The Shane White Show Ep. #222 - Ben Sharf (Platter.co)

Hello everybody. Before we jump into today's episode, we have two sponsors we want to say thank you to for supporting this 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 and 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 of water seemed like quite a bit while I slept. 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I was like, do I really wanna have mushrooms in my coffee? Well, folks, I will tell you, when I use NeuroRoast, 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 added a lot more caffeine. So I do, I do definitely drink too much caffeine. That's something I need to work on next year is to try to minimize how much of that. But Neuro Roast is something that has actually helped me because of the way they've formulated their coffee. Like unlike regular coffee, which is, you know, still something I consume, but Neuro Roast specifically doesn't cause jitters or crashes. 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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 in general. 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, uh, 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 RxBar, I always scratched 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 where I'm 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, and I mentioned this to you before we jumped on, like my world is a lot more Amazon and 3P e-com. 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. Um, 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, So 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 have an in-house developer.

Hmm.

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 wanna add functionality to your store 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?

Yeah. Okay.

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 in the marketing and conversion category into one solution. So we can unify your support teams, we can unify your costs, 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 of 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.

Got it. 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 you at the beginning, but when I was at RXBAR, I do remember, I think RXBAR must have, when we were, when we were building it on Shopify and I know actually we weren't even complete, we weren't even actually on Shopify, we were using, um, another 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, we all weren't that— like, it was a, it was, it was a good website, but it wasn't, 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. Um, so that makes a ton of sense. So, 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 e-commerce 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 bill 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. So 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 cost that you 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 who are coming to your storefront are actually purchasing, right?

So window 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 is 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, is that a piece of this?

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, 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 button and now it takes you to a product page. You get to the product page, you click the add to cart button. Once you click the add to 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 checkout and then you get there and you Hey, you enter in your payment information and then you click buy, right? That's 5 clicks that it took you to get a customer to go from seeing your product to buying it. Instead, what you could do if you have one SKU, since there's not that many pages they need to go to 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 checkout to type in your card information in one click instead of 5.

Got it.

Yeah.

Okay. That makes a ton of sense. It's not too dissimilar to what I deal with on Amazon, right?

You mean there's ways to reduce friction points?

Yeah. Yeah. Got it.

Okay.

Okay. Very interesting. And would you say the other obvious question that I had as I was, 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. And congrats. Is there like a certain size of a website and revenue or is there like a pro and con of working with a company like Platter? Like, do you need to get to a certain scale scale before it makes sense?

Um, it's, it's an interesting question because there's, uh, 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, you're 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 market, 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, you have 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 5 years. You realize that 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 it really, it really just depends like what your pain point is. I would say that traditionally we work best with brands that are between $5 and $25 million, but I have brands doing, you know, $250K in 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 wanna, 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 and it was gonna take 8 months for them to build the storefront, right? We were able to produce that storefront for them in under 60 days for less than $15,000. And they were live in under 60 days and saw a 45% increase in conversion in the first 30 days of being live.

Wow. Okay. Yeah.

So there you go.

There's actual data points and numbers there to back that up too.

And that's because a lot of that work that the agency was quoting them for was work that we've productized over the last 2 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 build in 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 it the same thing. It was kind of like, are you kind of like the Shopify of Shopify, like build-ons 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 for you to like kind of create a framework of what a website and checkout process functionality does. And then there's all these 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, uh, 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 out 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. We'll be the e-com nerds. We'll be the ones that'll 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. Because we fully understand that it's very hard for you to build a good brand while simultaneously trying to stay at the forefront of like new technologies as it relates to your online store.

