In the realm of e-commerce, Heather Udo personifies success, innovation, and tenacity. A trailblazer who pushes what’s possible for brands, publishers, and retailers, Heather has her finger on the e-commerce pulse.

Join Jim and Heather as they dive into the business challenges of creating an innovative tech platform that transforms e-commerce shoppers into loyal buyers

3 Key Takeaways

- Raising Venture Capital Might Create Problems: If you successfully raise capital before your product is fully fine-tuned and before the market is ready, you could run into trouble. Take a feather out of Heather’s cap: consider keeping a lean team and funding your growth via sales (bootstrapping).

- Strategy First; Technology Second: If a company doesn’t have a strong go-to-market strategy, it doesn’t matter what your technology does. Strategy first. Technology second. It’ll never work if you try to do it the other way around.

- Educating Your Customers Can Be A Slow Burn: After Heather shared her e-commerce visions with some retailers and brands, many of them balked. They just weren’t ready to do more than the required minimum with their online stores. But they could see the value in upping their digital game. Over the years, they came around.

Resources

Heather Udo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heatherudo/

Heather on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heathermarieudo/

Heather on Linktree: https://linktr.ee/heatherudo

Shoppable: https://linktr.ee/Shoppable

About Our Guest

Heather Udo is the Founder and CEO of Shoppable, an e-commerce solution that helps brands, retailers, creators, and publishers power innovative commerce experiences such as ads, websites, mobile apps, and shops.

Some of Heather’s career highlights:

- Won the 2013 Women in Digital Award from L’Oreal.

- Named one of the ten “Most Powerful Millennials in Manhattan” by Gotham Magazine.

- Identified as and one of the eleven “Tech Gurus Changing the Luxury Game” by Refinery29.

- Holds three U.S. Patents for technology she invented.

- Prior to Shoppable, participating in a successful exit as the business she co-founded was acquired.

About The Dirt Podcast

The Dirt is about getting real with businesses about the true state of their companies and going clear down to the dirt in solving their core needs as a business. Dive deep with your host Jim Barnish as we uncover The Dirt with some of the world's leading brands.

If you love what you are getting out of our show please subscribe.

For more information on how we dig into the dirt check out our other episodes here: https://www.orchid.black/podcast

About Our Company

Orchid Black is a new kind of growth services firm. We partner with tech-forward companies to build smarter, better, game-changing businesses.

Website: https://www.orchid.black

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/orchidblack/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@OrchidBlack

All contents of this show are rights of Orchid Black©️ and are not to be used unless authorized by written consent.

Heather Udo 0:00

I think you need to be honest with yourself and I think you need to. Sometimes you need to take a day to kind of step back from the weeds because as founders were, especially the early days, you're hands on, like doing all these micro, you know, pieces of the business. But, you know, I think sometimes you need to step back to realize, okay, how do I take an honest look at where the business is where the like what what I'm hearing from from the market when I'm hearing from potential customers.

Jim Barnish 0:32

What is up everybody, welcome back to the dirt where we go deep into the obstacles that you business owners face while growing the company and growing yourselves. I am your host, Jim barnish, and our guest today is going to blow you away her name, Heather Udo her company shoppable, which is an awesome platform to turn your ecommerce shoppers into loyal buyers. She has navigated the murkiness of an emerging market to get here, and she has a lot to share as it relates to creating and educating a new market. Before we jump in a big thank you to our sponsor, orchid black, a growth strategy firm that helps founders maximize the value of their business. And a big thank you to our listeners you if you find value in this episode, please let us know by subscribing and sharing with a friend. All right, Heather, let's dig right in. Who is Heather, and what is shoppable?

Heather Udo 1:28

Hey, thank you so much for having me here. So I'm Heather Udo I'm the founder and CEO of shoppable. And we've been around for 12 years. And shoppable is E commerce infrastructure that allows any advertiser or publisher to create a end to end shoppable experience, meaning they can embed buy buttons and embed checkout systems, anywhere online, from ads, to videos to content. We're even doing shoppable TV now. So anything shoppable

Jim Barnish 2:00

and you guys have been around for a while. Right?

