Diversifying ad channels is must, right? In order to do that, you really have to understand like the small door hinges that move really big doors. And in order to do that, you need to have very clean, crispy data and know how to analyze it. - Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer, and I believe running a direct consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results. I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business. Let's get on with the show. - Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. This episode has been a long time in the making. I can't believe it took me so long to pin you down, Mac. So, I'm bringing to the show the co-founder of Triple Whale, one of the leading tech startups specializing in the direct consumer SaaS measurement, data and AI automation, Mac's blank. Welcome to the show. - Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's interesting that it's been a while, you know, that this should have happened. We're both in Columbus, like, what are the chances? - I know, well, before Triple Whale and before our agency, Electric Eye existed, we both knew each other just in this space. - Yeah, it's just wow. Columbus, Ohio is great, everybody. It's a great place to live and to work and to build a business. - It's underrated, right? Which is good still, you know, like 'cause it's, it's not super well known and it's kind of like a gem, you know, it's... - It is. So let's like, you know, for the four people that are listening to this episode that don't know what Triple Whale is, can you give me, you know, the elevator pitch? - Yeah, this is something we have to refine all the time to be honest, 'cause we're constantly like, we're constantly trying to reinvent ourselves and by doing that, bringing value, right? How do you reinvent yourself constantly and have a consistent message and continue to like be on the trends and just continue to bring value with, especially with the fast pastness that you're saying with like AI and what's going on with data and how do you really bring it together? So we're really aiming to be as the backbone of data measurement, BI analytics for DDC brands and really we aim to serve the startup all the way to an IPO and we have that infrastructure to do that and especially with the newest edition of Triple Whale that's rolling out now that has been out for a bit now but it really allowed us to deliver on that. We kind of re-engineered our entire platform to go beyond attribution, double down on attribution, bring in some more like non-deterministic attribution as well and then then things like this go deeper on our MTA product as well but then also bring in some really robust capabilities for BI, for data, for owning your own data or really being a central source of truth for being an entire infrastructure that you need to really grow as a DDC brand, there's a lot there. >> Absolutely, oh no, no, no, absolutely but I think one thing I want to highlight here and I loved this ever since I, well, I think it was funny enough, it's the last time I bumped into you was at that event up in Toronto at Shopify's kind of event and Toby was on stage talking about how Shopify wants to solve most problems for most merchants and that is the line in the sand that they draw as what they're going to do and bake into their product and then that just opens up the app ecosystem and shows their commitment to those types of partners, whereas I talked to a lot of brands often about Shopify's analytics and I say depends on your goals but I would say almost every Shopify product that's baked in leaves something to be desired, there are some things they're really good at but I would say analytics is one of the things where everyone's just like, we use something else. >> Yeah, I think as the business grows in scales like needs become a bit more bespoke too, right? It's hard to kind of have it out of the box. And so Shopify leaves that door open for guys like they triple well, right, for us. And so also the unifying of multiple data sets where they're coming from different integrations you may have, as businesses grow and we see this and we have a lot of data to kind of like empower us to understand the life cycles of brands and you can see it. You got brands that are just getting started that are trying to find their products and their product market fit and they get to add a million dollars, let's say, in that area, right? They would be fine if a limited analytics that comes with Shopify and they're not super diversified in their ad spends and so they can kind of get by with that but as you start to kind of break through and you start bringing in beyond meta 'cause everyone starts to meta, right? And then you're gonna bring in Google, the next step and then it'll start bringing in TikToks probably the next one you're gonna do and then you're gonna cover all your bases, Pinterest, Snapchat, you're gonna wanna go everywhere. So as you kind of go everywhere with your ad spends you need a consolidated view and you need deeper insights in your business. And so that's really what we're trying to bring is to bring that almost like a bespoke offer which is really tough to do at scale but when we reengineered the platform the reason why we sought out to kind of double down on BI is that as our customers grew like they kept asking us for things we didn't have like we had very limited views on data and they're like, well, I could really look to see like this and I have a subscription box and we have like unique intervals of renewal like maybe you go buy it once a quarter or once a year or twice a year, not once a year but twice a year and so our ad of the box solution just didn't have that. And