Totally makes sense. And it seems like from what you've told me and from what I've seen, does it really matter what type of product it is? Like we talked about revenue. Now, does it matter? Like, is it— if it's food, if it's beverage, if it's a, you know, 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 have you guys, did 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. Uh, so it was interesting because we all bring a very unique lens and set of insights to the table. Um, just for context, like one of my co-founders was working in sales at a marketplace agency selling to brands for 4 years. So he understands like what makes them tick. Uh, 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 GoPuff, working on an e-commerce enablement tool, very niche, like in the Shopify world every single day. Um, and so for us, it was like we knew we wanted to start something and our way of starting actually was we started as an agency just working with brands, 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 going to 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 work directly with GoPuff now, so I know, you know, I know enough about the platform for sure from the front end. Is that where you come kind of like started for you? Was it GoPuff?

It was.

Very cool. And when did— what, how, what stage was GoPuff, would you say they were at when you first joined?

Uh, I mean, by any back of the napkin math, they were still technically considered late stage, I would say. But, uh, an 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, they've exploded.

Yeah. So it was, I mean, like I said, it was still pretty late stage, but on a relative basis, they were still in the infancy 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-founders started having the conversations, you know, being at GoPuff, I'm sure that was an exciting place. It sounds similar to what I felt like probably when I joined RxBar. It was, you know, towards the end before they sold the acquisition. So yeah, well, walk everyone listening back a little bit to just when you and your co-founders started talking about Platter.

Yeah. So I'll take it back even before GoPuff. I was supposed to do M&A consulting at EY Parthenon, and 12 hours before my first day, I told them 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 where are you from?

I'm from Buffalo originally. I played Division I hockey at Colgate University.

Okay.

And 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 5 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 to talk about timing. I know. I actually know one other person. I'm in Chicago. That was like their— 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, brilliant. Like, there was so much money in that.

That founder walked away with like $75 million in his pocket in 36 months.

That's like, it's absurd. It's absurd.

That's like bootstrapped.

And that's one example of how many probably that like capitalized on that moment, right? It's so interesting.

It was insane. 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 $100K a day on Google Ads. Um, and I was just watching him operate and I was like, I need to figure out how I'm going to work with this guy. Sure. So we kind of 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 kind of working on it in a very part-time capacity because I went to GoPuff after I was at the COVID testing company. And while at GoPuff, like I was just learning so much about the space and building an 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 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. 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 through 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 were 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 to profitability initially. And part of that was like not taking these healthy salaries for ourselves as founders.

Sure.

And so I was very much like relying on my source of income at GoPuff. Because we couldn't pay the 3 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 it got to a point that we could pay us, pay ourselves to like eat.

Yeah, right.

By no means am I— look, I even joke now, I'm still making like an entry-level college student salary, but that's because we're like very bought into what the bigger vision is here.

Sure. No, no, totally get it and totally respect that. So for you, Platter, obviously it's software. One of the things I really wanted to talk to you about too that I thought was interesting is I've always been interested in the software world. I've never really been involved with any business project in that realm, but I've always thought of it as a very— what's the right word— overwhelming to get started. Like there's— I run— we like to call it a non-agency agency, but essentially we're an e-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. Cause it's like, it's a little bit of validation. You gotta get someone to 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 then it's like, okay, we have at least a minimal viable product. Now we gotta 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 it, 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, 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 out product market fit. So I say that standard, 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.

Oh, okay.

So for us, what we did was we actually started as an agency and used a 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 bill them to build this feature for them, and then we would roll that feature into the core product.

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 to profitability before we took in a penny of 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 glove implement— implementation as one of our offerings, because I still think being able to get cash in the door on 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 no duh, right? Like that makes a ton of sense if you're going to launch a software company. Is it really expensive if you don't have someone 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 $10,000, $1,000, $100,000? Like, I have no idea what even the range looks like to develop software at the age, like the level you guys were at the beginning of Matter.

To be honest with you, I've tried to build a software company with no technical co-founder, and I'm building one now with a 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.

It's just like, there's a cost piece to it. Um, 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? Like 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. Don't get me wrong, 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. Um, 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, um, I don't think I would ever do it without a technical co-founder. It just, there's a whole level of knowledge.

