#032: Drew Marconi - Navigating the Future of DTC Profit Optimization

Your good and your bad habits also get reflected in the culture. Like, people follow your example. You chose to hire the people. So if you can make yourself better and get out of your own way on a lot of things, you also probably set a better example and lead better and improve the culture. So it's a lot less tactical for me. It's just how do I be the best leader for the org that it needs? Today and also make it more sustainable for me. I mean, like, being a founder is not easy. So like, if I can like take that amplitude and make it more manageable, then like I'll be able to do this for a lot longer and be happier.

Drew Marconi is the co-founder and CEO at Intelligems, a Colorado-based company providing invaluable assistance to e-commerce stores through testing data and analytics. Before launching Intelligems, Drew was the VP of Marketplace Operations at Via Transportation, where he built out the tools, data, algorithms, and systems to compete with the rideshare market. In this episode, we analyze with Drew the value of coaching and business strategies, explore the power of coaching and personal and professional growth, and emphasize the importance of maintaining a balance between reactive and creative work modes. Welcome back to episode 32 of the Turning Pro Podcast. Today we have Drew Marconi, who is the co-founder and CEO of Intelligems. Thanks for joining today, Drew.

Thanks for having me, guys.

Thanks for coming on.

To be here.

It should be fun. Again, feel free to—

I hope so.

I want to start with Intelligems. I think when we first talked like a year-ish ago, there's kind of like one central product. Since then you've been launching a ton more. And so walk us through as it is today, like most of the people listening to this are in e-commerce. What are the core offering? What does the core suite look like?

Yeah, I mean, so we call ourselves profit optimization tool. Uh, which way up here, what that means, like, you know, you're an e-commerce brand, you're paying to drive traffic to the site, optimizing that, trying to get good traffic. We help you solve the equation of that visitor lands. How do we maximize the expected profit from them? Like, how do we, there's some likelihood of them to convert. There's like their basket size and what they're going to convert on. And there's the profitability of that. Basket. And we want to like give brands tools to go optimize all of that. So you are, every visitor, you are like maximizing the potential from them and getting the yield and getting better ROAS and being more profitable and operating better. Um, we can get into it, but like our background's surge pricing and dynamic pricing, which is how we got here. So our first product was all about price testing. Like, should this watch band cost $20, $30, $40? What's the price elasticity? Like how many people are going to convert? Yeah, fewer people will buy at $40, but your profit's a lot better. Like where is that sweet spot? So that was where we entered the market in 2022. We realized pretty quickly, like there's a lot more to price than just the list price. So then it became, hey, let's test shipping thresholds and free shipping versus paid shipping. And what should that cost? Like that's a big price factor for customers. So we can also help you A/B test that. That led into offers and discounts and like, hey, you're giving out 20% off to everyone. Like, does that actually generate extra profit or are you just giving away money? And then over the last 8 months, um, we've been building out what we call content testing, which is A/B testing for all the content on the site. So like Google Optimize, rest in peace, a bunch of people use for their CRO tests. Um, figure out what's going to convert. And so we saw that was going away. We said, hey, we can build a really profit-centric version of that. So that helps people test basically anything on the front end— UX, images, your copy, new apps. You can roll that out, A/B test or C test different versions, and then see, okay, conversion went up. Maybe one of those actually drove extra AOV. Where does that net you out on profit per visitor? So yeah, our offerings are kind of price testing, shipping testing, discount testing, and then everything content related.

I feel like in every business, especially within e-com SaaS, there's— which you're experiencing now— there's like a push and then a pull. And it seems like you're just like grinding and grinding and like pushing this boulder up the mountain. And then a combination of things happen. Product getting better, team getting better, just brand tailwinds and people hearing about you. What was that moment in time where it felt like you were pushing, pushing, pushing to have conversations and then all of a sudden leads are just coming out of nowhere and everyone wants to work with you.

Yeah. I mean, there's still days where it feels like pushing. I'll be real. Getting people to think about pricing early on, like we started this in 2021, was a push. A lot of people were like, hey, we didn't think that much about our pricing strategy, but it's working. You know, we can put money into Facebook, money's coming out. We haven't touched prices in 3 years. Like, We're good. And the first moment of pull came in like late 2021. iOS 14.5 rolled out, like acquisition costs are getting more expensive. Then inflation starts to hit, like the supply chain. That was when like, um, containers got super expensive.

Early COVID.

Yeah, like early COVID was ripping, but then this was like second half of 2021. All of a sudden, like every single cost item for brands started getting more expensive and they're like, oh, what was formerly my 72% gross margin is now 55%. Maybe I should go revisit pricing. So some people who we had spoken to really early on, like before we had a product, who kind of like, you know, we're good, then started coming back and saying, hey, like, we'd love to figure out how we can get better pricing data. And so, you know, that kind of that became a tailwind of like, it's harder to operate, costs are going up. And then I would say we had a second moment around when Optimize shut down. So that's like last September. I think similar to GA4, people were kind of waiting till the last minute to deal with it and they realized, oh shit, like all of my A/B tests are about to pause because Google is shutting this down September 30th. And so we'd done all this work like building the product and getting some beta. And as that rolled out, there was— we did like a push on all these different test types. Like something happened. I don't know if it was scale or like different agencies putting us out there, but all of a sudden people started coming to us and saying, hey, we heard this tool is good. Like, can I do X? Can I do Y? And it made this really fun 6-month period of like, oh, you can't do that right now, but we can probably let you do that next week. And it was the fastest we've ever developed product. It was just like multiple features a day because people were coming in telling us what they wanted to do, what they needed. We could go provide it. We had like the whole team oriented towards it. Um, and yeah, it's just kind of continued like that since then. Like there's a certain— people love sharing their wins and sharing test results, and so they tell other folks, and that has generated like a nice kind of pull for what we can offer.

