Add To Cart

Unlock Hidden Revenue Streams with Instant's Audiences: Featuring Liam Millward from Instant & Sean Meyer from Leelo Active | #457

We sit down with Liam Millward, Co-Founder and CEO of Instant, and Sean Meyer, Founder of Leelo Active. Liam shares his journey from starting his first business at 13 to leading Instant, a tech company revolutionising ecom with automated engagement solutions. He reveals how Instant Audiences is helping brands like Stax, Oxford, FAYT The Label and Toys R Us maximise revenue by turning anonymous visitors into paying customers. Sean, a passionate advocate for Instant, shares how the platform has helped him skyrocket to $10 million in revenue. We dive into the benefits of automation, tips on scaling fast, and how ecom brands can tap into hidden revenue streams.

This episode was brought to you by:

Instant

About your guests:

Liam Millward is a born entrepreneur. Having launched his first venture at just 13 while travelling around with his family in a caravan, Liam later developed Navigate Australia, a travel magazine that quickly gained traction, reaching over 50,000+ people monthly, within 12 months of launching. Now, Liam is the Co-Founder and CEO of Instant, an Australian tech company helping big brands drive revenue and retention on autopilot. He raised over $7.5m in venture capital when he was just 17, in Australia’s biggest pre-seed funding round to date, led by Blackbird. Instant rapidly grew to over $1.5 million in annual revenue and 1 million shoppers just one year after launching. With two products now in the market across Australia and the US, Liam is on a mission to scale globally.

Sean Meyer grew up by the beach in Coogee, Western Australia, where his active, outdoor lifestyle shaped his passion for fitness. After studying construction management at university, Sean realised his true calling lay elsewhere. Following a few years in operations management and a high-profile modelling career in London, Sean returned to Australia to start his own business. In 2019, Sean and his partner launched Leelo Active from a spare bedroom in his parents’ house. Within the first year, Leelo made $170,000 and quickly gained a reputation for premium activewear. By 2023, Leelo had expanded into over 25 StyleRunner stores, and is now on track to reach $10 million in revenue.

About your host:

Nathan Bush is the host of the Add To Cart podcast and a leading ecommerce transformation consultant. He has led eCommerce for businesses with revenue $100m+ and has been recognised as one of Australia’s Top 50 People in eCommerce four years in a row. You can contact Nathan on LinkedIn, Twitter or via email.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Duration:: 40m
Broadcast on:: 22 Oct 2024
Audio Format:: other

