID testing company. Okay, I watched him build this entire thing I think it got talk about timing. I know I actually know one other person I've been Chicago that Was up like they're basically their dad was a part of one of those companies and I was like wow What a what a concept to like jump right into that like really it like there was so much money in that that founder Walked away with like 75 million dollars in his pocket in 36 months. That's like it's absurd It's absurd like and that's one example of how many probably that like capitalized on that moment right? It's so interesting And then when I was there my now co-founder he was the head of product and growth and he had built the whole product He got to a point where he was spending a hundred K a day on Google ads And I was just watching him operate and I was like I need to figure out how I'm gonna work with this guy Sure, I just became buddies at the company and I realized that he was doing some e-commerce work on the side and I also was With our third co-founder who's from Buffalo, which is where I'm from so myself and Mike We started doing some consulting work and then I met Kieran at the COVID testing company and then ultimately we ended up like joining forces We were out there working on it a very part-time capacity because I went to go puff after I was at the COVID testing company And while at go puff like I was just learning so much about the space and building it in insane network That it honestly just didn't make sense for me to like leave that behind yet And so we were kind of just hacking at things on the side and then eventually when it got to a point where it was almost like You're putting the business at risk by not devoting your full attention to it That was kind of the moment that I decided to make the leap I talk about that a lot on here Ben Just like the people's decision making when it comes to jumping to their full-time endeavor So for you was it you just made a good point your yours was more so you felt like Platter your new business was actually going to have detrimental Effects by you not putting more time into it For you and obviously you're telling us for your career. You're obviously a young guy that's been hustling Was there like a financial piece to this too where you were like okay? I need to at least be able to like Go to platter when I know I can you know pay rent or like have food Was there anything like that that you kind of we're working on in the background as well? 100% so it was twofold so the first piece was it actually would have been detrimental to jump too early Because of the relationships that I was gaining at gopuff And the second piece of it too is that we actually bootstrapped the profitability initially And part of that was like not taking these healthy salaries for ourselves as founders And so I was very much like relying on my source of income at gopuff Because we couldn't pay the three of us like what we needed especially like living in New York City It wasn't even possible So eventually I had to wait till I got to a point that we could pay us Par ourselves to like eat Yeah, right no means in my look I even joke now. I'm still making like a entry-level college student salary But that's because we're like very bought into to what the bigger vision is here Sure no no totally get it and totally respect that so for for you Platter Obviously, it's software one of the things I really wanted to talk to you about too I thought it was interesting as I've always been Interested in the software world have never really been involved with any business project in that realm but I've always thought of it as a very that's the right word overwhelming To get started like there's I run I we'd like to call it a non-agency agency But essentially where any commerce agency that helps brands mostly on Amazon and Instacart and other platforms And for us like getting that first client second client like that was really like the first big hurdle Because it's like it's a little bit of validation you gotta get someone like trust you But when you first start something for software, it's a little different. I would imagine where it's You have to create the product but starting with no code Is a huge uphill battle and then not only is that going on But once you put all this time energy and resources into developing a software then you're I would assume This is what I wanted to ask you I'm assuming that it's like okay. We have at least a minimal viable product Now we got to go see if anyone's gonna use this thing and pay for it So what was that like for you guys? What was like the business model even at a high level And how did you guys think about that like how did you think about designing software Testing and getting into the hands of people like these early days of platter It's a really great question So I think what we did is I would say pretty unique to most stories you'll hear so typically What you'll see happen is people will come up with a concept Oftentimes raise money and then go like try to build the product and prove our product market fit So I say that standard What what you see more commonly is people will raise money to solve problems My perspective on it is you should raise money to double down on solutions Okay, so for us what we did is we actually started as an agency And use the service-based model to fund R&D for the product So effectively what I mean by that is we would go to a brand work with them They'd say hey, can you build this for us and build that for us We would build them to build this feature for them And then we roll that feature into the core products. Oh, that's so smart So what I say and it's something that we still have in our business model today is that Having a services component to a software company is very valuable in my opinion for two reasons The first one is that you're actually getting paid to fund R&D And the second one is that when you have an ability to like generate you can turn on and off the faucet in terms of generating service-based revenue Which can just continue to fund the rest of the business So for us like we were able to bootstrap the profitability before we took in a penny from outside funding Because we would have these service-heavy contracts and just chip away at building that core product And then eventually once the product was like done I mean it's an ever-evolving thing, but I guess like in a place where we could actually offer a software product We then started to sunset the agency piece and really focus on the software piece But even today we still have a services arm of our business It's more of like a white club implementation as one of