How To De-Bloat Your App Stack | Ben Sharf, Co-Founder at Platter.co

Ben, welcome. Thanks for joining me today.

Thanks for having me, Sean.

Super excited to talk through Platter and the Shopify ecosystem. You know, as we were chatting back and forth, getting ready to do this today, you had mentioned two sort of primary pillars that you have that drive what you're doing at Platter. I'm hoping we can kind of start there and tell me about what you've noticed in the Shopify ecosystem and how that led to the solutions that you guys provide.

Yeah, so our business is built around two core theses. The first one is that a lot of apps in the Shopify ecosystem are features, not products. And so what that does to brand owners is they get stuck with too many apps, too many support teams, too many monthly expenses, and a bloated tech stack, which then leads to a slower website and lower conversion. And then the second piece to it is Basically shedding light on the misalignment between brands and development agencies. Development agencies get paid for their time. So in most instances, they're incentivized to make things complicated and drag out situations to get paid more money. But in reality, brand owners are looking for cost-effective, efficient ways to build and manage storefronts. And so what we've done over the last 2 years is natively build a lot of the most popular app functionality around marketing and conversion. Into one solution, which is a theme and app bundle, and then layer in best practices around how to increase your average order value and conversion rate so we can quantify making you money and saving you money at the same time. And the thing I'll say, like, couple of years from now, if Platter is successful, it's because we've debunked this myth that building a high-converting storefront is really expensive and takes a really long time, because that just shouldn't be the case.

Yeah, I think that's, that's such a common thing with marketers in general is we like to overcomplicate things and make things sound more technical than they are to make ourselves sound smart or make it seem like we have some sort of special solution. I'm curious if you could unpack a little bit regarding the apps being features, not products. Could you tell me a little bit about what that means and maybe even without naming names, some examples of things that would fall into that category or name names? Go for it.

You know, yeah, whatever you want to do. More specifically, like what that means is are you a feature or are you a product? So like, are you just an add-on or are you actually like a core fundamental component of a storefront? And I think a way that you can think about that is like, is it a nice-to-have or a need-to-have? And so when brands, like the best analogy that I would use is when you think about the iPhone and the App Store, it's like you want to download, you want like a map app or a calculator app. Like you go to the down, you go to the App Store and you download one. and you get stuck with 1,000 apps on your phone. Shopify has built the same thing within the Shopify ecosystem, but when in reality, like, they're empowering developers to build on their, you know, in their ecosystem, which I think is fantastic. But in a lot of instances, when you have developers who are building, you know, lifestyle businesses per se that are just like one very specific feature, it's not necessarily the most conducive solution for a brand owner. Because then you just have so much fragmentation where it's like one app might break and you don't know which one is triggering it. You need to reach out to a support team and then you have too many apps. And so there's a lot of different features that a lot of people use apps for that we don't believe should be standalone. So like to give you some examples, you know, mega menus, bundle builders, cart drawers, incentive bars, upsells, cross-sells, color swatches, sticky CTAs, post-purchase upsells, like, you know, the list goes on and on and on. And so I think one of the other things, or one of the big bets that we're making as a business that kind of goes against the rebuttal that someone might give us, which is a master of all is a master of none. We believe that there's a huge drop-off in terms of utility for each individual app after the core functionality. And so what I mean by that is like you might download an app because it's, they, you know, it does a certain thing and you pay X amount of dollars for it. But then when they tell you that they're now doubling the price because they're using AI and now it's super expensive, we learn that most merchants, they just care that like the core thing works. They don't care about the remaining 40% of all the bells and whistles that you say that you integrated as like new updates. And so based off that belief, we're convinced that if there's a solution where you have 90% of the functionality across all these different categories, where you leave out that last 10% of all the bells and whistles at a fraction of the cost, it's actually more valuable to a lot of merchants. And we've kind of proven that to be true for brands that are doing $1 million in revenue and brands doing $40 million in revenue.

Hmm. I know it does seem like there would be that natural objection to say, you know, if you don't specialize, how could you be as good at doing the thing that you're saying you're doing? Are there other objections that come up that say, I've got these apps turned on, these things plugged into my store, I already have them built in my workflows or whatever, just sort of a perceived difficulty in making the change to Platter?