The core value proposition is to just increase the fuck out of your business's revenue. We want to add millions of dollars a year in revenue to your business. That's as simple as it is. I would say one of the hardest things about building a data focused product, for example, is simply explaining how it works. Where's that fine line between feeling a little bit creepy if I land on a website and then get an email straightaway around the products that I purchased? Welcome to Add to Cart, Australia's leading e-commerce podcast that express delivers all you need to know in the fast-moving world of online retail. Here's your host, Busy. Hello and welcome to a very special Wednesday exclusive episode. My name is Busy. I'm joining you from the land of the terrible people here in Brisbane, Australia. Today's episode is brought to you by Instant and in particular their brand new product, Audiences. I'm very lucky to be joined by one of Australia's most successful and youngest entrepreneurs, Leah Millwood, who is the co-founder and the CEO of Instant, who is also then joined by Sean Meyer, who is the business owner and development manager of Active Web brand, Leylo Active. I want to give you a little bit of an insight into Instant. I was at dinner the other night, and as you do, we were all discussing new tools and things we had found, and there were three retailers who almost whispered, "Have you tried Instant yet?" And it was that moment that I thought there is definitely something here, it was almost like they didn't want to give the secret away, and today's guests actually talk about that. Instant is shaking up how e-commerce brands increase revenue and retention, and within just a year of launching, it is now used by over a million shoppers. Liam and his team are working with big-name brands such as Betts, Oxford, The Udi, Fate the Label, and Toys R Us to identify and speak directly with customers who were previously unidentifiable and draw them into a sales funnel. Today's episode is obviously a little bit different because we are taking a deep dive into Instant audiences, but I am here to help you understand if this is right for your business. We will be exploring everything you need to know about how it works, covering key details like implementation, costs, privacy and more. If you are wanting to tap into unknown visitors on your website and lead them into a sales funnel, today is the episode that you want to listen to. Liam and Sean, welcome to our decart. It has been a long time coming. Liam, we've known each other for a long time. Sean, first time I've had the privilege of meeting you, so great to have you on the show. We're going to dive deep today into audiences, which is the new product from Instant. But first, I want to get to know both of you. Liam, I'm going to start with you because you have a fascinating story. I feel like we said that this has been a long time coming, but I feel we've only known each other for a few years. I feel like I've known you forever. You've been around the Ecomo scene forever, but you've had a big few years. It's been pretty intense. I think we met each other maybe a couple of years ago at retail fest on the Gold Coast, the drinks that you host each year at the Loose Moose, and we met each other a few years ago. I haven't seen the Loose Moose for a while. In Instant's been, I've been working on Instant since I was about 17, and I just got backed from a trip to Hawaii to celebrate my 21st. I've been working on what, but maybe like three, four years now, and really only the last two years we've started to take off a hell of a lot. So that's been quite the last little journey, I guess. We're going to get back into the Instant journey because it's phenomenal and unbelievable that you are 21, it makes me feel like a piece of rubbish being 41 year old, sitting here what I've done. What you've done in a few years is just incredible, but Sean, I want to throw to you. Give us the overview of Leylo. Obviously, you got your over on the West Coast, over in Perth, starting this Le isn't grand. Yeah, so I'm over here in Perth. Pretty cool Ecomo scene over here, but probably not as big as you guys over in the East Coast, which makes you sometimes feel a bit lonely here in your networking events and stuff that you got on over in the East Coast, but yeah, I launched the brand back in July 2019 from a spare bedroom of my parents house and we're five years in now and it's just crazy where we've gone from, you know, first year getting 170,000 in revenue to this year being on track to do 10 million in revenue, it's just happening very fast and just, yeah, it's been a crazy journey. Unreal. What inspired you to start Leylo? Look, so for anyone that doesn't know, we sell a women's active work predominantly. Yeah, me and my business partner, who's my girlfriend, we've been the gym since we're 15 years old, so very fit active people. We also love fashion as well and look, we knew that we were getting into a saturated industry. I think active was just a whole other beast of so many amazing brands that we have to compete with. But being our first ever business, we thought, you know, we're just going to give it a crack, see how we go. And yeah, we just thought we'll just figure it out and, you know, it's kind of come together really well. Not bad for giving it a crack. We're just figuring it out. Now I know that you are an instant customer and we're going to come back to how you guys are working together because from what Liam's told me so far, you're getting some pretty incredible results, doing things a little bit differently. But Liam, coming back to you, tell us the instant journey so far because I know that you've had a lot of twists and turns over the years. What does the product look like today? Yeah, I mean, over the past few years, we've had the ups and downs of like any startup or business, right? Mostly ups. And that's all that matters in the end. And so, yeah, I mean, we started two years ago as a checkout