our offerings Because I still think being able to get cash in the door And day one with your client contracts and funding R&D is just like a very valuable model Because it extends our runway every single time we do it No, that's really really smart. I honestly, I'm sure other brands and other software companies have done that But hadn't really thought of it that way. It's funny And the reason some of this question comes about is I was really interested because I've always assumed and tell me if I'm wrong It sounds like you guys one of your founders is obviously a product engineering guy So that's a huge that makes a note to no duh right like that makes it so sensitive you're gonna watch a software company Is it really expensive if you don't have someone like like your co-founder who's good at product and engineering? I would assume like for me if I just wanted to go create some software that worked with Amazon for example I'm assuming I have no idea like is that a $10,000 a thousand dollars a hundred thousand dollars like I have no idea what even the range looks like to develop software at the age Like the the level you guys are at the beginning of the year to be honest with you I've I've tried to build a software company with no technical co-founder and I'm building one now the technical co-founder I don't think I'll ever try to build a software company ever again without a technical co-founder Okay, it's that important. It's everything just like There's a cost piece to it But there's also a knowledge piece to it so like you can go find an agency or an external developer to build something for you But it's like they build you an MVP and give it back to you
and now what? You don't know how to test it. You don't know how to like iterate on it. And every single time you want to change something, there's a dollar value associated with that. Sure. I'm going to go on. There are founders out there who've pulled it off successfully, where they can like push it far enough down the road, get an MVP, get a little bit of traction, and then maybe raise money and hire like a CTO and not have to give up nearly as much equity. But I think for me, from personal experience, just thinking about what I've done to date and in the past, that for any future tech product that I build beyond platter, I don't think I would ever do without a technical co-founder. There's a whole level of knowledge. It makes a sense. I mean, I know the ability that he has, even just what I just said. Like if you started the company, you pay someone to have money to build a software. Basically the conversation that I had with him was, build me a really good product that people love, and I'll go get you all the money and the customers. Like I'll go raise the money, I'll go get myself and Mike. Like we'll go get you the customers. We'll go get all the partners. We'll go help you hire all the employees. If I can sleep at night knowing that you're building a really good product that actually works, I can go sell the dream and be the marketing guy. And his response to me is like, great, I don't want to talk to anyone. And I'm like, that's how you know it's a match made in heaven. For sure. Oh yeah, 100%. Yeah, you would want, and I'm just guessing here. This is my world. I would guess that you would want a tech guy that is just in love with developing tech. Just to make it sense. Just like obsessed. What's interesting about him though is on a relative basis, he's actually a much better communicator than your average technical person. Okay, oftentimes they're not the best communicators because they're fairly introverted. But his super power is the ability to communicate and manage technical talent and like distilled, complex problems into that gestable information for them to be able to like use and build from. And would you say your co-founder, this is just such an interesting topic to me, was he an entrepreneur at heart or did you any other co-founder kind of pull him into entrepreneurship? Because it seems like there has to be so many of these gems out there that are great product people and they're just super smart engineers that could be entrepreneurs, but they just want to be engineers. And they want to just work on product. And then you have all these entrepreneurs and tech that want to launch tech companies, what they need those guys. So I've always thought there's and there maybe there's something out there already. I'm like, there's got to be some way that these people meet that's not just like just true networking. There's got to be like another way you can get people who are product focused to meet folks, you know, that are more entrepreneurial and more marketing sales focused. There's platforms and services out there. I think there's a couple challenges. The first one is that if the initial idea for the business isn't the technical person's idea, it's very challenging because you're essentially trying to get them to justify giving you hours and hours of sweat equity without knowing what's on the other side of it. That's the first piece. The second piece is I think that the best way for co-founders to mean work on something is just through like organic interaction. Okay. But like when you think about dating, like you go on a dating app and you meet someone you go on a date, it's like you sit there and you play the check box game. It's like, oh, like where are you from? What do you do for work? Like, and you just like get through all these questions, like get past that first layer of vetting. I feel like it's the same if you're like on a matchmaking system with a co-founder. Whereas for us, like we started as friends, we kind of just started nerding out on things together. And it's like one thing that I did next and I woke up, you know, two years later and here we are. Okay. It's like an organic progression as like friends. And so I think for me, like if I were to go out again and start over from zero, like I would probably lean on my network to try to find that technical person and it would be more of an organic just like discussion and see where it kind of evolves. I think one of the other things I would say about like co-founders finding each other and working together is at the beginning, it should be informal and like you guys are either going to have like the same passion and fire to spend all your time working on a thing or you're not. Like the one thing that you can't teach to someone is passion for an idea. Yeah. And if you don't have it, like it's not going to work, right? How can I force someone to spend 70 hours a week doing something with me while making no money if they're not equally as excited about it as