Heather Udo 2:05

That's right. Yeah, it's been a little over 12 years now, which is old in the tech.

Jim Barnish 2:12

It is but but old isn't a bad thing, either. So let's, let's talk a little bit about that journey in building shoppable. Let's, let's start at the beginning what what got you started and, and you know, what led to you getting shoppable off the ground?

Heather Udo 2:30

Yeah, so, you know, quite a few things kind of fell, fell into place that led me to starting it. You know, from the product idea. It came to me from a personal frustration that I had. And it was, it was a time in my life where I was in, I think it was about 23 Something like that, and had Korea, you know, had just gone through an exit I was on the founding team of another tech technology company, we've just gone through an exit and I was finally able to move into my own one bedroom apartment. And I don't know if you remember moving into your own home for the first time and having to think about furnishing it. So for me, you know, having my first proper place it was how do what are the products that I need to buy to make this feel like a home? And what's the process for that? So anyway, of course, I went to the internet started searching for for great inspirational images. And nothing was shoppable I could you know, as soon as I found something like great, okay, love that sofa, you know, this room looks perfect, how do I just copy paste it into my apartment. And you know, the frustration kept coming up time and time again. Because the process it just kind of blew my mind, you know, you come across something, you know, great content on on one of these websites. And then you go into what Google or someplace and try to describe the product or, you know, you think about maybe you know what brand maybe makes that and then you're what jumping around on different ecommerce websites trying to track down these products. The process was so, so bad. And it was so broken that you know, the aha moment for me was I was sitting at my computer with a credit card by my keyboard and literally trying to spend my money by all these products. And I thought to myself, I'm like it like it's so hard. It feels like these retailers don't even want my money right now. You know, and that of course is one of those that that moment led to that kind of inner discussion where I'm like, okay, of course they do. So if they want you know want the sale, I'm the consumer wanting the product. Why can't we find the Tell them, and you know, and then so if something's broken, then if you take it a step further, because you know, as an entrepreneur in a creative type, I'm like, Okay, let's just dig in on this a little bit out of curiosity now. So then, you know, taking it a step further, it was, okay, well, even the, like, Why aren't the publishers making this easier? And, you know, and, you know, realizing like, Okay, so there's, there's ultimately a scenario right now that that exists where all three parties are losing. But all three parties could win if we could solve it with technology. So what I kind of went down the rabbit hole of research just shocked, like, there's nothing, that there was nothing that existed that could really solve that. And, you know, and that's really what led me to, to creating shoppable and realizing, like, look, if I can create relationships with all the major retailers and major direct to consumer brands, and kind of normalize them, pull them into this massive digital catalog, and then connect in their checkouts, I can create a shoppable layer around all forms of digital content. And that's essentially what we what we ended up doing. That's the short version of you know, things along the way as as you know, as as they evolve in conversations and things like that. So we'll get into that. I'm sure.

Jim Barnish 6:25

All Yeah, and ecommerce in general has evolved so much in the last 12 years, I think my my first question for you is around, like the evolution that you've played in that landscape, I imagine 12 years ago, and maybe even still, there was a lot of education that came with creating a market in a lot of ways. And a lot of, you know, a lot of opportunity that's kind of surfaced over the last 12 years, as you guys have created new products and, and done new things and rolled out new opportunity to brands and advertisers. So like, it's pretty loaded question. First, it was a statement, but pretty, pretty loaded statement with with with a lot of areas that you could go in there. Let's let's start with was was this like an effort in creating a market 12 years ago? And how has that evolved? Since?