product, we were focused on kind of bringing shop pay as it is today to the rest of the internet. So for brands on like Salesforce, Magento, we were working with and continue to work with, you know, some of the biggest brands in Australia to do that. And we grew that product to like a million dollars in revenue for instant in like six months after launching, which was, you know, incredible. And out of that, our core value proposition was being, if you think about it, was being able to remember a shop-off every single time they came back to your website to give them an accelerated checkout experience. We really wanted to be able to remember a shop-off, remember their credit card information, remember their personal details so they didn't need to go through that complicated experience every single time. So we launched that product and you know, started to get some insane traction last year. We raised venture capital and today we've raised 30 mil plus and continue to grow our team both here and here in Australia and the US. And then more recently, kind of around January, we launched one of our newest products called Instant Audiences, which kind of took the main value proposition of checkout by being able to remember your shoppers and brought that to kind of an e-commerce merchant's marketing staff. So the product is, you know, exploded with, we onboarded, I think around like 180, 200 or 200 new brands just last quarter, last 90 days alone, which is wild. That is wild. And I heard, you mentioned there the VC, I heard that you're the youngest founders the Blackbird have ever backed. Is that true? I think it was true at the time. I was 17 when Blackbird first invested in us. My mom was actually still the director of the company. You have to be 18 to be the director. Blackbird backed us. And yeah, we've been coming since then, basically. That's awesome. That's awesome. All right. So Sean, tell us about how did you come across Instant? Where do the paths cross here? Yeah. So I was actually recommended instant by a group called e-commerce equation, which I'm sure you guys have heard of. They're pretty big in Australia now. And yeah, they were pushing instant saying, you know, how well it's working for a lot of the businesses that are working with the e-commerce equation. So decided to jump on a call with one of Liam's sales guys and yeah, it just seemed like a no-brainer. Honestly, I said to him, I was like, so why seems too good to be true when you're first putting it to me? I was like, it's not a hard thing to sell. And I was like, honestly, we just have to give it a crack and it's met all the expectations that we had and even surpassed it, which is just insane. Was there a specific problem that you were looking to solve at the time or you were kind of just going, well, if this is out there, we should be trying it? Yeah, honestly, I think it was a bit of that. It's just, um, let's give it a shot. There wasn't a massive issue that we were really patching up, but I think at the end of the day, you do think about e-commerce and like, we're constantly testing, you know, new things and seeing what works. And often we are sold the dream in e-commerce that this is going to do this and this is going to do that. So sometimes it's hard as a business owner to fully trust it, but for me, I was just like, look, let's just give it a shot and see what happens. It's so funny you say that because I was at dinner the other night in Brisbane with a group of retailers and we were talking about instant and I said to a couple of retailers around the room, I was like, have you used instant, you know, have you, have you actually gone on and tried it? They're like, yeah, and they're, they're almost apologetic about it. They were like, we've used it and they used exactly your words, Sean. They were like, it feels too good to be true and I don't want to tell too many people about it because it feels almost like a cheat code. That was their words. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Anything that gets some revenue on the board, right? That's the only thing. It's the biggest thing. So I think we've teased enough, right? Let's get into the nuts and bolts of this thing. Audiences. What is it and how does it work? Lam, I'll ask you to explain and then Sean will hear your experience with it. Yeah. So audiences is very, very simple. If you think about it, you spend all this money on meta campaigns and, you know, influencers, et cetera, trying to drive as much traffic to your website as possible, but the reality is majority of those people that visit your website don't end up converting and you have absolutely no idea who they are and for most brands, around 98% of their traffic is completely anonymous. They don't know who 98% of the people are that are visiting their website. So because of this, it makes it really hard to retarget these shoppers, remarket to them after they leave your website, retarget to them after they abandon their car, et cetera. And so you spend all this money getting given to your website with no way to recapture them and bring them back. And so what audiences does is allow a brand to know who the people are that are visiting their website by knowing who more of the people are that are visiting their website. We allow a brand to retarget them via email or meta, for example. And so because we're able to do this and know who more shoppers are, we bring them back to the website to convert. Got you. And is that using that original checkout capability to identify customers in the background to collect, to be able to identify each visitor for that seamless transaction? It's funny you mentioned this. I would say one of the hardest things about building a data-focused product, for example, is simply explaining how it works. And we put a lot of effort into bringing clarity to this, particularly with new brands. So perhaps I can break it down as clearly as possible. So today, without instant, when a shopper visits your website and