I am? Yeah, no way, no way, they wouldn't work. It is, you did burn out, I'm sure. Yeah, exactly. And that's the other challenge is like if you go down a road with a technical person who architects your product in a certain way and they decide you know what this isn't for me and you're left with something, every technical mind is going to approach problems differently. And so if you try to get someone to pick it up from where they left off, there's nothing to say that they can just continue on where they are instead of having to go, you know, one step back to take two steps forward. Got it. Oh yeah, yeah. So what, how did you guys as a team come together? Like do you feel like you guys are all, do you guys have a good enough relationship where you feel like you guys kind of like got check each other to make sure you're all still in this and still fired up and still pumped? I would say yes, but at the same time like I have so much confidence and trust in the two of them that it's not even something that crosses my mind at all anymore. Oh, that's good. Maybe in great couple months and like, oh, are they still like this as much as me? Now it's just like around the clock. So actually, I'll give you a funny anecdote. One of my two co-founders, Mike, he's one of my childhood best friends. Oh cool. So we have the same friend groups and it's become an issue with a lot of our friends where like we'll be out together and like the two of us will just be sitting in the corner talking about business. And they're like, can you guys stop? Like we don't want to listen to this anymore, but it's more addicted. We can't help it. Which I mean, if you try to think about it, would you rather it be the opposite of that? We're like, we don't talk about it at all. Would you rather be? We talk about it too much. And we're just like, we're so in love with what we're doing that it's just fun for us. That's awesome. And that's how you know it's something really special. Right? Like if you guys just organically want to talk about it, it doesn't feel forced and it's something you guys just want to do all the time. I definitely can resonate with that. When you guys were building the services business as like a revenue stream to then fund the product business, have you guys ever thought about spinning it off as a separate business? Or is it something where you guys just know the multiple on the software side is just such a greater, greater amount that you're going after? You know, it's just that's that's where kind of like the money is to go build a bigger business. Yeah. So I always say you kind of have two options, right? You can go the agency route and get cash rich or you can go like the software route where it's not necessarily bootstrap, but you're going for like a bigger outcome. Okay. To be honest with you in hindsight, like I always question like what was the better path as like a first time founder? Because you know, look, the options are like you build an agency and maybe we get it to a place where each of us are taking home a quarter million a year, right? And by five years from now, like we have a lot of cash or it's like we work for the next five years on this. We don't make enough, we don't make that much cash, but like maybe we have that massive exit one day and it's like, you know, overnight you're worth a lot of money, but it's not really overnight. It's like you've been building towards that. I think for us, we definitely have like a different risk tolerance in the sense that like I can wake up in three years at 30 and if I still have zero dollars, my bank account, like I'm still confident that I'll figure it out. And while I don't have a family and I don't have kids, I have a very, very crazy risk profile right now. I'm kind of like, let's take big swings while we can. I think now, like the agency piece of the business, we only service customers who are also on our software. So it's really just all feeding like the software piece, but the way that we look at it is like, you can do the services business, but in the background, we're just like slowly building up the monthly recurring revenue on the SaaS side. And ultimately when you get to a point where your MRR is greater than your burn, you're profitable, and then you have free money to play with to innovate. Love that. No, you definitely have like a, you have a great like head on your shoulders thinking about the way you guys are going about this. For you guys, do you feel like like where you're heading with the product of platter? Are you guys like in your infancy? Right now, like I'd love to know the same thing you said with GoPuff. Like where are you guys in regards to like where the sea thinks is going? Yeah, I think it's, I think it's still early days for us. I think one, I would say there's two pieces to it, right? Like you have the evolution of the product itself, and then you have the evolution of just the brand and the awareness. So no one actually knew of platter up until about two months ago. We were building mostly in stealth mode for the first two years under a different name. We were waiting until the product was out of place where we could turn the jets on, at which point we rebranded to platter. We hired a head of growth. And so I think like 2024 is a huge inflection point for us in the sense that not that many people knew about us. And it was partially intentional. My superpower is like connecting and marketing, like relationships and marketing, like super connecting. And so I've kind of been waiting for this moment for the last two years, where I can just kind of go out there from the rooftops and like scream about platter and everyone can hear about it, learn about it. And I feel like we finally got to a place where our messaging and our product is starting to click. And we're like breaking our records every month and revenue. But I still feel like we haven't even scratched the surface on like what I want to do in the vision that I have for the business. That's bad ass, man. That's really cool. Do you see, I mean, right now, is it only Shopify or is like Shopify just kind of like for anyone in the software D to C side? I mean, to be honest, is like Squarespace or Wix or any of these other platforms, are they even worth the time or energy for a company like you guys or is the Shopify runaway so fast? The TAM is so large on like the total just will market and Shopify is like so big compared to everyone else that it's just we would be doing ourself at this service at this stage in the game to be allocating resources to other platforms. I think there's something to be said about later on having like a product within our product.