I feel like your business above most is the is the easiest one to just let results speak for themselves. One of the reasons it's one of my favorite tangential businesses in the space is because he chases the same metric we do, which is profitability, right? Like, one of our moments was the same thing where everyone's like, oh no, I need to cut costs, I need to get more efficient. It wasn't just growth at all costs, because profitability is our value prop as well. Uh, and I can't say the same for every e-com software company in the space, but the other fun side note I want to just add in is Drew. I don't— I— we talked about it before we started, but he's legit one of the OG people that was like involved in our journey without even like even paying attention to it. He knew our business like 3 iterations ago that I don't think anyone in our current like ecosystem even knew existed other than I think Drew.

That's when it was Framework.

It was Framework Labs.

Yeah. And I was hearing about, oh, Platter, what's Platter? And then I was like, oh, that's Wait, Mike and Ben, like it's the same guys. Yeah, the brand has come a long way. But, but even back 2 years ago, like me and Mike were talking about the same thing of, hey, feels like people are super under-resourced on what to do once a visitor lands on the site and like we can make a lot more profit from that. So yeah, like very similar value prop.

Yeah, it's, I would say the one, the one caveat is where you guys are. I don't know if you have any service piece to your business, but like you layer in on top of like the infrastructure, whereas we are like trying to go at the bottom, which is definitely very challenging. But I mean, look, everyone has to find their, their pocket within the space to play in.

When it comes to customer acquisition specifically, as that kind of snowball happened where all of a sudden people were coming out of the woodwork, customers referring, investors referring, people seeing you guys and coming in, what were you very intentional about in terms of the levers that you pulled there? Because again, some of it is sometimes people come in and you're like, I don't even know where you're coming in. They just see you. But then sometimes you can pull very strategic levers about like agency partnerships or channel partnerships. Walk me through how you thought about that.

Yeah, I mean, one thing that has always been— two things that have been clear to us is we are hopefully serving the first 0.2% of the customers that we're ever going to have. And, and we should treat them accordingly. We should give them the best possible experience, be really generous in how we treat them. And like our number one company value, which sometimes gets us into trouble, is like, be helpful. So like, let's just be generous. Let's try to orient towards impact. If it's not working for someone, like, great, let's be honest about that. If it is, let's find ways to make it even better. So just treat everyone coming in who's taking a chance on us as like a potential evangelist and really go above and beyond. Where we can and just be like honest and real and helpful as possible. The flip side is we also realized early on, like we've always run pretty lean. We need to focus our energy and like we launched an app in the App Store in January 2022. The first like month it was just this roller coaster because it's like install, uninstall, install, uninstall. And like stuff is happening that you don't really know how to explain and like every person who installed and then uninstalled like 24 seconds later just like cut my heart.

Yeah.

It's like if we were just distracted by like we had this Slack channel that was like the— it's Applog. We still have it. Every like login, install, uninstall, billing change. And, um, one thing I'm really grateful that we did was set up a whole kind of infrastructure around that. And it's gotten better over time, but of like Who is this brand? Is it a real store? What information can we quickly look up about who they are and if they're a fit and are they qualified for our services? If they are, great. Let's go all in, reach out, try to find them, try to make them really successful, like get them on a call, show how this works. And if they're not, then we're going to try to do our best not to worry about it. We'll help them if they reach out, but like, we're not going to focus our energy there and like worry if they install and uninstall. So that was a pretty deliberate thing of like be generous but also be targeted with that and try to not ride every wave. Um, yeah, I mean, partnerships was something that from day one, like a bunch of our mentors were like, oh, you got to do partnerships. Agency partnerships are huge. Like It's 30% of this company's revenue, 40% of Klaviyo's revenue. And we kept trying and like, I was always pretty skeptical. I was like, I don't know where this is going. It's not really working. I'm having a hard time figuring out like what the value prop is, but we stayed in touch with people and like kept folks in the loop. And then the content testing thing ended up being a great fit for a lot of our partners because they're trying to illustrate their own value. And CRO agencies, CRO agencies, web development agencies, agencies that are building new websites that want Show the impact. Like, everyone needs to attribute their work. Um, and so that finally clicked. Like, we kind of stayed at it and tried different things just because we knew there would be something. But it was hard. I mean, there were times in there where people were telling me like, yeah, lean into partnerships. And I was like, guys, we're trying. Like, I don't know what else we can do. I'm just having conversations. Um, in terms of other deliberate decisions on acquisition, just kind of keeping our customers in the loop, like our early supporters. So beta testers, early investors, just like friends, like anyone that we interviewed for product feedback early on and old coworkers we put on this newsletter list. And it was like pretty raw early on. Here's what we learned. Here's what we screwed up. Here's like we added 2 customers this week. That's amazing. And we just brought people into that and, um, it created a like huge network of advocates and people who kind of knew what we were doing and knew the strategy. And then a year later they have a friend who can use us and they would like make that intro. So that, like, you have to give information and context to get good referrals and be top of mind. So we didn't know that was gonna be so helpful when we did it, but that like early newsletter was really valuable.

I'll give you one piece of unsolicited, uh, advice based on my own learnings. When you think about, uh, effort versus impact, you should go on 100 podcasts. I can't tell you— I've been doing a ton of e-commerce podcasts. I cannot tell you how many people have come through our website who said, we found you guys through a podcast. Yeah, uh, it's been, it's been shocking. Like, Mike, Mike texted me a few months ago and I was like, dude, I don't know what the fuck you're doing with these podcasts, but keep doing them.

Just, just keep pressing go.

Well, it was just because there's a lot of very niche podcasts who maybe don't have a ton of subscribers or a big audience, but it's super focused. So, you know, you increase your surface area. All it takes is one person. When you think about valuing your time, like, I don't know what your contract sizes are, but it's like, if you're spending an hour of your day on a podcast and you're getting even one lead from it, a warm lead who like knows what you're doing and reaching out because they heard what you're doing, it's probably in the end, if you calculate it, you're probably going to be in the net positive when you think about time out.

Totally. And then it's, you know, content that can be reused and like recycled and put out a bunch of ways.

Yeah.

In the early days we did a handful and similarly that, that like helped us. That was actually a nice pull moment too of, hey, price testing is pretty esoteric. It's like we're talking about price elasticity and profit per visitor and like it's not a just immediate sell. I get it. So being able to talk about it long form I find as well just gets it in people's head in a way that like it can if they're just popping on a website.