Heather Udo 7:18

Yeah, no, it's a it's a huge question. Um, you know, it has it, there was no market for what we're doing and shoppable. And, you know, at that point in time, just to kind of set the scene of what was going on in the environment, because, again, as entrepreneurs, when we're thinking about starting a business, one of the things we need to take in consideration is like, what are the market environments of whatever it is, you know, whatever space you're in, so where the markets were, you know, like major retailers, target Walmart, Saks Fifth Avenue, BestBuy, they all had ecommerce sites. But, um, a lot of the brands did not, at that point in time, so there were there was actually less fragmentation than there is today. At that point in time, every single day, you could pick up Women's Wear Daily, or go to women's wear daily.com. And see a new, a new brand had just launched ecommerce, and it was newsworthy that, you know, I don't want to name any names, but you know, any American brand or even international brand, but mostly American at that point in time XYZ brand launched ecommerce. So it was still, you know, it was still pretty early days in E commerce from that perspective. But the major retailers were there. So that's really what we focused on. Now, in those conversations with the retailers, the first level conversation that I could get at, with each of them pretty much all went the same way. Like, oh, this sounds really interesting. You know, when and I get it, I totally would love for this to exist, but we don't operate that way. We don't we, we don't do that. And every time I'm like, I know, this doesn't this hasn't existed. Nobody operates this way. You know, but I'm glad that you see the same future, you know, and I found that commonality with them. So it really was to your to your point, you touched on it, it really was kind of an educational process, and having to work with the retailers to help them see the same vision, as well as help them see the value that it provides them. visa vie providing better user experiences or better consumer experiences and helping them create more shoppable moments means that they're helping that they're creating more opportunities to convert their shoppers in different locations. Now, to your point on you know, also on kind of other market changes at that point in time, you know, traditional affiliate marketing existed, but it you know, again, it all was forced the shopper to redirect away from whatever website they were on. And it was very difficult. It was very manual for that to work. And one of the challenges that we ran into early on, again, being trying to create this market early on, you know, as all of the brands were coming on board, launching their own e commerce sites, we you know, we of course, were following that the following the announcement, so and so's online. Now we're like, great, come join shoppable catalog. We want to help you, you know, get going. And for them, they're a lot of the early emails that we got back word, this sounds great. But we're we're ecommerce ecommerce one on one right now, we can't do anything but focus on the basics of getting our site going. So. So anyway, so it's a long, you know, there's a lot was a lot of stuff for sure, going on. But we've had to put in the time to get that going. And I think part of what we learned early on is that we were early, you know, we were early to a space that did not yet exist. So I had to as an entrepreneur had to think through, okay, how do I adapt, and make sure that we are around when this becomes a real space, you know, because I was still convinced this is this is where it's going to go, it just is going to take a little bit longer because of some of these other market and buyer environments.

But I think that's, that's really common, right? Where entrepreneurs will start a business those those, there'll be the visionary that sees where the markets going, they might think it's timely in that they're in time for the market, but maybe they're early. And there are so many businesses that you know, that were too early for the market and overspent too early on, and ultimately weren't able to be the one that took on the market when the market was there. And you have had a success story of both being a little early to market, but also weathering the storm and taking it on when the market caught up to you. So you know, what, what advice do you have to other founders who might be going through something similar in their own market?

Yeah, I think you need to think you need to be honest with yourself. And I think you need to, sometimes you need to take a day to kind of step back from the weeds because as founders were especially the early days, your hands on, like doing all these micro, you know, pieces of the business, but you know, I think sometimes you need to step back to realize, okay, how do I take an honest look at where the business is, where the like, what what I'm hearing from from the market, what I'm hearing from potential customers, those types of things? And I think you you also want to figure out like one, do you still believe that your idea and your technology, or your product, whatever, you know, whatever it might be? Do you? You know, are you still honestly convinced that you're on the right track? Because sometimes the decision, you know, the what the realization might be that you're not right. And that, you know, there is no need for it or the market, you know, it's going in a different direction or something along those lines. But if you were in the position where I was where I really was still convinced I'm like, this is where it is going. And I'm hearing that this is what people want, they just need a little bit more time, then I think you need to figure out, okay, where how do I, you know, what sort of steps can you take to make sure that you're still around when the market catches up to you? So for me, one of you know, of course, you need, you need capital, you need cash, you have to figure out, okay, how to, how do you operate in a way that allows you to do that? So if you from the fundraising standpoint, we in a lot of sense now, I think we're lucky that we didn't raise venture capital, because how do we raise venture capital, we probably they probably would have poured on the cash into the marketing and pushing, you know, pushing this too early. And it probably would have tanked, you know, because the timing wasn't quite right. So, you know, I think in a lot of ways it we were lucky in that from from from that perspective. But what we ended up doing is going out to some of these two, at the early days to different publishers that told us they really wanted the solution. They really didn't like the traditional affiliate links because they monetize from, you know, from primarily from ads on their website. So we ended up deciding, okay, we're going to try to fund through sales, and that's where that's what we ended up doing is making sure we kept a really lean team and And that we funded ourselves with, with our sales. So I put my energy towards selling, working with different publisher deals and trying to create as long term contracts as we could. So we had that reoccurring revenue. So it also, we also decided to set up our business based on SAS, which allowed us to have that ability to fund the business and of course, be here today 12 years later to talk about it. When you know, the checkout space has been red hot, you know, for the last year here, and massive publicly traded companies are launching distributed checkouts and things like that as well.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's it's the timing, the timing is definitely here that you've been waiting for. So awesome to see a lot of the hard work paying off. When you look at some of the resistance that you faced in the early days. I mean, some of those conversations were probably super fruitful towards better understanding the customer, the brand and, and everything that you were that you were building towards. But was are there any that stands that stood out where, you know, you had to have some really hard conversations probably in the earlier days around? Where the where the puck was going probably call you. The Wayne Gretzky is shopping, I guess at this point. Right. So like, were there any, are there any conversations that that's that stand out from a resistance perspective?