I would say that one of the biggest things that happens in conversations we have with brands is like, you don't know what you don't know, right? So it's very easy to, to get comfortable and stay complacent versus learning about alternative solutions that might save you money and make you money. And so I think there's definitely a fear because we find that so many brands have PTSD. Every brand has one bad story about like a developer who overpromised and underdelivered and charge them too much, or they're technically restricted by whatever it is that they had built. And so it's always scary to think about like change. But I would say that our, something that we've been able to do that I honestly, I think surprised me when we started is like, we've been able to reduce so much friction in that migration process that the switching costs are a lot lower than normal. And brands are way more receptive to it than I thought. Like, we have a big ask when we're talking to brands, which is like, hey, let us like redesign and build a new website for you. Like, that's a pretty daunting thing to tell someone if they have no context in terms of like how you've built efficiencies to make that process go smoothly. And so I think for us, as long as we're asking the right questions, shedding light on the things that brand owners should be thinking about, they tend to come around our solution to where it's like it makes too much sense to not do it.

Right. Yeah. How, you know, Shopify is always releasing things in bulk and making changes. What's the process like on your side to stay on top of that stuff and see opportunities to add elements into the offering and say there's this, there's this new segment of apps that's popping up that's saying it can do this. But maybe that's an area where we can expand Platter to kind of fight the, the creep, the tech stack creep that might be happening there.

Yeah, I think first and foremost, it's important to recognize that when Shopify releases an app in a certain category, in my opinion, what they're actually doing is validating that category where I think a lot of people freak out like, oh no, they're going to cannibalize everyone overnight. Like the best example, it's most recent was they released a subscriptions app. And then you have all these subscription players who everyone's like, they're gonna, you know, be dead overnight. But what people don't realize is that Shopify has limited resources where they can't be the best at every single thing that they're building. So it's actually just validating that it's real. And by them offering a cheaper solution, it's an entry point for brands to start testing out subscriptions. And then when they're ready to go to a more sophisticated, like, flow, they can use one of those other players. And so for us, I mean, having our, you know, having our ear to the ground, always being aware of what's being released and always knowing the latest and the greatest is really important. But ultimately a lot of our product strategy is driven by what our customers are asking us for.

So, you know, my, my first entry point into Platter was the House of Macadamia's case study that you guys have been sharing out. And there's some pretty headline-worthy numbers associated with that one. So I'm hoping you could either detail that specifically or Or any other ones that you would say kind of show how this plays out in the real world?