that's maybe platform agnostic just to open the opportunity to work with other brands, but one of our first investors had a nine figure exit with his business in the Shopify ecosystem. And he was the guy who told us like keep the services piece your business and only focus on Shopify right now. He's like high wasted time and energy in the discovery process building and other platforms and the ROI just wasn't there. Ah, yeah, no, I mean it makes sense. I mean to be honest, not to keep going back to what I do, but like Amazon feels the same way sometimes right like there's some other platforms that we work with that are all growing and moving in the right direction, but same thing in 3p like Amazon is just so much bigger than all the other platforms combined. It kind of feels the same way sometimes. It's interesting though because it's like an ongoing debate specifically in the venture community. There are certain venture funds who feel that the total adjustable market in Shopify's ecosystem isn't going to give you the outsize returns that you're looking for as an investor. Really, because there's only been a couple like unicorns built just in the Shopify ecosystem. Okay. But there are some that continue to put money into it who don't agree with that. So it's just like an interesting like ongoing debate and I think really it just comes down to you as a business like what you guys think makes the most sense. I would say we have product ideas that are agnostic to Shopify, but for the law like for the next 12 months at a minimum like we're definitely focused on Shopify. I mean, it's interesting right when you start bringing in and thinking about venture or private equity. They're obviously looking for these enormous multiples for to make sense for them. And I've started to wonder especially post COVID and just the circles of people I run around with and then like launching my business for example. There's there's like the return that you could get from venture and what they expect. But then there's got to be so many I wouldn't so there's those are unicorns that they're looking for. There's got to be another level down of just like cash flow positive super healthy businesses that like you've been as a co founder could grow to a place where like you're doing really well. And you could do it for a really long time and it would get to a point where you could probably automate a lot of things. It starts something else and like use the cash from plan. Yeah, it makes a sense. It's like yeah, maybe I don't get this enormous crazy news shattering exit, but like we're going to make really healthy profit here as a business like you know I would call them more like you know family run operations that just go on and on and on and on and you can have it for a decade plus. I have I mean I have one specifically a friend of mine who's a developer who like doesn't really like to he again he's introverted doesn't like to do sales or socialize with people he's probably making 75k month off his Shopify apps he doesn't really talk to anyone. Isn't that crazy. It's just like a what he treats it as like a lifestyle business. Sure. Yeah, I mean I'm not trying to make a billion dollars with this I don't need to but I'm you know I'm making 75k dollars a month I it's I'm a very simple person it's way more than I need. Right, and if you think about like there's probably a lot more of those that you know one person right I know a few people like that it's funny there's probably a lot more of those out there you know that are and I maybe it's just the economy that totally outside of Shopify and what you guys are doing but you know the venture community and CPG food and beverage specifically like the last 12 months has been pretty tough for a lot of brands to raise capital just because margins are a lot smaller and food and you get to have you know some crazy velocities and stores to make it work. So it's interesting that's just an interesting aside that I was thinking of so for you guys been I mean got a good understanding of the product the business how you guys got it started. What is the next you said you know you hired a head of growth so 2024 should be a big inflection point so maybe fast forward what do you feel like if we had the same conversation in two years three years five years what has been saying what is platter look like do you guys have you thought that far ahead of like where you hope platter goes. Yeah I mean I think my my goal is a couple years from now if we're successful like we'll debunk this myth that building a high converting storefront is expensive and takes a lot of time. That's that's great one thing we're after because it's not the case in our opinion and we're we kind of look at this is like making the attempt to do category creation. Where it's like you can take something that exists and try and tweak it and make it a little bit better but we're trying to like reinvent the way that you build a store so it's still like leveraging tools that are out there but it's like how can we productize it in a way that it's much faster much cheaper and doesn't compromise quality. I like that so are you guys would you say you're you're to a degree trying to to reinvent you know D to see one P E come because I know it seems like