they identify themselves, say, via your newsletter form, abandon checkout, et cetera, a cookie is created to try and help you remember who that shopper is. But you know, so much effort into making this return shopping experience really, really good for their return shoppers, and it's one of the most important things. The problem is that when that same shopper returns to your website two days later or two weeks later, for example, that cookie has expired. And as a brand, you completely forget who that shopper is, meaning you can't email them or bring them back to buy. So what instant does, for example, is that we're able to help you as a brand to remember who your shopper is for longer indefinitely. A shopper identifies themselves by a website, like using the same ways they would today. But we store that cookie, a service side, rather than on your device, which I guess is the power of instant. And so by doing that, remember who your shoppers are indefinitely, giving you the ability to retarget them, yeah, and more often. And then retargeting customers, do retailers need that customer's email address from previous purchases or previous sign-up to be able to send them that email? Yeah, they do. So it needs to be an opt-in in shopper. So we don't share any personally identifiable information across merchants. We have a common database of shoppers, but we only let a brand know the shopper when they're opted into your website. It needs to be your shopper first. We're just able to, we help a brand for a member of your shopper is. We like to always say like Chrome, Safari, et cetera, particularly with all the recent changes, like have short-term memory loss. They remember who your shopper is for like 24 hours, but when they come back weeks later, you have no idea who they are and you can't retarget them via email. And there's no other product out in the market that does this? I mean, of course, there's like any company, there's competitors 100%, but for us, we focus on the things that matter most. We are the best at identification. We are the best at looking for really high intent signals about a shopper. And I hope that we deliver the best revenue results, and that's definitely been the case so far anyway. Awesome. Sean, how have you implemented audiences? Do you have any specific use cases where you've found it to be really beneficial to be able to target that customer and identify that customer that lands on your website and follow up with a message straight away? Yeah, for sure. But I think Liam's really summed it up well, from my side, like I'm not the super techy guy that understands a lot of this, but I always looked at it as almost an analogy of being like a fishing net, and it's really capturing those customers that are slipping through the cracks. And honestly, like the onboarding sits like, and all that was like such a seamless process. Liam's team makes it extremely easy to just almost felt like plug and play, jump into the collabial account and it's setting up those flows and it's making sure they're really triggering correctly. But as Liam said, we put in so much effort to get that traffic to the website. We pay a lot of money and you really want to have the best chance to be capturing those customers, re-targeting them and assisting them along the way on that purchasing journey, which instant has done a really good job and for reference for us, I think in the first 30 days of onboarding, we made $66,000 in additional revenue that we would have lost out on, which is massive, and I think it was a 25x return on investment, so just unbelievable. That's awesome. You won't be unhappy about that as a business owner. What are the kind of use cases you've got there? So for example, I'm landing on the Lilo site. How long do you generally leave customers before you send them a message? And what kind of messages are you sending them to convince them to come back and complete that shot? And it's pretty fast, like a turnaround where we're hitting them with that kind of welcome flow and ensuring that through that welcome flow, we can explain who we are as a business and really just warm that customer up. And then we're kind of pushing them down the funnel a little bit and if we really have to, we can push certain incentives like discount codes to get them across the line to just get that first purchase. And I think that that first purchase is so important to us as a business, just because when we look at our returning customer rate, it is so high because the product's great. And that's what we really back ourselves in on is we just need to get that first purchase across the line and we know that customer's going to come back time and time again. And I'm assuming part of that flow is discontinuing the flow if that customer ends up purchasing whatever stage that they're in. Yes. So that will fall off the back of that one. Yeah. Gotcha. Liam, we heard from Sean then that they're plugging into Clavio. What are the most common messaging tools that you see instant connecting with to send out those messages? Well, today, we actually only integrate with Clavio and for smaller brands, we either integrate with Clavio or we allow a brand to send emails, retargeting emails through instant dashboard directly. You know, we only launched the product back in in January. And so it's been like a, you know, this massive kind of, hence, we ought to try and improve the product consistently, get motions live really quickly, et cetera. But you know, it's super easy. Clavio. I think it takes like Sean. I don't know. Sean can, can't get for maybe like an hour to go live. It's pretty simple. Beyond boarding was so fast. That's awesome. And so tell us, you said only been up since January, I had a look on your website. You got phenomenal clients in there already and really interesting to hear Sean's take on how quick it was to implement, but then also the results that you get immediately. What are the case studies or what are the retailers of really using