Yeah, I mean, I think what's interesting is there's just a handful of things that we're looking at when analyzing an existing website and figuring out like what are the opportunity areas. And from there, you typically are able to like isolate certain parts of the website that you would want to improve, right? So if you think about from the perspective of House of Macadamias, like there were a couple different things that they were dealing with. Like the first one was just the lack of flexibility and the ability to iterate. In addition to the fact that, you know, they're at the core, like they're brand builders. They aren't necessarily like conversion rate nerds the way that we like to think we are. And so having, having someone who can help come in and like kind of guide them and give them those obvious low-hanging fruit changes to be made. Right? So for example, with them, it was a couple of things. Like the first one was optimizing their consumer, like, journey. So like just that conversion funnel, everything from like landing on the page to like information hierarchy to drawing you through actually making a purchase. And then the other piece to that as well is like maximizing the opportunities to increase average order value and conversion. Something that we feel very strongly about is the concept of gamification. So it's consumer behavior, right? Like it's psychology. If you make someone feel like they're earning something for an action, they're way more inclined to do so. And it sounds really like minute and not important, but when you take any brand that is doing any amount of traffic and you're able to introduce these new bells and whistles, you can actually see pretty sizable returns. Like House of Max is a great example because if you actually go on their website and land on their homepage, they have an announcement bar that persists across the entire website that says spend $65 or more to get free shipping. And not only that, they have a second one that's an incentive bar that also persists across the entire website. So from a human psychology perspective, every page that you click on on that website, you are reminded that you can get rewarded by doing a certain behavior. And then if you go into like the cart, you'll see the same incentive bar there. And then there's nuanced ways where you can add upsells on the, the mainframe of the product page. You can do bundles, you can do upsells in cart checkout extensions are another place to do upsells post-purchase, right? So there's a lot of different touchpoints where you can make material impacts to metrics like AOV and conversion. And so I think this was a brand where they had a really good product, they have good assets, but they did not have the proper conversion funnel and they did not have the most efficient website they could from like a speed perspective. And so because we know they have a good product and good assets, It's like, let's rebuild the foundation of your house. And then when you start to double down on adding more dollars against growth, knowing that you have an optimal conversion funnel, you end up seeing the results similar to what we were able to uncover for them. But I, I do want to preface this in saying that like, number one, we never guarantee results to brands because there's a lot of variables that we don't control that have a material impact on metrics like conversion, seasonality of the product, quality of the product, pricing strategy. Discounting strategy, etc. So if you keep everything else constant and our, our like introduction of platters, the only thing you change, we have some pretty good conviction that we have an impact there. And the second thing I'll say is that not every brand sees metrics as drastic as House of Max, but I think it's important to like highlight those instances to show that it is possible.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think even, you know, with the consumer psychology part of this, just using those basic concepts, there's the idea of endowed progress. People are more likely to finish something that's already started. So if they see a 10% bar because they've done something that didn't feel like a lot to them, they're more likely to finish it than if they're starting from zero. And just little things that you can tap into can really have an outsized impact on conversion rate, average order value, whatever it might be. Um, within, more specifically within Platter, I think some people may view things like a progress bar, incentive progress bar, or whatever, an in-cart upsell option as an experiment or as a test to run within their funnel. Can people specifically select certain items to deploy on their site, turn them off if they're not seeing lift? How does that work?

Yeah, so the premise of the name of the company, Platter, which I came up with after basically locking myself in a room for 3 months, is just this idea that we build a lot of different optionality and you can kind of pick and choose your platter to craft the experience you want. So you don't have to use everything. It's really identifying what's valuable to you based on, you know, your SKU count, your price point, your objectives, et cetera. And we're just there as that partner to help give you recommendations and help craft the experience that's optimal based on what it is that you're looking for.

On the agency's side of this, you know, I do agree that I think a lot of agencies build out big processes, big research timelines, and things where they are kind of just adding perceived value to a relationship without necessarily taking action and adding things to the website that might actually make a difference. Do you see a future where an agency finds Platter to be an attractive part of their workflows though? And they say, look, yeah, this is going to make our life easier. We can still bring value elsewhere. We're going to do customer research, we're gonna run a bunch of surveys, we're gonna do all these things that will help inform part of what you're talking about, which is the website is just one piece of it. There's so much other stuff where you can build out a better product, you can build out better messaging, and your solution is coming in and solving a really, really core part of it. Do you see a world where that plays out where agencies say, yeah, we have to have this on our stack and in our system?

Yeah, so I actually love that question. My belief is that the problems we're solving for a brand are fundamentally the same problems that we'd be solving for an agency, which is a couple things, right? The first one is operational efficiencies. So if we can give you a solution that has more functionality out of the box, hypothetically, you're gonna need less custom code to get to the final product that you're looking for. The second piece of it is based on the developer tools that we have and the design system we have, you're able to do things cheaper and faster. And so fundamentally, if I can go to an agency and say, hey, look, I don't care what you charge your end customer. If I can improve your profit margins and make your team more efficient, why would you not want to use my solution? I would just say in terms of like where we're at, uh, in the life cycle as a company, like we haven't spent too much time yet pursuing that B2B route just because we're, you know, still laser focused on the brand piece. But I can tell you that it's like an obvious next step for us as we evolve as a company. We have a couple agencies who've proactively reached out to us who we're currently working with already, but it hasn't been like a large initiative just yet for us to try to go tackle that entire space. With that being said, I do think there's an obvious market there.