Um, I'm curious what, um, what are like the key markers that you look for when you're qualifying a brand? Is it category, revenue, amongst other things?

Um, we exclusively focus on Shopify right now, so that's a pretty easy one. That'll change, but for now, cut the list there. A certain amount of revenue is necessary because you need traffic to run tests.

Like, you know, but is it visitors or revenue, or you're just saying one is typically a function of the other?

It's number of orders is like the, the N for an A/B test.

Okay.

And a given test, we want minimum 100 orders per group, but something sensitive like a price test, we probably want 200 to 300 orders per group. So depending on the types of tests someone's running, like, we usually say, hey, you should have like 1,500 to 2,000 orders a month. And, and that often correlates with like a million-ish in annual revenue.

Okay.

Um, depending on where someone falls, we're going to like put them into a different funnel, a more self-serve one, or one that's, hey, let's actually like build a solution here and talk about what makes sense. Every industry is good for this. Um, really high AOV we have to be pretty careful with because like when you were buying this couch, you and your roommates probably like took a long time to make the decision, brought it up on a bunch of devices, came back over time. So that like high consideration cycle products don't get as good of test data. So that's like we try to work with AOVs under $300.

It's actually the same with our business too, because a lot of our value prop is around like gamification and incremental improvements of AOV conversion, cost savings. But it's like if you're selling, you know, $500 jewelry, I'm not going to tell you to put like an incentive bar and upsells in your cart because no one's going to just impulsively add a $400 product to their purchase.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, they may be doing $10 million in revenue but not have actually that many orders to go get statistical significance with.

Yeah. When you were— you talked about the like phases of momentum and especially over the past 6 months. I mean, even working with you guys, like seeing the momentum in real time. I feel like, I feel like there's a— on the surface, everything's gravy, everything's moving, it's exciting. You're building more product, you're talking to your customers, building more products, signing more customers. On the downside of that, especially for you and your role, there's so many highs and lows. It's like the frequency of highs and lows. Maybe before, one high week, one low week.

Now I'm sure it's one hour to the next.

Now I'm sure it's like as things— I mean, verbatim to over the past kind of 6 months as well, we really started to scale. And on one hand I'm like, oh my God, this is so exciting. On the other hand, I've been more frazzled than I ever have because every hour it's like this. How have you learned to manage that?

Uh, having a co-founder is really helpful. Um, I find you just like inevitably you can pull each other closer to the middle, like the amplitude super high, but you can go be— I can just call up Adam, my co-founder, and like, well, we'll even out a little bit. One of us will be high, one of us will be low. We'll get to a good point. Finding time to zoom out, incredibly helpful. So like I still do an investor update monthly and that's like a great, you know, the days feel long, but the months you're like, wow, we made a ton of progress.

Have you always done monthly?

Pretty much. I mean, we did weekly for a period. We went through Techstars and they were like, you're going to send an update weekly, which is how that newsletter started. That I only kept up for like 3 months.

I'm on the other side of the spectrum on that topic. I do quarterly.

Yeah, I will probably change at some point because it does— it tends to be the thing on my to-do list. I'm like, oh man, dreading.

The reason I do quarterly, I just have a founder friend who built a very successful business. His perspective on it was, if you want to know what's going on in my business, like, get on the phone with me and be helpful. Which I'm like, that's— yeah, you want to keep people in the loop, of course. But like, from a philosophical perspective, that's a super valid, like, perspective in the sense that you don't want the person who's just bugging you to like, where are your metrics now? What's going on? Like, how about you try to help me improve my metrics instead of just bothering me to find out what they are? And for whatever reason, that just stuck with me. And I'm like, quarterly is, is the thing.

Yeah, I think that's valid. I think it's as much of an exercise for me as it is for the investors. Because it forces that zoom out and like, what, what did we accomplish on that timeframe? The other thing I do is every time, like the first thing is an ask. And that was the case with our newsletter. You lead with an ask every time. Like, I'm recruiting for this role. I'm like doing this. And, you know, we have a pretty wide number of people on that list. Someone is always going to have an answer to that. Like, I need someone who can help fix our Google Ads conversion. Okay. Yeah. Here's like a guy. So yeah, having a co-founder helps manage the ups and downs, finding time for the Zoom outs. I use an executive coach, which is great, like business therapy, basically.

All right, we got to, we got to jump in. I want to go deep on that one.

Great.

So not to cut you off, but I'm— it's super top of mind for me because I just did an offsite with my co-founders. And one of the things I brought up to them was like, guys, we've been so deep grinding for the last couple of years. We now have a 14-person team and like a real business. We need to figure out like how we're making sure that we're leveling up and making sure that we're continuing to empower others and like doing the right things. And so this is the first time that we collectively agreed that we want to invest in an executive coach. And so I want to better understand from you, like, what have you gotten out of it? How did you go about finding the coach that you're working with? And what— how frequently are you doing it? Just give me kind of the full— yeah, full picture.