audiences to its full potential? Yeah, I mean, without sounding like a complete sales pitch, I think, you know, we have so many brands these days and some of the biggest brands in July, Woody Stacks, Fate the Label, Toys R Us, like there's so many, you know, incredible brands that use audiences. But the best that I actually love most is the fact that we, we have only ever lost one customer since launching in January. And I think that's super powerful, like, you know, so many platforms promise the world. They promise everything, et cetera, and it just never pulls through. And in our case, we've never had any negative feedback and I think the biggest way to see negative feedback is when a customer doesn't want to pay you. And so, you know, not losing any customers, I think, is the biggest, you know, particularly powerful, considering how fast and how many brands we onboard each and every month. That's right. Well, if it's that easy to onboard in an hour, as you say, Sean, that I'm assuming it's definitely easy to offboard. So to have only one customer in that time is a pretty incredible feat there. Talk to me about, is there a network effect here with instant in being able to, there is more power in the more retailers that are on, you mentioned some pretty incredible retailers that you have on board. Does that increase the identification that you have then of as you onboard more retailers, you get more identification? I mean, there is an element to the product of that, sure, but just as I said before, we have a common database of shoppers, but that particular shopper still needs to be opted into that specific merchant. And so the network effect allows us to know who a shopper is and kind of connect the dots. But it doesn't allow us to say, you know, just give, you know, you sign up for instant and you get all these email addresses and, you know, contacts off the bat. The other really important thing is that we're only ever allowing a brand to retarget a shopper through kind of a series of flows. They're never like signing up to their campaigns or anything like that. We're solely focused on like just delivering immediate revenue impact, not the long term. And we look for really high intent signals about a shopper, instant looks really high intent signals so that we're sending emails and trying to retarget shoppers who are more likely to convert rather than just sending like a million emails out. Awesome. And Sean, you mentioned the some of those incredible results that you're getting from those additional emails. Has it changed the importance of email in your marketing mix in terms of, you know, how much effort you're putting into those email flows and getting them right now that you have this kind of technology to identify customers that you get to your sites through a matter or what it influences, however they come into your site, how's your marketing mix changed? Yeah, absolutely. I think you do shift your focus towards, you know, the messaging in those flows and optimizing them and just making sure that on a monthly basis, we are looking at, you know, making those small one percenters to ensure that we are having the best opportunity to convert those customers. And I think they're going back to, you know, what Liam's saying, you can use all the best practices possible when it comes, you know, building out your flows and stuff in Clavio, but having something like instant just adds that extra layer to ensure that, you know, you have that best opportunity and chance to convert. Any secrets that you can share around an optimal email flow set up? Honestly, I think I'd leave that one to Liam. You're probably more of an expert. Your brand is different, but the best brands hit a shopper as soon as they possibly can after they've shown really high intent on their website. I think that the natural thing is that people are just really busy kind of always getting distracted, et cetera. And so kind of putting the same effort behind what you put behind making your checkout experiences, you know, as converting as possible. The best brands kind of put that same effort behind email and behind trying to retarget and bring these shoppers back to convert. And so once a shopper is, you know, in our case, we really look for things like a shopper has come back to your website multiple times, or they've visited the same product multiple times or they've selected different sizes, like, obviously, they're pretty interested in this product. Like, we need to get them to the stage of actually putting in their credit information. And so we identify that shopper and trigger an email that goes to them around one or two hours later, and then we send them, you know, the best brands will send them like a series of, you know, three or four emails over the next week. If they don't convert off to that, let's leave it for a bit, wait for them to come back to the website organically, and then we'll get them up again, because you don't want to be annoying. That's like has the negative impact. So yeah, like three or four emails and after about one or two hours after they leave the website. Yeah. Really interesting, isn't it? Because there's that fine balance. I think most marketers or e-commerce retailers listening will be like, oh, where's that fine line between, you know, feeling a little bit creepy if I land on a website and then get an email straightaway around the products that I've purchased? But then the way you put it there, Liam, it's like, well, if the emails are actually helpful and useful and help continue to pick up that journey, rather than just be spammy, then you're actually adding a little bit more value into that transaction. Exactly. And, you know, something that we launched recently was our automated AI email builder. And with us like over the past year, we've learned about the emails that can be the best, you know, the optimal time to send it, the best triggers, the design of the email, what to include in it. And so in the instant dashboard, you