Yeah, I feel the same about our world in the conversion rate optimization toolkit space. I think that these tools are still primarily a research vehicle, and so there's a lot of work that still is relied required by the individual user to use heatmaps, to use session recordings, to use conversion funnels to get value out of it. And, you know, I think that there is a world in the future where that shifts and it says, actually, the tool is going to give you all the insights you need to know to optimize your website. You're not going to have to dive in and watch a bunch of sessions and heatmaps. And there's an obvious question then that says, well, do agencies get mad at that? Because that's what they are taking on. They're finding those insights for you. And I feel the same way that you do about what you're talking about with Platter, where it's like, actually, it makes them more efficient and it makes them be able to spend their time on other elements of the relationship as a CRO agency. You know, you talk about the future and I'm curious if there's anything right now that has you specifically excited about where Platter is heading.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things, but I think the thing that I'm most excited about is our path to basically reducing the timeline it takes from designing entire wireframes to actually deploying a storefront, right? Like our obsession is how do you reduce that timeline to effectively, like I always say, my goal is it ambitious? Probably. But I tell my technical co-founder all the time, like if a year from now I can go to a brand and say, from the second you sign this contract, I can give you back a new store in like under a week. That has all of the design best practices, all of your requirements, and all the functionality. Like, that is, in my opinion, the real disruptor, where you take this process that is known to be historically, you know, a 6 to 12 month process that then just gets tightened down into days or weeks because we're productizing a lot of the things that people don't want to productize because that's what they get paid for, right? So for me, like, I'm excited about a lot of different things, like, right? I think A big one is that more people are starting to hear about us because we just released the Platter brand a couple months ago, like publicly. And then the other thing I think is just our keeping our eye on the prize of like, when do I think we've hit a point where I'm like, this is disruptive? And it's when we can give a brand a new website that's on parity with, you know, paying six figures in today's day and age, but for a fraction of the cost at a fraction of the time.

I love your, your take on AI. I'd love to hear what you think about tools. And I think that You mentioned earlier in the conversation that people are slapping that tag on things and charging more for something that may be very much the same that it was before. How do you see that playing out? And, you know, as somebody who's got an eye on the Shopify ecosystem, how do you see it playing out maybe specifically there as well?

Yeah, I mean, it's— you're naive to ignore what's going on with AI. I think that AI will absolutely become omnipresent in every business's day-to-day operations, whether that's today or a couple of years from now remains to be seen. I think there's an important point to be made around number one, not having like the shiny object syndrome where you're just chasing the buzzwords and also understanding like what it means to be using AI. There's way too many companies out there right now who are basically taking LLMs that like the OpenAIs and Googles of the world are building and they just like slap a new brand on it and a new wrapper on it and call it their own technology company, which like to me just isn't real. Yeah. So I think it's, there's, there's like a, there's a silver lining between what is actually AI that you're building and what is just like borrowing existing toolkits. Look, we're, we spend time every day figuring out like what internal tools should we be using? And like, we have someone who spends a lot of time on AI. We haven't actually like deployed anything that we've spent time building yet, but we've been spending a lot of time just doing research and figuring out like, where does it make sense and how does it make sense? Because we recognize that there's certain elements of the business building that will be commoditized because of it, right? Like building content sections, for example, on a website, like that's going to be an AI thing. You already can do it now. So it's, if you're investing time into building code and building functionality, like do it in logic and in a way that can't just be replicated by a prompt engineer on ChatGPT. In 10 minutes. And so I think that's all to say that AI will become omnipresent in every business. It's on us to make sure we recognize where are we at risk of being cannibalized and what path can we go down where we have some level of defensibility, keeping just that topic in mind. But again, I just, I know that there's this shiny object thing that always happens where you see companies that go from being a Web3 company to an AI company to a deep tech company because that's what everyone talks about. And so I think there will be impacts. The question really is just how fast will that happen?

Yeah. Yeah. And that the shiny toy syndrome is real. And I think that what's interesting is that, you know, what we're calling AI is, you know, technology that's kind of been around for a while. It's just been repurposed and refactored into conversational models. And, you know, I do see as people who are in this stuff all the time and see people talking about AI all the time, it feels like it's been around for a while. And it really, I think we're just getting started. And I think that there will still there'll be some major breakthroughs where it fundamentally changes how we're even thinking about it today. A lot of what we're seeing is just toys, you know. A lot of what we're seeing is just stuff that's either spitting out nonsense copywriting like it's a golden retriever on energy drinks, or it's some sort of thing that's like— in our world, in the CRO world, it's just a lot of like bolting on of something to help you already do something you were doing, maybe slightly faster. Maybe slightly more efficient, but essentially the same deal. You know, we're talking about AI and creeping things out, but the core of what I'm getting from your message about Platter is simplifying things. And it feels like that's kind of a rule that can be applied to business and life in general. And I'm curious if that kind of comes from anything specifically in your background of that approach to life and business in general.