It makes a ton of sense.

I mean, I know that he has even just what I just said, like if you started to pay someone a ton of money to build, 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 like 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 isn't my world. I would guess that you would want a tech guy that is just in love with developing tech. Just that makes a ton of sense.

Just like, yeah, 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 superpower is the ability to communicate and manage technical talent and like distill complex problems into digestible 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 and your 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 in tech that want to launch tech companies, but 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, and, 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, um, it's very challenging because you're essentially trying to get them to justify, uh, 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 meet and work on something is just through like organic interaction. Okay. 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 checkbox 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 led to the next and I woke up, you know, 2 years later and here we are. Okay.

Yeah, that makes sense.

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. That wouldn't work. And just, you'd 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 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 gut 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 the first couple months I'm like, oh, 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 like we're 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 where like we don't talk about it at all, or would you rather it 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. That makes a ton of sense. 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 5 years from now, like we have a lot of cash or it's like we work for the next 5 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, in the sense that like I can wake up in 3 years at 30 and if I still have $0 in my bank account, like I'm still confident that I'll figure it out. Right. 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 this, you think this 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, uh, up until about 2 months ago. We were building mostly in stealth mode for the first 2 years under a different name.

Oh, cool.

Uh, and we were waiting until the product was at a place where we could turn the jets on. Um, at which point we rebranded to Platter. Uh, 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. Um, 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 2 years where I can just kind of go out there from the rooftops and like scream about Platter and everyone can hear about it and learn about it. Um, 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 in revenue. But I still feel like we haven't even scratched the surface on like what I want to do and the vision that I have for the business.

That's badass, 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 D2C 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 does Shopify run away so fast?

The TAM is so large on like the total addressable market on Shopify is like so big compared to everyone else that it's just we would be doing ourselves a disservice 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 suite that's maybe platform agnostic, just to open the opportunity to work with other brands. But one of our first investors had a 9-figure exit with his business in the Shopify ecosystem, and he was the guy who told us like, keep the services piece of your business and only focus on Shopify right now.

Makes tons of sense.

He's like, I wasted time and energy in the discovery process building in other platforms and the ROI just wasn't there.

Ah, yeah. No, I mean, that 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 addressable market in Shopify's ecosystem isn't going to give you the outsized returns that you're looking for as an investor.

Hmm, really?

Because there's only been a couple 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 an interesting ongoing debate. And I think really it just comes down to you as a business. What you guys think makes the most sense. I would say we have product ideas that are agnostic to Shopify, but for the next 12 months at a minimum, we're definitely focused on Shopify.

I mean, and 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 it 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 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 need, so those are unicorns that they're looking for. There's got to be another level down of just like cashflow positive, super healthy businesses that like you, Ben, 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. And start something else and like use the cash from the space doing that. Yeah, it makes a ton of 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. 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. He doesn't like to do sales or socialize with people. He's probably making $75K a month off his Shopify apps. He doesn't really talk to anyone.

Isn't that crazy?

It's just like a— he treats it as like a lifestyle business.

Sure.

Yeah. I mean, I'm not trying to make $1 billion with this. I don't need to, but I'm, you know, making $75,000 a month. 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, 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 don't know, maybe it's just because of the economy, 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 in food and you get to have, you know, some crazy velocities in stores to make it work. So it's interesting. That's just an interesting aside that I was thinking of. So for you guys, Ben, 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 ahead 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 2 years, 3 years, 5 years? What is Ben saying? What does 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 of years from now, if we're successful, like we'll debunk this myth that building a high-converting storefront is expensive. Intensive and takes a lot of time.

That's a great one.

The thing we're after, uh, because it's not the case in our opinion, and we're— we kind of look at this as 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 in a way that it's much faster and 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 reinvent, you know, D2C 1P e-com? Because I know it seems like, again, this is just from what I hear. I don't own a storefront necessarily that sells anything today. It seems like everyone, 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 Platter is actually going to try to actually reverse some of that and convince people that it could be a lot more profitable and make a lot more sense to sell 1P?