resistance from, from customers?

Yeah, resisting customers.

I think on the on that side, it was, again, part of it was it was about being forced to market in this space, that there's, there's resistance in the sense that I can't tell you how many conversations I had with companies, not going to name any names that were like, We need this technology, this is the holy grail, like we have to have this, this is everything we've been looking for, for 10 years, like great, this is gonna be easy, we're gonna close this deal in no time. But then we get into rooms with, you know, 1215 people, and they're like, this is, you know, now we just need to figure out our strategy, like, okay, so great. And that could, you know, in literally, in some cases took a year or more. And, you know, and, again, for us, we were targeting these bigger companies, because they had the cash, we needed the cash, we needed to sell to big companies that could front the cash and pay longer term. But the challenge was, they don't move as fast. So we, you know, we certainly heard, you know, we're faced some resistance, because of those, they're kind of interpersonal things of, you know, okay, we've got to set our strategy, then you have people internally there that are trying to figure out, you know, they might disagree on the strategies, you're trying to align them, you're trying to teach all of them get them excited. And, you know, and at the same time, if you're a marketplace business, like, like shoppable, is, you know, we needed both sides of the marketplace. So we're trying to get all of the brands and the retailers excited and on boarded, and then trying to get the right publishers and distribution sources on the other side, and we're trying to line them up, so that the ones that are ready to move forward, we have the right products to sell at the same time, too. So there was certainly a lot of paths to like that we faced on resistance. And one. You know, one other piece of advice related to that, that I would give other entrepreneurs is, when you're thinking about a launch partner, don't think about a launch partner, think about launch partners. And don't rely on just one. So we you know, I will admit to making that mistake, we had a very big company that was you know, told us over and over again, we want to be the launch partner, this is so important, we want to be seen as innovative, etc. And of course, it didn't end up the dealership not going through. And we wasted I think it was six, maybe nine, nine months, really focusing in on them. And in the end, you know, we had some learnings talking to them as a potential customer. But we didn't get that ended up getting that deal because they had a change in management or change in direction. I can't remember it was something you know, something like that. And then we really had to go out and find another another launch partner. So had we been more cautious and probably, you know, admittedly a little less naive about it, we would have went out and focused on having multiple launch partners and you know also even if a company is not ready to sign right away and put $1 value, you can have them sign, you know, some sort of letter of intent or Something along those lines that they are going to move forward with you. And then you can have those strategy conversations. So a couple of lessons learned in those early days.

I love that we're making our way to lessons learned. Are there any? Are there any other setbacks that you had along the way that you learned a ton from?