again this is just from what I hear I don't own a storefront necessarily it sells anything today. It seems like everyone that that is the same verbiage I hear a lot is that to run a Shopify site today it's expensive to get traffic to it with Google ads and meta is so much more expensive than it used to be with all the changes they've made. Would you say platters actually going to try to actually reverse some of that and and convince people that it could be a lot more profitable make a lot more sense to sell one piece. I lost to hear for a second. I think that our goal is to make improvements from an operational perspective on the storefront itself. Like you won't necessarily touch the growth side of things from like ad spend perspective but if we can produce a more optimal storefront inherently that means you're going to get a better ROI on dollars here allocating to your ad budget got it OK and and so I kind of asked this question before but for people listening who have a Shopify storefront and we potentially want to work with platter. Can you maybe give one use case like let's just use you know a food brand right that's that's obviously like in my camp. They have a they have a Shopify website what would be something you would tell them listening to right now like go look at this metric or go look at this on your site today and you know not necessarily a specific metric but just like this is what we would improve or like this is like you brought platter and it would improve it just to give someone who's listening today like like I can go glance at this before I reach out. The first thing is like think about how you manage your storefront today right like do you are you beholden to an agency do you have like a super custom website where you're not technical and you're not able to make changes are you on Shopify 2.0 where you can utilize the drag and drop editor as a non technical person to make changes. Those are like the first first things I would look at beyond that another one is like test your site speed score is that really low if it is there's probably a reason. And then beyond that it's like I can I can call out high level things that we look for from looking at a lot of websites that have material impacts on conversions and average order value right so like a very easy one that we always talk about when someone goes to check out. Do you have a cart drawer on your website or do you have a new page that loads for someone to check out that is like the first thing we always look at right a car drawers basically a slide out cart that appears on the same page. Versus loading a new page to show the cart. The other thing I'll say is like there's a lot of different bells and whistles around increasing those metrics like upsells right so a couple examples would be incentive bars do you gamify the Shopify experience for your customers like if you add one more product you cart you get $10 off are you. And then you're just putting in like bundles where it's like put these three products together and get a free gift. There's a whole slew of different ways to do it but the thing that I'll say is that we are always willing to do a free storefront audit of brands. And I always say at the very least we maybe gave you some actionable feedback that you can walk away with and at the very most we can work together. Oh, that's great. That's awesome. Yeah, I'm sure people that listen to this will definitely take advantage of that. Ben is I get closer to the end of the podcast some of the things I love to ask founders like you and just from talking to you over the last 40 45 minutes or so I'm a pump because I think you're going to have some good ones here. And then it's just getting shit done. So what do you been what tools do you put around you to not only get things done today and like figure out what you're doing today but also like plan business goals personal goals. So in layman's terms are you a pen and paper kind of guy do you have apps it would surprise me if you don't have some sort of app knowing you and or or some sort of combination of tools what is what has been used in a day to day basis to get shit done. I definitely have apps I think on a micro level in my to do less I have an app called things that I use but I would say that beyond that like my philosophy on getting shit done is figure out mundane tasks that you can put a process around and delegate them. I'm very big on infrastructure and process as it relates to like being able to level yourself up and the only way you can do that in a lot of instances is like getting out of the weeds to be able to like move on to the next thing. And so for me like I it's really about like bringing it's it's exhausting a task to the point where like it's actually detracting from you growing and then finding someone to come in and help take that off your plate. Okay, do you have any good examples of that yeah like I mean a great example is like the with the storefront audits right like we put a lot of time into analyzing these websites. And it got to a point where like I don't have enough time in my day to like actually build out all the audits from brands that wanted to see them and so what I did was I actually built out like a full SOP and blueprint that took me like a month.