can actually go in and rather than paying $100,000 to an email marketing agency, you can just go in and you can click generate email flows. And we'll actually automatically generate email flows that are on brand view, on brand with your colors, with your logo, your products, et cetera, in a single tap and create that whole optimal email funnel for you. So we can talk about it here, or you can just, you know, go and click a button and it will be done for you. Have you used that? Sure. Have you used the AI builder? No, not yet. But I definitely will be getting the team to have a play around, see how that goes. Yeah, the whole AI stuff is just crazy how fast that's evolving and just changing up the dynamic of our businesses. Yeah. Liam, at the start, you mentioned that audiences works. Obviously it's built around email, but can also tap into meta and other channels. What are the most common use cases outside of email that you're seeing retailers use audiences for? Yeah. Email is definitely our biggest because it's the most controlled kind of channel. And so it's really easy to measure ROI and revenue, et cetera, with email. But, you know, secondary to that is meta. So audiences, you know, commonly, and the biggest use case today is like we've spoken about is allowing you as a brand to re-target your shoppers via email. But if we look at kind of instant as a bigger picture, our whole value proposition is not to have fancy dashboards and go live really quickly and et cetera. Like the core value proposition is to just increase the fuck out of your business's revenue. You know, we want to add millions of dollars a year in revenue to a business. As simple as it is. And so what are the ways that we do that? Well, email is a really big channel. And then obviously meta, meta, TikTok, et cetera, as well. And so this is a new channel that we're really getting started with. So instead of re-targeting your shoppers via email, we allow our brand to identify the shoppers that are visiting their website and plug that into to meta. So they're able to have like hyper-targeted campaigns on meta, TikTok, all their ads, et cetera, directly to the people that have specifically visited their website. And so, you know, return on ad spend goes up significantly and we're seeing some really strong early results on that. And Sean, have you integrated with your meta campaigns yet? Yeah. We do have the marketing team on board with that. Yeah. It's working good. We're already seeing our ally going up and I think that, yeah, being able to re-target and just have more dialed in targeting is just the no-brainer at the end of the day. It feels like on meta because of how AI and machine learning is driving a lot of the targeting there for most brands, any little advantage that you can get to get that slight tweak of improvement and edge on competitors there is worth taking at the moment. Is that fair? 100%. That is a very big goal and that's exactly what we're looking for. Brilliant. Liam, can I ask you the commercial model for audiences? How does that work? Is it a subscription? Is it a clip? Is it a how your deals mostly set up? Yeah. I mean, we're super straightforward. We, our pricing starts generally $2,500 a month but in saying that pricing varies on the size of the brand. We generally try and optimize or shift our pricing so a brand always sees at least, you know, 5 to 6 times ROI with the product and so if you're a really small brand we'll optimize our pricing for that and so, yeah, it's super straightforward. We want you to succeed. We're at ads product at the end of the day and so we need to be on the sliding scale just as much as the merchant. It's on a month-to-month subscription, no-locking contracts like our competitors and yeah, we allow you to get started with a trial in the first month as well. And then when it comes to set up, Sean, just going back to what you said, they're around the 60-minute set up. What did that look like? Can you talk us through the steps? Is it a Shopify plug-in? How does that work? What were the steps that you had to do to get your team up and running with audiences? Yeah, sure. So Liam can probably correct me if I'm wrong but it's just a piece of code that's actually put into the back end of the website. There's no actual Shopify app or anything like that. They're then given an instant dashboard as well that you can then go off of and there's a bunch of Clavio flows that are duplicated and re-optimized in your dashboard in Clavio so you can kind of trap the performance there too. Yeah, super straight forward. Awesome. And while we've got Liam on the line here, if you've got any feature requests, anything for him to put in the pipeline here that you'd like to see around audiences or instant in general? Honestly, that's a great question. I'll probably almost be like, do you have a magic wand that can just make me more and more money? I didn't mind his sales pitch before. His sales pitch around where he had just to grow the fuck out of your revenue. That was pretty good sales pitch, I thought. Yeah, just keep doing that, honestly. But I think that if you could do things that are even in line with maybe SMS as well, obviously we've got email marker, we know how powerful SMS is as well and just like the open rates on those kind of things. That would be very cool to see if you could integrate into that side of things. And then yeah, I guess going even deeper and further into the side of like meta and Facebook ads. I can imagine you aren't sitting still, you move at an incredible pace. Can you give us any insights, any secrets into what's rolling out at instant over the next 12 months? Oh, next fall month, we're really focused on the US at the moment, and you know, really trying to grow over there on our side. But I think for us when it comes to merchants and like improving the product, something that we're really focused on is getting a whole lot better at email. I think today brands are so reliant on working with an email