I mean, there's so many you can, I don't think anyone can that can be in business for 12 years and did not have a lot. I mean, other things, you know, that a couple other things that that come to mind, I would say, you know, one, like small a small thing, but it's, it's expensive. It's think, you know, and I'm not a lawyer. So let me just put that out there. But think about when, like, what time is right for you to incorporate. So another mistake that I made was, for whatever reason, I just the day I ended up incorporating was like, you know, mid December, and come January, it's a new year, you're going to have to pay taxes, it doesn't matter. You know, that you didn't operate the whole year, you know, they're going to come to collect, and depending upon what state you're in, those franchise taxes are sometimes $800 or $1,000. Even if you didn't make a penny, even if you operate it for 48 hours the previous year. So I learned that the hard way when the new year started, and I'm like, I have to come out of pocket. I think it was $850 or something. thing for California at the time. And I'm not happy about that. So that was another early kind of lesson lesson learned too is you have that minimum tax, which is painful.

Yeah, you guys, and you guys now have four products that you that you've brought to market?

We do we do. Yeah.

So talk to me a little bit about, you know, the the ideal customer for those products, you know, how you guys go to market with with with those? And, yeah, I'll leave it at that.

Yeah, so we, so we've ended up, we're really creating solutions that are focused around at now. And this is kind of part of the our evolution, we focus or products around the advertisers. Because when we think about creating where shoppable wants to go, in order to create this, you know, the shoppable layer across all forms of digital content. The thing that ties together, all these different types of platforms and experiences are the advertiser. So instead of initially, it felt like we were a little bit more focused on the publishers and the distribution sources. But you can have the same advertiser across multiple publishers and across other platforms and social sites and, and things like that. So we've kind of shifted our focus to be based on these advertisers. And then really, we are working with them as we're, we're developing products. So some of the products that we've released, or, like, you know, a lot of them are based on what we're hearing from, from our customer, sometimes they're what we're hearing from agencies that we work with, and different different problems that that they have, like, for example, we recently launched a product called instant shop, which is a hosted shop that, uh, you know, an advertiser can fully brand, they can put whatever products they want, they want on it, they can embed tic tock videos and YouTube to videos, the checkups embedded within it, whole thing can be created in 20 minutes. Now, this came out of really came out of conversations that we had with both the advertisers but you know, to an extent more so on the agency side, where the agencies were telling us, some of the problems that we have, is we're getting, you know, specifically within social, you have these advertisers, A lot of times working with content creators, or even if their own their own content, but then they have these videos, where someone's talking about these three products, you know, these their three favorite dog food, you know, treats or their makeup look, whatever, whatever it might be. But, you know, from the advertiser gets one link to send their ad to, to send that the users to, so if they use that one link to send to one product detail page, you know, consumers can't necessarily easily find the other products, and they're getting consumer complaints and complaints on their social saying, you know, you have, like, I can't, why don't you make it easier for me to find these other products? It's a bad experience, essentially. So we kind of dug into that and thought, Okay, how do we create a smoother better experience for you know, With the users and therefore, for the advertisers, and then how do we also solve some other challenges that we were seeing, which is, you know, the advertisers. And before I get into that, I'll just kind of comment that, what one of the things that I always try to do, when you know, when our product development in conversations with our customers, is hear what they're telling us, but also in in taken what they're asking for, but then also think how to why give them more than that? How to why not just make things a little bit better? How do I try to think, you know, three steps ahead. And, and that's kind of what we were trying to do, too, is think, Okay, well, we can create this, you know, a landing page for them. But also, we also want to solve for being able to help them track their those campaigns, like the the revenue that they're getting by individual campaign, and better track their the effectiveness of the creators that they're working with, which is another problem that they're having. So how do we solve all the different challenges that they have? And ones that we expect? That they're going to have? How do we pull it all into that product and make it make sense and try to make it elegant at the same time?

I'm curious, as you're talking, I'm, like, some of the things that you're saying are just like screaming AI, machine learning, things like that, that, you know, are obviously, you know, hot, hot topics. I'm curious, considering kind of the influence of AI ml, in today's digital market, how, how is shoppable leveraging these technologies.