month to then have another person on my team be able to look at a website and break down every single section of the site and produce that audit. Nice. Okay. That's just like one example of something where it's like we're talking to brands. We want to be one of the things that we value at our company in terms of our relationships with brands. Not even customers just brands is like we want to personalize that conversation and make it bespoke to you and not make you just feel like it's another cog in the wheel and other sales call. You're sacrificing speed by doing that but like for me quality in our relationships is what allows us to have like a very low turn rate and give ourselves the best chance to win. But with that it required a lot of process to be able to provide that bespokeness at scale. And so for you, did you, do you guys use like executive assistance or do you hire people full-time or contractors or how did you solve the like the time and people person for that specifically? Yeah, we're a mixed bag of contractors and full-time employees. We have one EA who works like across the three of us as founders. But it's mostly full-time employees in house. Got it. Okay. Nice. Very good. The next question is all around source of knowledge. So Ben, for everyone listening today, is there a book, a podcast, an article, just anything that you recently popped in your brain first that you're like, oh this is really interesting and everyone listening today should check out. Diary of a CEO by Stephen Barlett is my favorite podcast. I just started listening to him. Like he popped up recently. He's great. I think the other piece of advice that I would give is figure out what source of medium works for you in terms of learning and digesting knowledge. I was the kid who like tried to force myself to read for so many years even though I hate reading. And I heard Gary Vanderchuk talk about it one time and it really resonated with me. It was like, if you're not a reader, don't force yourself to be a reader. Just like find another form that works for you. And so like podcasts and YouTube videos are like my form of learning and listening because I just realized that I'm like 280D to sit still and read a book for a long period of time. Dude, you and me both. I that's so funny. You say that and that's such good advice for everyone listening and I'm gonna take that advice to I for the longest time. I'm a big I've over the last four or five years I've become like a big goal guy. It's just at least like having annual goals. For me, it's like helped me like kind of stay the course and feel like I'm like driving to something that's work. And every year I've had a goal to read like a certain amount of books. And the first two years it was like paperback and I made you know, I got through like three and the whole in a whole year at a you know, it's trying to like 12 I think the first year. And then I tried audible and audible was at least like I can at least do other things like while I'm working out or I do lunges and all this stuff so I could I could listen and that is helped. I've definitely like adopted that. But it's funny you say that because I genuinely have someone asked me I love podcasts for whatever reason and so obviously I have one so that it's exactly. So it's like yeah, it's a good point like just find what it is that you like to learn as long as you're learning you're pretty much you're checking that box whether it's I think whether it's a book an audiobook a podcast or YouTube it that's great advice. One of my one of my best pieces of advice that I ever got was make your A's A plus is and find someone else to do your C's for you. That's really good to yeah like we all try to probably do too many things that we're not good at. And I rather just like hone in on the things I'm really freaking good at and make that my differentiator as an individual and just be very honest with myself and find other people to fill in the gaps where I know that I'm not good. How have you gone about figuring out like what was the process for you to figure out what what's an A plus for you than what's a C task. The things I like to do the things that actually get me outcomes and a lot of trial and error. Like when I'm doing something and I'm like I hate this I don't want to do this anymore. I'm like okay that's probably not the thing you should be doing. And don't get me wrong like part of starting a company you have to do the hard jobs like no one's gonna be there to do it for you. So my co-founders and I have done everything and anything you know to get to where we are but I realize that like when you want to get to that next level like what is it that you want to be doing and I know for me that I'm a marketer and so to the extent that I can get myself out there meeting people and telling our story at scale like that's the best contribution that I can make back to the business. So like as an example I told you that we just hired a head of growth two months ago I had built out a full plan of these different ideas I had from a go-to-market perspective and all the things I wanted to do but I didn't have the bandwidth to actually be the execution on it and candidly like that's just not where I'm best. So like I brought him in I go look your job is not gonna be as stressful because I already know all the things I need you to do like here's a list of it just like help cross the T's and dot the I's on the things that I you know I'm I'm incapable of at certain times for whatever reason it is and that's like that's kind of how I think about like where do you hire next and how do you scale your team. I love that that's great advice Ben that's awesome definitely something I'm gonna walk away with today trying to figure out a little more it's like a that's a good thing to like always challenge yourself on and keep figuring out if it's changing. The last question Ben and the most important question how can people follow you whether it's you know LinkedIn on social media get a hold of Ben and how can people learn more and hopefully work with platter. Yeah so my personal socials is just Ben Sharf across Twitter LinkedIn Instagram it's BNsh ARF and then our website is platter.co PLATER.co and then if you're interested in chatting with us you can email me directly my email is
[email protected] love it man. Well awesome Ben thank you for taking the time today this was really cool I genuinely love having people on where I just don't know a lot about the world they're in and I feel like I get to walk away learning a lot so thank you for the time and hopefully a lot of people get to get to experience platter. Thanks for having me Shane I appreciate it. (upbeat music)
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