I lost you here for a second. Can you hear me? There we go.

Oh, there we go. Sorry, we cut it. Yeah, we keep cutting out a little bit.

Yeah, I, I think that our goal is to make improvements from an operational perspective on the storefront itself.

Okay.

So like, we 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 gonna get a better ROI on dollars they're allocating to your ad budget.

Got it. Okay. And, and so I, I kind of asked this question before, but for people listening who have a Shopify storefront and, and would potentially wanna 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, in my camp. They have a, they have a Shopify website. What would be something you would tell them listening to right now? Like, okay, 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, if you brought Platter and it would improve it, just to give someone who's listening today, like, like, oh, I can go glance at this before I reach out.

I think 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 checkout, 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 cart drawer is 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 to your cart, you get $10 off. Are you leveraging like bundles where it's like put these 3 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. So if they want to go to the website and just submit for a free audit, they will get on a call with them, walk them through what we would change on their website and why we would do it. And so 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, Ben. Yeah, I'm sure people that listen to this will definitely take advantage of that. Ben, as I get close 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, you know, 40, 45 minutes or so. I'm pumped because I think you're gonna have some good ones here. Um, the first one is just getting shit done. So what do you, Ben, 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 some sort of combination of tools? What has Ben used on a day-to-day basis to get shit done?

Yeah, so I definitely have apps. I think on a micro level on my to-do list, 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. Like, 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 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 storefront audits, right? Like we put a lot of time into analyzing these websites and it got to a point where like I didn'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.

Okay.

Um, 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, another 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 churn rate and give ourselves the best chance to win. But with that, it required a lot of process to be able to provide that bespoke at scale.

That makes a ton of sense. And so for you, did you— do you guys use like executive assistants 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, 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. Um, but it's mostly full-time employees in-house.

Got it. Okay, nice. Very good. Um, 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 pops 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 Bartlett is my favorite podcast.

Just— I just started listening to him. Like, he popped up recently. He's great.

Um, 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. Um, and I heard Gary Vaynerchuk 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. Um, and so like podcasts and YouTube videos are like my form of, of learning and listening because I just realized that I I'm like too ADD 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 going to take that advice too. I, for the longest time, I'm a big— over the last 4 or 5 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, and it's work. And every year I've had a goal to read like a certain amount of books. And the first 2 years it was like paperback and I made, you know, I got through like 3 in the whole, in a whole year. I don't, you know, I was 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 has helped. I've definitely like adopted that. But it's funny you say that because I genuinely, if someone asked me, I love podcasts for whatever reason. And so Obviously I have one, so that, that also gives you a way.

I did too.

I did the same.

It's the same thing.

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, a YouTube video. That's great advice.

One of my, one of my best pieces of advice that I ever got was make your A's, A pluses, and find someone else to do your C's for you.

That's really good too. Yeah. Like we all try to probably do too many things that we're not good at.

And I'd rather just like hone in on the things I'm really fricking 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's an A+ for you and 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 look, don't get me wrong, like part of starting a company, you have to do the hard jobs. Like no one's going to be there to do it for you. So like my co-founders and I have done everything and anything, you know, to get to where we are. But I realized 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 2 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, that's just not where I'm best. So I brought him in, I go, look, your job is not going to be as stressful because I already know all the things I need you to do. Here's a list of it. Just help cross the T's and dot the I's on the things that I'm I'm incapable of at certain times for whatever reason it is. And that's kind of how I think about 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 going to walk away with today trying to figure out a little more. It's a good thing to 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 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 B-E-N-S-H-A-R-F. And then our website is platter.co, P-L-A-T-T-E-R.co. And then if you're interested in chatting with us, you can email me directly. My email is ben@platter.co.

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 experience Platter.

Thanks for having me, Shane. I appreciate it.

Aah!