So it was another Techstars thing. They like provide a coach during the course and there was actually a coach for the entire class who led our like retreat. His name's Keith. He's great. And then you would get paired up with individual coaches. And so I met Terry, my coach, through that and decided to keep working with her afterwards. Uh, I mean, where to start? So a lot of that program and the stuff that Keith worked on, and we've brought Keith to our team retreats, like every team retreat we do, we try to bring a little bit of that coaching. He comes from like a school of thinking called Conscious Leadership, which is kind of like how do you stay centered, stay balanced, recognize when you're like operating above the line, like from an area of curiosity and openness and Hey, I'm trying to improve versus when are you below the line and like operating from safe, I need safety and there's anxiety and like I'm closed off to new ideas. So there's a whole bunch of like ways of talking and thinking that you're trying to be conscious and present as you lead, like tons of great material on that. It has been, it's a great way of thinking. What's more important is it's given our whole team like a shared language on how to communicate with each other about like emotions and where, all right, I'm like frustrated right now. Let me communicate what of that frustration is at you about the work, about myself. Um, how do I give feedback in a way that's productive and like not gonna make things worse? So it's given our whole team a shared language and like that's been kind of a cultural point of emphasis. And anyone who joins, they— like, one that we use a lot is like facts versus story. So, hey, we're having a difficult conversation. I don't think Verbatim's moving fast enough. You guys are great. So that's not it. But like, let's say that I may have a story that Adrian's overextended and like the team is spread too thin and that's why we're moving slow. I don't have any— the only facts I have are like I wanted this to happen and it happened then. That like enables you and I to have a conversation. I could say, hey, I have this story in my head. Do you think that's true? Here's like the facts I'm seeing. And we can know— you can say, oh, I agree on the fact, or I disagree. Actually, where I'm coming from is this. And like that, it's just a little verbal tweak. Yeah, but it lets our whole team like move faster and like get through thorny stuff. So that's team level things with Terry. So my personal coach, we meet every 2 weeks for an hour. Just had it yesterday. I mean, frankly, it's a lot like a therapy session. It is like open agenda. She'll maybe push on things that we talked on last time or like hold me accountable to something I asked her to check in on. But it'll kind of be like, what's eating at you? What's top of mind? And it may be I'm having trouble recruiting for this role. And what is it like? Do I have the wrong expectations? Am I getting the wrong candidates or We are trying to figure out, um, you know, a tricky situation with a customer and there's like personal issues and tech issues and financial issues. Just a forum to talk through it. And I'm very much a verbal processor, which is why I'm giving super long-winded answers here. Uh, and so it just like helps structure those thoughts and arrange it or, and, and she can pick up on trends and like say, hey, this seems like that issue you had with sales a couple months ago where you were like holding yourself back because like, I'm a bit of a more of a perfectionist than I realized. Being a perfectionist while starting a company is really hard and often in my case leads to like inaction. So she'd be like, I think that's like perfectionism talking. Like, how do you— how can we like break that down? Or Yeah, I had another example that slipped, but it's, it's just the other thing to your point, like she helps identify inflection points of like, hey, the team is 15, 16. You have this team retreat coming up. What needs to be different in how you lead this versus when the team was 10 people and like prompt that sort of reflective thinking actually about the style of leadership that, um, is really helpful. And like, it just generally gives a toolkit for stepping back from the roller coaster and be like, all right, I recognize that there's ups and downs, but like, how am I needing to improve along the way?

The other question I have is, do you think it's a good or bad idea to have a coach for us collectively versus us on an individual level? Because I mean, if I'm being honest, also, like, I don't think we want to be paying out of, like, out of the company for 3 of us to have 3 individual coaches. Just feels expensive. But again, like, maybe it's worth it.

So I'm curious. I mean, like, you know, let's say that's $1,000 a month.

Like, that was my other thing is I actually don't know.

Yeah, I mean, I think going rate's probably somewhere between $200, $400 a session. Okay. Um, it's not— if that helps you grow your company like 2% better over the course of a year, like, that very quickly paid for itself. Um, But I get it. I mean, we had that debate up front. We have separate coaches, my co-founder and I. We both know each other's coaches. We both like met— like he uses Keith, who we went through Techstars with. But I don't think there's any downside to having the same person. And I could see ways in which that's helpful because like when we disagree, like it's me and my co-founder, having someone who can see both sides of that would, would probably be useful, not as an arbiter, but just to be like, Oh, this pattern is happening between you guys again. Like, do you want to— do you want to choose to break that pattern here?

Well, it's that, but I think the other piece of it too is there's obviously coaches who specialize in different aspects of being an executive coach.

Yep.

And so it's also, you don't know what you don't know. So we're trying— we know intuitively that we should be talking to people who've been there, done that, who could just help us grow. But at the same time, I don't think we necessarily know what would be the most beneficial thing for the business today. Like, You know, is Kieran, who's the product guy, should he be talking to a technical-ish person to understand how to like communicate and empower technical people? Whereas should Mike and I be talking to someone who has more operational experience, or is it helpful to cross-contaminate? We don't really have those answers. So I think like having conversations like this with people who've tried different things to just gain knowledge, because the other thing I'm obsessed about with getting a coach is like you expedite your learning curve by learning from someone who's done what you're trying to figure out.

Yeah. Or, I mean, there's all sorts of different styles and I think it's, I mean, you played sports, so like it's worth asking what kind of coaching do I respond to? Like, do I want someone who's pushing me and like critiquing? Do I want someone who's just like checking in, like more pestering and like that's what I need? I prefer someone who will just like let me talk and like wind my way through it. And that will inform the search. And you also build up your own little, like, personal board. So my coach, like, hasn't— I mean, her— she runs her own business, but she hasn't done the startup thing before. She comes from, like, a therapy and social work background, but has worked with many founders who have gone through it. So that works for me. But I have, you know, a mentor who's really good at sales and who I go to for, like, tactical advice on how do I get better at this. Similarly, like Adam has his coach and he's been on the founding side before, but deep in this conscious leadership. But we have an incredibly helpful technical investor who wrote an angel check and like he'll help us do tech screens and evaluate new engineers and like think about architecture. And so Adam can go to him for very tactical stuff. So there's almost like a network of many coaches we have on different topics. But for the main one, it's just kind of like what do you think you're going to respond to the best?

I think it's also really important to note that I've worked with executive coaches in the past and also health coaches and other ones, and that sometimes I think I want a certain style. And then you start and I made the mistake of not trying out multiple people. Like I had a, I had a health coach, like a nutrition coach. And in my mind I'm like, you're tough and disciplined and like, I want someone on top of me.

Yeah.

And I hired a nutrition coach who every day would like email me and check in. And after like 2 weeks, I felt like I was being attacked. I was like, I actually don't want that. I do not respond well to this.

I'm checking out.