marketing agency or just giving their best shot at Canbar to create some emails or whipping out the Clavio template builder. And they're kind of running out of blind. And so we have a massive incentive to help brands make their emails the best converting. We can have, you know, the best identification of their shoppers and send as many emails. But if the emails aren't good and they don't convert, there's not really any benefit behind it. So something that we're really focused on is helping brands, particularly small and mid-size brands to set up, flow, set up the design of their email templates, trigger campaign, you know, trigger that email close at the right time, the right messaging, et cetera, all in the click of a button, completely automating it all. Something we're really focused on over the next kind of six months. Yeah, brilliant. And I know you've just spent some time over in the US and you're over there regularly. How are you finding the maturity of the Australian e-commerce market versus the US? You know, you mentioned that setting up flows and some of the basic things that you would assume most e-commerce businesses have. How are you finding the maturity levels between US and Australia at the moment? Yeah. I mean, I spent, I probably spent like four months in New York this year. We have a team in New York. It's the brutal back and forth through Australia, but I love it over there. I think that there's a lot of similarities. I think that everyone's just focused on how to get the next dollar in the door and trying in million different things until something sticks. I think that's honestly just the reality of it. Trying everything, seeing what works, you know, consistently cutting budget on the things that don't deliver ROI or don't just deliver revenue to your business. I think that's honestly just the truth. And that's the same in both markets. I think Australia, the e-commerce world and community is a lot tighter. You know, everyone knows each other and everyone's at the same events, et cetera. In the US, it's a lot more competitive. You need to be the best. You need to know your shit and it's just such a bigger market to both succeed in but also fail out. So I think, you know, that it all comes back down to the same thing of just where is the next door revenue coming from to survive and get it in the door. Love it. Sean, Leo, what are you focused on for the next 12 months? What are your plans? Obviously, we've got Black Friday, Cyber Monday coming up, which I can imagine is front and centre for you and the team right now as we're recording this mid-October. Where's your focus after that? Yeah, it's just continuing that upward growth trajectory. I think that the game really does change as you start to go into the eight figures and, you know, things that worked in that journey from like 1 million up to 10 million, they just start to break down as you're going further into the eight figures and it's just those little 1% that you can do that can just win you back so much revenue, which is just crazy to think. And I think that that's where I'm shifting my mind is just seeing like where we can win back things, optimise things a lot better because, yeah, it just feels like from 1 million to 10 million, you're really just like, grab it, buy the neck and just drag it along. And now it's just like, refocus and really look at the thing holistically and see what we can do to make those changes to really help us go from say 10 to 20 million in the next few years, which is a massive change. You know, it requires so much from logistics, operations, marketing, it just becomes a whole another beast, that scale of things. So I'm excited, but you know, nervous and scared at the same time, but I think that's business at the end of the day. If it doesn't scare you a little bit, if it doesn't excite you, then you just, yeah, what's the point? It really just comes down to as long as Liam keeps making your money. Yeah. That's it. Just keep doing your thing. And I think, I think that's it as well. You know, that's probably the crazy thing is like, you know, e-commerce has always developed and changed so fast, but I think right now it's, it's happening at a rapid rate with all the AI stuff, which is meaning that, you know, people's job roles and titles are changing very fast. We're subbing out certain things with AI and just trying to stay on our toes, especially as a small business, where we're competing with, you know, the nine figure businesses that are doing hundreds of millions a year. And you know, we're such a small fish. So we need to try and find those little competitive advantages that we can jump on very quickly because we're so small and dynamic. And that's what I want to use to my advantage to make sure that we can compete with those big guys. You know, they've got such big teams and I run quite a lean operation. So, you know, we need people like Liam and other services like that, that we can jump on board and really give ourselves that, that little lift. You've got to be careful what you say on a podcast like this. Your inbox will get smashed after that. Jens has been fascinating. I always love the opportunity to deep dive into a new piece of technology that can help retailers, especially when it impacts revenue directly. So it's been an absolutely privilege to be able to do that with both of you. I know there is so much more to both of your stories that we didn't even get to today because we were focusing primarily on audiences. So Liam, incredible success so far with instant, especially audiences, only running from January to have some of those brands that you mentioned earlier using the product and getting the results. Tell me about a brand that you just hold up because you see so much. We heard about you over in the US and all the brands that you're working with. Where's a brand that you just go, they're just doing it so well? I really think it's got to be Isaac and the team at College & Code. They're based out of