I have a Post-it note. It's a Post-it note. It's actually also a fortune, a fortune cookie.

Amazing note.

And it says, genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.

Love it.

And so I think that some of the most successful entrepreneurs that I know, they have this innate ability to take super complex problems and distill it down into digestible bits. And I think a lot of times people try to sound smart by making things feel complicated when they just don't need to. And so for us, like, we understand how many touchpoints go into building a new website, especially when you don't know what you don't know. So there's a lot of trial and error. There's a lot of learning, there's a lot of mistakes. So to the extent that we can simplify what it actually means and what does it entail and just reduce that time that it takes to do it, like simplification is where we win if we're actually successful down the line, right? Because like, if you think about it, what are the steps that actually go into building a website? You have a, like, assuming you already have a brand, let's say you're building a new website, right? Mm-hmm. Understand your requirements, build wireframes, finalize the wireframes and implement them. Like there's, there's components that there's micro-components within each of those of like, okay, what are your requirements based on the fact that you're a high price point product with a large SKU count or vice versa? Are you a brand that wants to be capitalizing on upsells, or is it more brand awareness play? So we understand like what features do you want to use and not want to use. Here are the designs based on what you discussed. Great. Fix this, fix this. They look good. Now we're gonna go build it exactly what you said you saw we were gonna build, and then we'll give it back to you. Like if you really try to strip it back, that is exactly what's happening. The problem is the process that I just explained to you is reposition back to brands in a way that seems like it's— you're curing cancer. It's a really complicated and a really long thing and it's really expensive and it's going to be hard, but it doesn't need to be.

How does this also— this idea impact the way you guys operate as a business? I'm not sure how many people are on the team, but does it also carry over into your approach to just getting stuff done internally as well?

Yeah, I mean, having a bias for action is like one of the most important principles that we have on our team. Right? Like we don't really have room for people who want to just like be managers and talk about ideas and draw, you know, draw up ideas, like execute. I want like very quick feedback loops around the type of work you're doing and seeing if it's working. And if not, let's fix it and figure out, you know, where, where can it be changed? I think that, that is like a really, really important aspect of how we operate. I recognize that as teams get larger, you need to introduce more process to like keep everyone on the same page, but it's more important to just be hyper-aware of checking in with yourself every so often to make sure that you're not getting away from your core fundamentals. Right? So like as an example, I do a calendar audit every quarter where I look at like what meetings are on the calendar for our entire team. Whether that's product meetings, marketing meetings, all hands meetings, et cetera. And I think about like which of these meetings, if we took them off the calendar, would actually negatively impact our business and which ones are nice to haves, not need to haves. And we just rip those right off. Like asynchronous work is a huge part of what we do as well, given that we're a remote company. Because what I don't want to do is spend 30 minutes on a meeting talking about what needs to happen and then you go do it. Like, why not just make like a quick couple minute Loom video? Or put a few steps in a task on Asana and then do it, and then you could talk after to revise it.

Yeah, for sure. No, I love that. Ben, tell me a little bit more about where people can find Platter and where they can follow along with everything that you've been talking about.

Yeah, they can find Platter at platter.co. It's P-L-A-T-T-E-R.co. And then our handle on socials is @getplatter. I'm Ben Sharf on all socials, B-E-N-S-H-A-R-F. And then if you want to get in touch with me, my email is just ben@platter.co.

Amazing. You also have a podcast. Plug that real quick.

My podcast is called Turning Pro. I do the Turning Pro podcast with my co-host Adrian Alfieri. It's @turningpropod on socials if you want to check that out as well.

Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing time with me this morning. I really appreciate it. It's such a compelling idea, and I hope nothing but the best for Platter as time goes on.

Thanks for having me, Sean. I appreciate it.