Part of it also is like you— it's sometimes easier to figure out what you don't like versus what you do, and you have to go through those things to know you don't want them. But I think in the spirit of trying to be efficient about it, in my mind, at least what feels intuitively, it's like, okay, if I were to recommend Mike to get a coach, like find a coach who's just going to help you close more deals, right? Like it's very simple. Like you're selling, like how could you just be better at what you're doing? Or for me, it's like, figure out someone who can help you just be like a better leader and a better operator, like across, you know, cross-functional teams. And with Kieran, it's like, how do you just empower your product and engineering people to build a better product? I'm sure we could like zoom out and make it more like a— because I think what I'm hearing from you is some of it is also emotional, like how to handle certain situations. And maybe that's what it is. But I think all we've landed on thus far was let's try to get some help, but we don't necessarily know what is the most effective yet.

Yeah, I think a lot of it for me is like, how do I just get out of my own way? Like, a lot of times you don't really know the bad habits that are holding you back until you, like, get Amir shown up. And it's been also really— people told me this would happen, but your, your good and your bad habits also get reflected in the culture. Like, people follow your example. You chose to hire the people. So if you can make yourself better, and get out of your own way on a lot of things, you also probably set a better example and lead better and improve the culture. So it's, it's a lot less tactical for me. It's just how do I be the best leader for the org that it needs today and also make it more sustainable for me? I mean, like, being a founder is not easy. So like, if I can like take that amplitude and make it more manageable, then like I'll be able to do this for a lot longer and be happier.

Um, it resonates so deeply because I, I'm a huge fan of therapy. I haven't done in the context of like business therapy, but like personal, and I've seen ways that it's allowed me to grow. And I'm— I talk about on the pod all the time. And so I'm just thinking about in real time, it's basically the same thing but a different— it's not your necessarily your personal problems, but like your business problems.

Yeah. Yeah. And like oftentimes, like, I mean, they bleed together.

So like, sometimes they're together.

The conversation can go either way in both forums, sometimes like personal views in the business, business views into personal. But and like, like yesterday I was like, oh man, I have so many meetings. I really want to cancel this, but you just like have to do it in my opinion. So like it's almost a good sign when I want to cancel it because it's like All right. I know this is a little painful, which means it's probably important to do for the long run.

On the days— we were talking about this in the last pod, David— on the days where you're well-slept and you're eating well and you're exercising and you're really stable mentally and just closing big deals and you're making progress, showing up to back-to-back-to-back calls, even though it's a lot of work, it is a breeze. Like you're ready for it. I'm curious for you, on the days where you look at your calendar, you're back-to-back-to-back and you haven't been working out and you're not feeling well and you just lost a huge deal yesterday and you got 4 hours of sleep, say after ShopTalk or something.

Yep.

How do you ensure that as a leader, maybe you're not at 100%, but you're still showing up as best as you can for those deals or for those conversations?

It's hard.

I appreciate the honesty.

Raw emotion on your face right now.

Well, for me, there's— I've always had pretty like verbal roles. I was a consultant. I like worked on all these small teams. I'm gonna go in a slightly different direction. It is much easier for me always to react versus create. So like a day long full, long full of meetings, even if it sucks, I like the structure cuz I can show up, I can be told things, I can react to things. I can talk pretty and feel like I was productive that day. Um, I'm gonna steal a line from my coach, like, react and create are the same 5 letters. The problem with those long days of meetings for me is like, it just puts me in a reactive mood, which is an easier place for me to be and like completely swamps creative energy. Like a big goal for me this quarter was like, can I block out an hour and a half each day where I just no computer, just sit with a piece of paper and like think through harder problems for the business or like things that I need to process and get off the treadmill of Zooms.

So how has that gone so far?

I was way better at it in January, the first half of February when I was in New Mexico versus the last month and a half when I've been here. But incredibly useful. Like I just had a list. Hey, here's the things I need to talk— think through. Org structure, fundraising strategy, like thorny product questions and stuff that like needed multiple days to solve. And it was tremendously useful. Like I had a ton of clarity on where we needed to go. And now I'm like, hey, I got to get this back in my calendar. It just felt— it also helped me be just a much more engaged leader. I was like setting better goals for the team. I was holding them accountable more, feeling less like I had to do everything. So people were empowered. I had a more sustainable life and like was making better decisions when I had that habit.

I have two thoughts on that. So the first one, and you guys can keep me honest, I feel like being reactive versus creative is easier for most people because you don't really— when you're reacting, you're not really given a choice, whereas creating is like a state of emptiness almost, where you actually like getting to a place of calmness and peace knowing there's a lot of things going on that you have to intentionally shut out. Maybe it's just— I'm just speaking from personal experience. Seems like reactive is the easy way out for most people. I don't know if you feel—

have a back-to-back calendar, easier to react for sure.

And then the second piece of it, uh, that actually Aaron Spivak said to me, and I tweeted this and it actually was probably one of my best engaged tweets. I sent him a screenshot of my calendar one day and he was like, dude, what the hell is this? And he was like, go through every meeting on your calendar and every meeting that isn't making you money, take it off your calendar. And of course it's, there's nuance in that comment.

Yeah.

But when he said that and I looked and I'm like, that's a nice to have, not a need to have. That can be solved with an email. Like that's not actually pushing the business forward. And it, that was the thing I needed to like recalibrate myself and be honest with myself that I'm not falling. Cause I'm the same as you. I'll fall into that trap of 8 meetings back to back and then you're exhausted. You're reacting all day. Yeah. You didn't really get anything done.

You, you're like not gonna eat healthy after that.

No. And then, and then you, but it takes discipline to guard your time and quiet your mind to be creative. And it's something that I struggle with and I'm still working on today.

I think it's uncomfortable conversations with yourself too. I was, uh, I was having dinner with Prince from Factored and Chaz, both Vinyl portfolio companies. Shout out Vinyl. And I was talking to Prince about this because we've been working with Factored Quality for a long time through Verbatim. And sometimes I'll jump on calls and still be on them. And he was like, what are you doing on these, man? I was like, well, people want to talk to me. He was like, no one wants to talk to you, man. Like, you hired a good team. Let them do their job. They're doing it way better than you. And I still make this mistake sometimes where there's sometimes where, like, I love to get involved in, like, go-to-market and sales, and I want to be on those. And then sometimes I'll be on calls and I'm like, I really didn't need to be on this one.