in order to really get more bespoke and custom you have to stand up a robust sort of like data platform and her goal with our new platform is to be that for you whether you know how to manipulate data or architect data on your own or if you need us to do it for you like they're we're basically able to provide data insights on your business for any type of e-commerce business. - Absolutely. And obviously you guys are doing some amazing things these days but taking back to the humble beginnings. Let's talk about the idea, the why this exists. - Yeah, I say about eight years ago it's when I really got into e-commerce and before that like I always was dabbling in some type of entrepreneurship going on, right? I caught the entrepreneurship bug my last year of college and halfway through that I'm like, why did I just pay for five years of college or four and a half years of college was how I realized that with the internet you have access to labor and different things that you can build and sell and like whoa, whole world up and up. So I was really out of the end of college I got heavy into entrepreneurship and did a few different startups and things like that. It wasn't until about eight years ago that I came across a group of people that wanted me to build them websites 'cause I had a bit of a digital like sort of agency going on. And these networks that I had kind of developed they were all Amazon sellers and they wanted, they all had like nightmare experiences of like only being on Amazon and then kind of not having control their own destiny and sense, right? You can be shut down or de-ranked and things like that. They wanted to get into the Shopify game but it took an entirely different game, right? So they brought me on to build the websites to help them start that. And so through that journey of working with them they already had an Amazon business. I built them Shopify websites and then they're like, okay, well, we need to run ads. I'm like, I don't know how to do that. Like well, you could probably figure that. So having a handful of clients that just like paid me to figure out how to run ads and so turn to YouTube, right? Turn to wherever you would turn to to learn, right? Whether it was like Ezra Firestone's courses or whatever mastermind group I found at the time and started to learn ads and it started working for some of these sites and driving them traffic. And then I'm like, I saw the potential and so I started my own sites and early on the connected Oberlo via AliExpress and like that was like my sandbox to play and to learn how to build an e-commerce brand, you know? So it was really started with dropshipping and that's like where I started my career in e-commerce. Built a few stores. One of which was like a boutique for women's jewelry and handbags. - I remember that one. - Had no idea really what I was doing at all and just testing. Like you would, you would set up like, you know, five new products a day based on trends on the internet. You'd have an, yeah, I had like a team of overseas that would set up the ads for me and I would just watch them and you'd go through five or 10 a day with a small budget. Back in the day, you could make some dents and then one would like catch, you know? And so that first store was like my experience setting up that system, understanding, DDC, understanding direct response. That store ended up scaling very quickly. Like up until September of 2016, I had done like a hundred grand on that store from that entire year. And then I had one ad that hit that October. So Q4, right? It went to $500,000, right? And then it went to 1.2 during November and it was all dropship from Oberlo and AliExpress. And it was a nightmare. I had to jump on a plane to China and like work out stuff with my suppliers and throw stuff on a speedboat and get it here in time for the holiday season. That was a fun experience. So that was my first run at getting into e-commerce. And that was a store that lasted like two years. I ended up selling it at a loss 'cause I got into all sorts of like debt trying to manage, bring inventory over to warehouse it here, stop like actually dropshipping and control the customer experience and keep customers long-term. You can't really do that by dropshipping in that way back then. Ended up selling that and then I started another one shortly after my wife actually had an idea of these braids, pre-braided hair braids that were like sort of trendy. And so we started a store and women's hair accessories is my wife's idea had no idea and it ended up working. It ended up scaling pretty rapidly. The original target audience is a funny story for people that appreciate like direct response like direct response and just ad buying. The original target of that store was actually Orthodox Jewish women who they cover their hair. And so we found a website that sold accessories and fashion to that cohort. It's a very small cohort like in New York, right? But we had our pixel on our site. So that site would actually send us traffic. It wasn't like a marketplace. We bought ads daily and I just retargeted them on Facebook my Instagram but I loaded up the pixel. And at some point my wife was like, I'm seeing these things everywhere. Let's try to go broad. So we took that pixel data from that site from that cohort, made it all look like audiences. And I think year one we did about 50,000 year two, we did about two and a half million. And it was from that original cohort data. But so during this experience, I'm scaling this in. We set up influencer programs. We're sourcing a UGC for our ads, set up manufacturing was not drop shipping, did the whole thing, had packaging, did the whole thing right, running that