Melbourne. They're actually also in e-commerce equation with Sean, that one of our earliest customers to use instant. And just like seeing they grow over the last six to 12 months has been insane. The team's growing and they're absolute weapons at Facebook ads and they just do a lot of everything. And it all pulls off and the new factory, the packing warehouse, the new office, that or Dean at Nakey as well, also in the e-commerce equation I feel, he's absolutely killing it. So yeah, they're like two perfect brands that would use instant, yeah, love it. I'm going to hit Jay right up for co-sponsorship of this episode, I reckon. I know. I have to speak it out, I think, speak it out. No brilliant guys, that's a great example. And, you know, I love that businesses of all size, whether they are that starting out or whether they're in surprise businesses, all have access to these tools. So it's not like you are holding back to once you hit 50 million or 100 million, then you can have access to this. It's like it's available to anyone on a sliding scale to help you grow and get to those numbers. So that's a really nice model. Liam, Sean, wrapping up, if people have heard today and want to get in touch and learn more, what's the best way to get in touch? Sean, I'll start with you and then Liam, if you can follow up. Yeah, for sure. I'm probably most active on Instagram, so you can get me at Sean, S-E-A-N, underscore mayor, M-E-Y-E-R, send me a DM, always happy to answer any questions. Honestly, I'm an open book and I love speaking to other startup business owners, founders, whoever, you know, like love bouncing questions, ideas. I think that that's the best thing about the e-commerce industry is just we have so much to learn off each other, so yeah, feel free to reach out. Love your work. Thank you. And for me, probably LinkedIn in my case, you can find me, Liam, or LinkedIn or just reach out to the team on via our website and let's lock in a demo and we'll show you how it works. Beautiful. Liam, Sean, thank you for joining us today on Add to Cart. It has been a pleasure to hear about both Instant and Leylo and to dive into the new audience's product, which doesn't feel so new when you've got so many retailers on it already, but only here since January. So still relatively new in the scheme of things, but thank you for both taking the time. Thanks for having us. Thanks, Nathan. What an absolute privilege to sit down with Liam and Sean to talk through both their businesses, both have incredible stories. Liam just blows me away with what he has created in such a short time and at such a young age, but it was brilliant to dive into Instant and in particularly Instant audiences because I know a lot of people when they hear about it, they are very interested but also have a lot of questions. I hope we were able to clear up a lot of those for you. As always, here are my three main takeaways from our chat. Number one, stop leaving money on the table by engaging unidentified visitors. 98% of your website visitors leave without making a purchase. I think we all know that from our conversion rate figures. But most of us don't actually know who that 98% are. Instant audiences aim to change that by identifying anonymous shoppers and allowing brands to re-engage them through targeted emails and ads. Sean shared how Liloactive have used audiences to turn these previously unidentifiable visitors into paying customers, driving them back to complete their purchase and keeping them engaged over time. Well worth looking into if you do not know who those visitors are that are leaving your site. Number two, easy implementation for immediate ROI. Now there are not many tools where you can plug in and get a return straight away. And that is what Audience is offering and of course what Sean talked about for Liloactive. Liloactive were able to set up audiences in an hour and saw a massive 25 times return on investment in just 30 days adding 66 grand in extra revenue that otherwise would have slipped through the cracks. By automating that re-targeting process, Liloactive was able to capture the new sales, improve conversions and significantly boost overall revenue. There's not many times where something is both easy and immediate. I know sounds too good to be true, I thought the same thing, but might be worth looking into. Number three, mastering the alert of perfect timing in email marketing. We all know that timing is everything, especially when it comes to converting high intent shoppers. Instant audiences takes the guesswork out of identifying shoppers who show strong purchase intent like revisiting the same product page multiple times and triggers automatic emails within one to two hours. That will obviously open up the question around how soon is too soon, but as Sean said that the most well-timed emails paired with relevant content keeps customers both engaged without being intrusive and leading to long-term loyalty. If you want to know more about instant and in particular audiences that we discussed today, head on over to instant.1, that's instant.1, to find out more and to contact the amazing team over at instant. And as always, if you enjoyed the episode, please share it and don't forget to leave a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, a big thanks to Instant for making this episode possible. Before you go, we'd love to invite you to join our free e-commerce learning platform, Add to Cart Campus, meet other professionals and learn from e-commerce experts to take your business and your e-commerce career to the next level. Register to join campus at addtacart.com.au/campus. Now if you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with a friend or colleague, or even better. Leave us a review on Spotify or Apple, it really makes a difference. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]

This episode was brought to you by:

Instant

About your guests:

About your host:

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.