Yeah.

Even though I think my ego is telling me, no, you need to be on that with, with you guys. It's like, No, Drew wants to talk to me. I don't, I don't think Drew really wants to talk to me on this, or they need my feedback here. I think it's— I think that's an uncomfortable conversation.

Yeah. You think you're helping your team, but you're like getting in the way of them owning it.

Let's talk about social proof for a second because Adrian never plugs himself on this pod. So I want to take the onus of doing so. Since you work with Verbatim, what problem is it— is he solving for you and how has it been so far?

I mean, a lot of problems. Um, so we're doing one thing that's pretty familiar to people. We're like equipping you with CRO tools with an angle towards profitability. We're doing a bunch of things that are really unfamiliar. No one has been able to do price testing. No one has like personalized and tested shipping thresholds. So there's this category creation exercise of like in 5 years or 3 years, I want every brand above $20 million a year in revenue to have a person who just thinks about maximizing profit. They're smart, they're hungry, they're analytical. They are like owning pricing, which no one ever has a clear owner for. They are like making sure every discount is incremental or iterating their way towards that. They're managing the CRO agency or owning that. And it should just be like a best practice. That everyone does. Like, there's so much profit left on the table because people don't think about this stuff. To some extent, like, I, I don't care. Intelligems does not need to win all of those deals or even be like— you don't need Intelligems to get better at it. But I feel like we greatly grow our market if we paint this picture for operators of like, this is what the future is going to look like. This is a best practice. Go start thinking about this inside your company. No one's going to create that category besides us. We've thought about it 100 times more than any other team in the world. We like know more about e-commerce pricing than any team in the world. Like, who else if not for us? But you're so busy operating and doing stuff and working with individual accounts, like it's hard to zoom out. And talk at that like 50,000-foot level and take the time. Hey, I just gave great— my teammate gave great advice to this brand in a one-on-one situation. How do we like take that and make it one-to-many? So that's been a challenge for us because we've been busy and because like we just— I tend to be very focused on what's in front and reactive in the meeting day full of meetings. And so my team reflects that as well. So a big part of what we're doing with Verbatim is, hey, let's like actually talk about what we do, explain this concept of profit optimization, show the success stories, and start building the conversation about that. Um, that is like the mega goal. And part of that's marketing and figuring out distribution and how do we build an audience and all that stuff. But like goal number one is, is build the content. Like Let's figure out how to talk about it. Um, and so yeah, that, that's why we decided to work with Verbatim. We were like, we can't do this ourselves. We've like put it on the agenda many times and it's never been something we could execute on our own. We talked with like pure content people who didn't specialize in any particular way and didn't have confidence they could like convey the nuance of what we're doing. And so Verbatim was like, These guys know how to do it. They have a great team. They understand the space and can speak the same language that we do and that our customers do. And we thought, should we hire someone? And it was like, Adrian's team knows way more than anyone we would hire. It would take them a year to get to that level of expertise. So yeah, that's what he's doing. So far, it's been great. I think we're like a month, month and a half in.

Drew and I are still on all the calls.

Yeah, but really—

All right, guys, let's get off them. I'll be the mediator here. You guys need to both go back to doing.

I know, well, I, I was traveling, so I was off the calls for a bit, and then I hopped on one. I was like, wow, Adrian's still here.

There's one where we were both on it. I don't think either of us talked, just like waved goodbye, and I was like, he shouldn't be on this call.

Yeah. Uh, Adrian, is that a common thing? I feel like what you just said is so common in all your conversations where everyone knew intuitively they wanted to get around to doing it, but it just continues to fall down the list of things to do until they hit a point where, where they're like, we need someone else who can just be that peace of mind to get it done and get it done well.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's two components that are not talked about, and one is we want to make it— we want to make it a perfect experience for your customers that we're interviewing or your partners that we're interviewing for content. And I think there's a really well-founded fear for a lot of founders that if I'm hiring even a head of content or a junior kid out of college, are you going to go introduce them to your biggest customer?

Yeah.

And have them even just do an average job, not have like a good experience. You want it to be fun for them. Like they're, they're doing you a favor. And I think that's not talked about that. Yeah, you could hire a junior kid out of college. Maybe they're really sharp and figure it out. Are you going to go introduce them to your biggest customer and hope they don't mess it up? And that's a really scary experience, I think, for founders. And then I think the second thing is ultimately Series B+, I recommend a lot of teams go in-house. Um, there's just so many touch points with your company as you're growing. I always do recommend that route. But what is not talked about that I think teams are a little afraid to talk about is the cost of in-house. Um, and I think the offshoring conversation, as more people have hired developers and designers around the world, I think people are starting to come to terms with it a bit. But the— you're not just talking about a base salary. You're talking about ramp up time.

Yep.

You're talking about interviewing time. If you're hiring senior recruiter on the front end, what if it doesn't work? Severance on the back end. You're talking about PTO, like all of a sudden, oh wait, we're actually only hiring this person for 10 and a half months out of the year. They're taking 6 weeks. Health care, which is incredibly expensive, especially if their family is on the plan, which I'm learning now as a founder too. Yep. Health care is incredibly expensive.

Yep.

Not just the ramp up time, but also equity component. And so I think a lot of teams don't think about that. They're like, oh, you guys are X amount a month. This person is X amount base. It's like, you need to think about all those other things. You're only getting this team for 10.

Why have I never seen you make a long-form LinkedIn post that said like, here are the 10 things you don't have to think about and why you should work with Verbatim? Because that struck a chord. Yeah, that was so well— that was so well articulated. And I can guarantee you that majority of the brand— the businesses you're talking to, that is not what they're thinking. Like, it's— I think it's way more simple to what he just alluded to, which was We've been wanting to do content and case studies and education, but we just can't get to it because it keeps falling down the priority list. I mean, you could tell me if I'm wrong, but I don't know if you're like, I have to think about benefits and the ramp up and the severance and all those things. Like, you should probably lean into everything you just said a lot more.