whole success, had customer success, had procurement, the whole nine yards. And every good, you know, I think owner operator has their credit card game, their credit card points, game worked out, right? Every dollar you're spending, you're getting one or two points, which everyone you have. So I would like to travel with my family, right? I like to take my kids, take my wife on doing the holiday seasons or whatever we would go. But when you're abroad and you're traveling around, like you can't open up all your screens and see like where my was my row as, things like that. So I really just wanted a concise sort of dashboard in my pocket where I can like see the metrics that matter most, right? What's my real ads? What's my spend right now? The Facebook mobile app for ads is like the worst experience. - Oh, it was. - Shot point doesn't have the whole story, right? So like this is where I'm like, I need to make an aggregated like simple app. Like I just want to do that, you know? And that was really the inception of Chippewell. The idea was through that experience. And so I built it for, the idea was to build it for myself. And I always, you know, I'm entrepreneurial. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to get this thing working. We'll try to make it a business out of it at some point. But I struggled doing two things at once. So like it was like all about timing for me. And say like in 2019, my co-founder, AJ, he and I had known each other for a while already. We kind of stayed in touch. She was in Israel. I was over here in Ohio. He was big in the startups and tech. Always, always into that. And every we talked to was always about like tech and the future and, you know, AI and things like that. At some point in 2019, he was coming off of the startup. He and his co-founder, Yvonne, who's now, that's the three of us, right? I was over in Israel and met them in a coffee shop one day. And I was talking about e-commerce and it's working. It's amazing. And AJ is like, what can we do? How can we work together? So I paid them to build this first version of Chippewell. You know, and they got started. In the meantime, AJ needed a job essentially. Like what's the next thing he's going to do? So he started working for me, apprenticesing, like how do I run ads and teach them in training. We worked really well together. In 2019, he actually moved to Columbus to his family and we worked full-time on Madison Braves. It was he and I and our wives, that we were running this brand together. And then COVID hits and we hit a tear, right? Everyone did. COVID-20, when they shut everything down and CPMs were super cheap, right? So we were able to scale Madison in that 12-month period of time, I think we scaled it to like $7 million. It was amazing, right? Like out of our garage essentially. And then fast forward a little bit. Chippewell's on the side, they kind of built something, but we were focused on one thing at one time, which was e-commerce. But then when COVID ended, essentially, and everything opened back up, well, CPMs went through the roof. My AOV on Madison Braves was like 58 bucks. I couldn't support it anymore, it wasn't enough. So I kind of had to take a pause and like re-engineer the business, maybe get some other product in. That point to my, AJ, why don't you just run with Chippewell full force? I took like a few months to re-figure out Madison Braves. He finished the product and got our first beta users on it. And then people just essentially ripped it out of our hands and just wanted to use Chippewell. Very quickly, we had about, we had hundreds of people using Chippewell. Some might have been paying 'cause it was just like free, like just dry out, you know? And it very quickly just like blasted off. I dropped everything with Madison Braves and jumped full-time into Chippewell. And AJ, Yvonne and I, we basically incorporated the company in like June of 2021, I think. Yeah. - When was that big iOS and like attribution hiccup? - Probably six months later. - Yeah. - And so we were, we always had was like that summary page product that people I think love. And that was growing pretty wild. We had raised our first rounds. Like I have 4 million bucks just off that with early adopters, some influencers. And then we raised a small seed round also from a very prestige fund out of Israel. That was awesome. And that was before we had the pixel. That thing was blasting off, you know? But then came iOS 14.5, we had, we started expanding the team on the engineering side. You know, first thing we did and grab some buddies to work for us. Run CS with us, like just people like our friends. You know, that's what you do when you first get started, right? And then we started building this pixel because, you know, many reasons. Our clients were asking, what are we going to do in iOS 14.5? Like what are we going to do as a company? What are they going to do as customers? We didn't really, we had a way to like see your aggregate numbers, but we couldn't get you like sort of the granularity on the campaign level you needed to understand what's going on. That's when we started to say, okay, you know, if someone was going to disrupt us, they would build a solution to this. And then also if we wanted to like really execute on the vision, we're supposed to do more with data, more with AI, more with automation. So we need like reliable data from the ad platforms. What you're getting from them now is it's not going to be reliable. So we made the decision to like, to build a pixel, to build our, you know, our, basically our data resolution product, which is behind it, right, pixel. And we actually pre-sold it, I remember. We took like a page out of the old