I think breaking down the costs for people live really changes the conversation. And I think the funniest, the funniest part is that sometimes people say, well, I'm just going to go hire the best head of content out there who's done it before. And I'm all gung-ho. I said, okay, go do that. And a lot of the time they will just go hire us anyway. Even after they hired the head of content, head of content will say, well, I'm very experienced. I don't want to actually do all the writing, and they're just going to hire us anyway. And I'll tell founders that and they'll say, okay, I don't believe you. Then they'll go hire that person and they're so experienced that they don't want to do the writing anymore and they're just going to outsource it to us anyway. And so it still ends up in the same place.

That's funny. Yeah. And when I could see people like getting stuck on the question, oh, maybe we should hire this, and then takes a couple months to think about that, and then like you just lost time, which is also really valuable. So exactly, yeah, I mean, that, that question did come up for us like for a second, but then we did the back of the envelope math and the cost, maybe you can believe it would be similar, but the time was the biggest thing. Like, we can get this going today and get results in 4 weeks versus like maybe I have good candidates in 4 weeks if we decide to recruit.

Yeah. By the way, I will say there are 1-2 percenters out there. Like, you can get lucky. And I recommend like everyone put out a JD and see what happens. That's always my first recommendation.

You know, the only reason we've never worked with Verbatim is because I sit next to Adrian for like 6 hours at least one day every couple of weeks. So I was like, I feel like I've taken at least enough of this to try to, to do like 60% of what you offer people.

Hey, I've done live teardowns of your case studies.

Yeah, no, I'm saying I've been fortunate enough to get the real-time education. But everyone else I've talked to, I'm like, dude, that's the guy. Like, I can't really help you.

He reached out to me about working together.

The origin story of how we met, which if we have anyone who's still listening to our podcast 30 episodes later, shout out to you, but you probably have already heard this story. I was literally on Google. Trying to understand how much it would cost to hire a head of content or a content lead. And I opened up LinkedIn and I had a LinkedIn request and I opened it and he requested me on LinkedIn and I clicked on his profile. This was actually at the same time I was on Google looking at content hires and I clicked on his profile and his tagline was like, your, your content engine or first head of content or something. I was like, this is way too serendipitous to not reach out to him. So I messaged him on LinkedIn. I'm like, hey man, I'm actually on the internet looking around for what your business does. This is super interesting. Can we chat? And we got on a Zoom call for like— it was a 30-minute meeting that lasted 2 hours, and we walked away wanting to start a podcast together.

Best friends ever since.

That's actually the story, which is why it's— yeah, it's wild.

Who would have thought? Serendipity.

One thing I want to talk to you about— I know we don't have that much time— is investors specifically and how to get the most value out of them. I think a lot of people do it poorly. A lot of people also do it really well. When you first raised— because you've raised a couple of tranches of investment— A, how do you think about the people you want on your cap table? And then B, aside from sending these monthly updates with an ask, which as we all know doesn't always work, how do you focus on activating them in the right way that is also respectful of their time?

So how do we think about who it was and how do we activate them? Yes. I love our investors. I'm going to say that. I think every VC is going to tell you about all the ways in which they will add value. Money is green regardless of who's giving it to you. And like, I put me generally in the skeptic camp of how much value an investor is going to provide. Like, you got to run the business, you got to do the hard work. Like, no one's going to make that easier. There's not going to be a magic bullet. I think the, the two minimums that I need from an investor is, can this person, particularly if they're a fund, help me with my next capital strategy question, my next raise or an exit or something? Like, they should have— if it's a seed VC, they should be well connected with Series A VCs and help— like, they— that is the one thing the investor does over and over and over again that as a founder you are doing once every couple years. So like, that is their expertise. Ask about how they've helped founders in their portfolio with that, because, because it's also a very different form of storytelling to go get investment. Like, you're doing sales, you're talking about your product, your customer's educated on what they're buying. A VC is coming in pretty cold. They may know the space, but you need to engage at a really different level. So your investor can hopefully help with the storytelling and the network. The second thing I hope for them is a relationship where I can bring problems. Like there's always gonna be problems, questions, things we're trying to solve. I don't want any fear of judgment or that I'm gonna be micromanaged or told I'm doing it wrong. Like someone who knows that shit's gonna happen. I can come and they're going to take a problem-solving mindset of like, cool, here's what I've seen, let's try this, let's try that. And but ultimately, no, like you guys have— you guys founders have more context. So like, here's my input, do with it what you want to do. That's the relationship I want with my investor. So like, I think you test for that in like, I think it's the average VC founder. You should have like, you get 8 touchpoints before an investment, like use those, go for coffee or beer, share problems in the business. Like, don't front. I mean, there's obviously a little— like a lot of posturing in a fundraising process, but see how they react to not perfect things. Those are my two main things on like, is it good people for a fund? We brought in a lot of angels. I think probably like some people would say too many angels. Like there's some people who are like, you should have the smallest cap table possible. For us, it was like, does this person know e-commerce? Like, we had customers invest. We had people who've been in the space for a long time, people who founded brands and tech companies. And for that, it's like, hey, do you know that you can lose this money? Uh, do you have some ideas of how you maybe could be helpful for me down the road? And like, are you going to be a supporter and tell me before you invest in a competitor or something? Uh, and if they check those boxes, then like we actually took way smaller checks than we anticipated. And some of those tiny checks have been super valuable. They're like people in the city who have introduced us to customers and taken us to events and, um, have given like amazing product feedback. So like strategic angels, we were very happy to make room for, and that's proven to be really valuable. As far as activation, like It's— I think it comes from like proactive communication. Like, I don't expect any of my investors except maybe my largest to be sitting at their desk and being like, how can I help Intelligems today? If that does cross their mind, like, I need to be pushing them context on what we're working on, what we're thinking about, like what challenges running into, what roles recruiting for. Because what I could hope for is something serendipitous happens. They meet a candidate who's looking for a job or like just got laid off and they're like, oh, Drew was just talking about that. He was looking for someone like this. Like, let me make that intro. And can I push enough context for them where like when the serendipitous thing happens, I'm who pops to mind? And the asks are a way of doing that. The investor updates are a way of doing that. Like, I don't want to spend my time on a bunch of like 15-minute Zoom updates where I'm like keeping people posted. But I'm also like not going to wait back and like see who comes to me. I'd rather push context, let people go find opportunities. I mean, it's the same reason we do like product marketing, like, hey, let me tell all these customers about our new features. And I don't expect it to be relevant for everyone any time, but like when they have that idea of, oh, I really need to update this landing page. Oh, didn't Intelligems just like launch a way for me to do that across countries? Like, that's the kind of activation I'm trying to create.