e-com, like pre-sale book, and we pre-sold it to the current customers. And we did a launch on Twitter. And that was a crazy time. That was like, Rabbi, the whole crew was like assembled then. That was fun, those early days. We went from like 50K of MRR to like the month later. It was like 300, just by pre-sold on that thing. Then we launched it. And then very soon after that, we were raised to Series A, and then add more product, add more product, and then Series B. And now we've got about like 26,000 stores in this trip away right now, and Shopify is back with us. That's wild. When did Shopify come into the picture? Obviously, they were the key partner for the product, but... Yeah, they got involved. Like, I think we did that in 2022. January time, possibly. Yeah, they've been awesome. They're awesome. I mean, we, I think it was three months after Sean and I started the agency, we just, we just ignored every other platform. We're like, there's just something special about Shopify and the partner ecosystem here. I know people's names, they're very nice to us. Like, everyone wants to help everyone. There's rising tides raising all ships around here. 100%. This is a cool place. And that's how the company, and that's how they are inside too. Like, it's just not only is that what they've created with their partners, but the people inside the company are, are really awesome. Absolutely. First of all, the story is amazing, but let's now circle back. You guys have this amazing, mature product. You're adding some new features and functionality to it. You mentioned earlier some stuff about what you're doing with premium and business insights. And what, like, if you were talking to a customer right now who was like thinking about it, you know, what are some of the things that you'd want to point out, be like, these are the cool things that our customers are using from our product. There's a lot. Like, one thing we do is build. There's a lot of vectors, right? Like, there, there is our new, like, there's our, our, our GPT product, essentially, which is like, it's, it's called Moby, right? I'm sure a lot of people feel it. And it is, I'll say a word, but it's not like going to do it justice until you actually play with it. But you could just say it's chat GPT with your data. Yeah. But it is chat GPT with your data, right? Like, it really knows your business and it can serve insights. You can ask it questions. You can reason with it. You can brainstorm with it. You can create new copies for your ads with it. You can create metrics to measure things in your business. Like, you can actually create template. You can create, like, BI visualizations, tables, graphs, charts with it, and then save it and send it out to your team to monetize and, or to, to operationalize. We were just jamming on chat GPT before the call, right? Yeah, we were. You really can, I'm sure you're, you're asking business questions all the time to chat GPT about your business, right? And you have to feed to the context, right? Like, it doesn't have all the context. Yeah, I told you before this, I had to, I built my own GPT and I trained it on, like, all the SOPs that we had at the business. And that took some time. It was amazing. So all the integrations that you connect to Triple Will now go into Moby, okay? Has access to all that data. And you can chat with it. You can ask it questions. You can create, like, sequences of questions that lead to outcomes, right? Like, you know, when you, when you're like a canvas, right? You, you're like a paralysis. You don't know what to put on the canvas. There's just so much opportunity, right? So we run into that with Moby because like, yeah, you can do anything you want. Then it's like, well, what do I do with it? So we had to kind of create curated paths of, like, getting value from it. So if you log into Moby right now, it's going to have your store's data, right? Behind it, obviously, it's going to say chat, the power of chat, GPT with your data. And then it's below it is a trending questions that people are asking from across our community. Like, different cuts of data that you wouldn't think of even asking, right? Like, you can do like a CTR analysis. You can do Google analytic type things inside of it because it just has everything, right? We've built the infrastructure to, you can create visualizations that would replace GA4, right? We haven't been able to take the story out yet because it's just, there's so much that can happen or in the middle of, like, writing this story and shaping those journeys. You could create CRO style. You're talking about CRO a little bit ago with me, right? You can create landing page analysis that can help with, like, CRO type questions. You could ask it to forecast revenue because we incorporated models from Facebook and Google on, like, MMM, first of all. So you can do MMM type questions that people have. You could ask revenue forecasting, inventory forecasting, using, like, validated models that Google and all the big tech players use and trust with ways to validate them as well, with historical. And it's really a platform that can, it's like an infinite machine. So that's one thing. It takes time. You have to learn how to prompt it properly. There are still some rough edges, but they're getting better and better. And the more data we have, the better it gets to from your store. So that's one thing. And that is super exciting, OK? People come to us today for attribution and BI. They don't necessarily come to us today to, like, chat with their data. But once they taste it and they feel it, they understand it, they get leverage. Like, chat GBT, and these things, they just give you leverage. This thing gives you a