Yeah. Has that been similar story for you with the angels in terms of—

Yeah, I think the one thing I resonate with is we took in all the strategic angels. I think the one difference, but again, I don't think it matters, is we did like an RUV for checks under a certain size.

That's— Yeah, I should have done that for sure.

Oh, they were all on the cap table.

Oh yeah.

I don't— I don't really— I don't actually—

Carta Bill sucks.

My $1,000 check sizes would have messed up your cap table.

I don't think it matters as much as I think it gets played up that it's a bigger issue than it really is.

You just end up going to the next Cartier and they rip you off.

Yeah. I mean, in that regard.

Yeah.

But if you're— and then I guess if you're getting later stage in terms of the type of money, like, is it a price round? Is it a SAFE? Are there rights? Whatever, then sure, you should probably think about it a little more. But early days, like we did an RUV, we did an extension later on where the RUV was already closed. We ended up taking a couple smaller checks that made sense for us later on. But I would say in terms of like relationships with investors, for me it was more so like directionally, here's the world that we're playing in. Like if you meet anyone tangential, just like send them over. And then if there's very specific things that we need help with, like I'll reach out to them and say, hey, like, can you help us with this thing? But beyond that, it's the quarterly updates with very specific asks and updates. But I think the thing that you said that maybe I didn't want to accept on day one, but come to realize very quickly is like, you're the one that still has to do the work and like build the business. They're not— there's no magic bullet. Like they're not going to do something for you. Like, holy shit, that was magic. Like they're there to support you. Do I get more frequent texts from my larger investors? Like, hey, what's the update? Yeah, of course. But you can't expect them to build your business for you. I think it's more nice to know that if I need to reach out to someone for something, they're going to answer the phone because they have a vested interest in what it is that I'm doing. But it's very much not, especially because we've raised less than $1 million. Like most of the people who've invested in our business, it is not something they're waking up thinking about. And I respect that. And to be honest with you, we wanted it that way. I don't want to be hounded by my investors if I need— like, I set the expectation with them. If I want something or need something, I'm going to come to you for it. But like, don't bother me is kind of my personal perspective on it, unless you're going to be helpful, which is what I said to you earlier. Yep. But everyone has a different, like, preference on that, I'd say.

Yeah. What does— I know we only have a few minutes, but what does the next few quarters look like for you guys? Like when you're end of the year 2024, when you're reflecting in your journal or however you reflect.

Yeah.

What does a kick-ass year look like for you guys?

Uh, so I always answer that in like a couple of different dimensions, right? So there's growth, there's financials, there's team, there's product. We're working with just about 1,000 brands right now.

Hell yeah.

Yeah. So like, wow, it's crazy and awesome. I'd love to close the year at like 3,000. Like, that would be a killer number. Like, we need to work to get there, but I want us to achieve a certain scale of impact, like make a ton more profit for the industry. Our revenue, our retention is going to come from that. So like step one to create more impact, get more brands on the platform. Um, second big thing is like, can we— this is more product. I want us to open up new channels to deliver value. So right now a lot of the product is A/B testing driven. Um, A/B testing, you are kind of iterating towards the single best version of the site. You know, you're, you're putting out these options. Version B worked the best. Our roots are in dynamic pricing and like making decisions every minute for each rider and each ride. We want to push more towards that, like add on more dynamic features that can be just constantly delivering value for brands in the background. And that looks more like rather than finding the best one size fits all, the best, like the global maximum, can we take different segments of traffic? Oh, these are your mobile. Um, customers from this campaign. These are your returning customers from Klaviyo campaigns on desktop. Can we help you find— oh, actually, this experience works best for that segment. That experience works best for this one. This offer is best for this segment over here. This offer is going to— that, like, Adrian lands on the site, he only needs 10% to convert. To maximize my function, like, I'm cheap, you got to give me 20% off and That's going to be like the optimization that we find. So we're just making decisions per session that add value. And there's a whole, like, that's kind of the tech we love. We love A/B testing. Don't get me wrong. But like, there's a lot that's been done in the past. Like, no one's really pushed into that in a meaningful way in e-commerce. So hopefully we can deliver more value through like dynamic features on the product. And then on the team front, I mean, I just like love our team. It's been We've kind of slowly built it out and have kept a really high bar and we need to add folks this year. But I hope that we are like at 22, 24 people but have kept the same bar and like our culture has stayed the same and even gotten better. Like our, our, the way I think about it, it's like, all right, there's a core of us. First was me and my co-founder. We brought on our first couple of people. Here's how we work. Spread it to them. We were lucky to bring in a couple of people from our last company, so great. They know how we work. They're part of the core. We just had our team retreat now, like the 8 new folks who joined since last year. They get how we operate. They're part of the core. Can we like keep— like it's almost like a tree, like strengthening the cultural wood at the middle. And I don't know how to measure that in like a goal, but revenue. Yeah. Hopefully we've grown the team and like kept that bar the same and everyone is like, this is the smartest group of people I've ever worked with.

Talent density. Yeah, I love that. That's a great place to wrap.

Yeah, that was awesome, man. I appreciate you coming on. You want to just look at the camera and let everyone know where they can find you and what you're up to?

Yeah, um, so I'm Drew Marconi. You can find us at intelligems.io, I-N-T-E-L-L-I-G-E-M-S, or on the App Store. Um, if you have any A/B testing needs, if you want to just chat about how you can boost your profit, come find us. You can email me drew@intelligems.io or fill out the demo form on the website.

Oh yeah, thanks, man.

This is great. Thanks, guys. Yeah, thanks for having me on.