ton of leverage of accessing data and understanding your business. Another thing that, like, we built this for, one of the questions that would always come to our success team is, like, well, I have all this data, but, like, what do I do with it? You know, it's like a paralysis, analysis paralysis, right? So if you're going to AAA today, you've got a series of dashboards, right? You have to know what to do with them, you know? And we have tips and things to help you. And people just learn it through, they learn it through their experiences as being an ad buyer, right? But we did bring Moby inside the dashboard, too. And you can just generate, like, conversation with it. You can talk to you. You can talk to it about the context of that dashboard right there. What's performing, what's not, what should I watch? You know, if I look for X, Y, and Z in my ad performance, what should I look at right now, right? Like, when you're, like, in the ads manager, like, I'm going to look back seven days, I'm going to look back five days, three days, I'm going to look at ROASIS and CTRs and things like that. You can have it do that for you and serve those ads directly to you to look at and analyze. So, I mean, I think the next step with Moby, once we have all the data and the experience, we're really tight, is, like, can it action stuff for you based off of things you want it to do? And, like, these, you know, I've always had a level of, like, skepticism with AI, like, for, like, you know, 10, 12 years, you're hearing, like, oh, we've got AI in our product, you know? And there's always, like, ad products out there, too, that have, like, AI or, you know, in the DTC world. It wasn't until you saw a chat, you could see that you're like, oh, wow, you know? Yeah. And then, that sort of became real, and you're like, whoa. So, we went all in on that thing. OK, so that, that, you got to try it. You got to try it. I'm going to give you a cat after this chase, you're going to try it. Oh, I love it. OK, then, the next thing that we have, which is, which is huge, right, is sonar, which is enriching, it's taking the pixel data, which is enriched customer journey data that is time to, you know, where you're spending on ads, but now it's like, can we feed that back into the platforms and enrich data in platforms? So, increasing the quality of audiences inside ad platforms, inside ESPs, like, Cladio, right? So, that you can, specifically, like, I'd say, for Cladio, like, we can enrich flow audiences. So, you can make sure you're hitting more people that are already on your list, but due to whatever, maybe if they logged in from another IP, or they're using different emails just for the same person, they've already opted in, you have the opportunity to send them a message. So, you know, there's a lot of providers out there, and we have the best pixel identity resolution product out there, so we just, we built that. Now, that, for sure, is like a no-brainer. You got to get it. You can make incremental new revenue day one. And then there's just added business intelligence. We have a whole template library that is, you can flip on. You can, like, go through it and add it to your plan, and you can see it. And it's different cuts of data. And it's community sourced. And from our team, and now we're getting with influencers, and people in the space that just, like, look at data differently, you know, like, how should a business look at these metrics? And so, we have a template library, think notion, right, but for DVC metrics. So, that's huge. I know I'm missing something, but there's a lot, you know. Oh, absolutely. And there's not enough time in the world. Yep. Especially when we just want to-- I talked a lot. No, no, no. It's perfectly fine. And I know this episode of People Are Gonna Love It, and I'll have you back on next year, and we'll talk about some new cool things. But I will give you, like, parting words. Is there anything I didn't ask you about or something that you want to make sure you mentioned before we go today? Just an overall trend that we're seeing, just to kind of put it out there for the audience. You know, diversifying ad channels is must, right? In order to do that, you really have to understand, like, the small door hinges that move really big doors. And in order to do that, you need to have very clean, crispy data and know how to analyze it. And so, that's what we built. And I just think that that's a message that's going to become more and more necessary to hear in this space, that if we were all performance markers before, we got to lean a little bit heavier into now data and data analysis. Tools like Moby and GPTs and things like that, it's going to make it easier. Absolutely, Max. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thanks for having me. I'm glad we got to do it. We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own businesses. You can find all the links of the show notes. You can subscribe to the newsletter at honestycommerce.co to get each episode delivered right into your inbox. If you're enjoying this content, consider leaving a review on iTunes that really helps us out. Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help you get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to electriceye@electriceye.io/connect. Until next time. Until next time.
On this bonus episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Maxx Blank. Maxx is the Cofounder of Triple Whale, a leading tech startup specializing in direct-to-consumer SaaS measurements, data and AI automation.
We talk about bespoke data for growing brands, building an Ecommerce brand from scratch, overcoming analysis paralysis with AI tools, and so much more!