So yeah, so we use, we use machine learning as it comes as it relates to our product catalog. So we have, I can't even tell you how many brands and retailers we have in our catalog now. But we have 400 million product skews in our catalog coming from all these different brands and retailers. So and then we normalize it all into a single product API that our customers can use. And so what we're doing is using machine learning to help us normalize that catalog into a single into a single catalog, which with 400 million skews, it's massive, you can't manually edit every single one of those, those are all coming in with different taxonomies. There's, you know, challenges with color naming conventions, where some, you know, one brand is going to call something Navy, the other one's going to call it midnight, you know, or, or something else along those lines. So how do we know that those things are both Navy, and in any way, so we use machine learning and that respects. And then we also, as it relates to, to AI, we have some great partners in that space that are essentially using Shabazz catalog, and their image recognition, and, and their AI to be able to identify products, both within content within, you know, photo content, but also within video content, on your TV, on your phone, on your laptop, and then making those experiences shoppable. So I don't think I can say their name because they haven't publicly announced it yet. But we're partnering together with with an AI company to basically expand the capabilities within that space.

Well, that's a that's exciting. It's probably one of the reasons that you got that was that was that award, you got tech guru changing the luxury game, isn't that? Yeah. Well, sorry, what was that?

I was just saying we also started specifically in luxury. Now, you know, we do a lot of things we're selling, you know, everything from toilet paper to, you know, expensive, expensive watches.

Well, I'm having my first kid in a couple months. So we're stocking up on all the all the things that I never thought I'd be stocking up on that are essentials, like diapers, and toilet paper and all that good stuffs.

Perfect. Well, you should, I would encourage you to go to pampers and go check out pampers.com that you can set a can create something called a diaper stash. And it's a really cool, essentially way that you can, you know, you're going to find out just how expensive diapers are and how frequently you're going to be buying them. But, um, but yeah, they have a cool, cool program and they're using using shoppable to do it and congratulations, by the way. Super, super exciting.

Oh, thank you very much. Yeah, is exciting, exciting times. So um, all right one one question that just, it came to me while we were talking about, you know, kind of the evolution from a technology perspective. You've been here around the digital media industry and E commerce world for over a decade, probably two decades, if you include all your other digital media experience what what other technological shifts? Have you witnessed that maybe this new, you know, push towards AI? Is is it from, from a, you know, not commoditization, democratization, we'll call it, you know, what other what other technology shifts? Have you witnessed that have impacted the operation of shoppable?

Hmm, that's a good question. I think, I think part of it has to do, I think part of it has to do with with resources. And, and a lot of it is, you know, I think earlier, people wanted, you know, just wanted a lot more to be manual, because they wanted more control over things, especially, you know, again, going back a decade or two decades, the everything within technology was just a lot, a lot different. And as I was saying, like, a lot of companies were just coming online, and it was I was literally having conversations with venture capitalists, when I started the company about whether or not ecommerce will hang around, will it be here for the long term? And it's like, Oh, my God, like, Okay, I'm in the wrong room right now. But, you know, so it was a different time. And I think, you know, as it relates to shoppable, we had, we're in a lot of rooms, where people potential kind of customers wanted everything that we did to be super manual, because they want to complete control over every single product, I want to know that I'm going to put product X exactly here, and product y over here. And I want this image to show but not that one, you know, and it was super high touch. And it was just, you know, from, from the technology perspective, you're like, This is not scalable. And of course, it wasn't. So all companies, it doesn't matter, you know, how big or how small, all companies are going to say that they have resource constraints, right, and that they never have enough resources. So when you have, you have that it really is kind of a pressure cooker, in a sense, that forces companies to look for other solutions. And even though you might not be comfortable with, you know, with full automation, it's going to move, it's gonna force people to move from doing manual, whatever it might be to saying, okay, look, we've got to have, we've got to introduce some some automation into this in some way, shape, or form. So I think that's kind of part of that's part of that evolution. And it just increases even little by little increases a company's comfort level with automation and you giving, giving them the right tools and constraints to say, Okay, I'm going to allow automation, but we have these certain features that are gonna protect the company, away from whatever their worst fear is, that could happen from automation.

Yeah, yeah. Speaking of when you were setting up processes and automation for your own business, because obviously critical for laying the foundation for scale, you guys are, are building and growing quite fast at this point. What? Like, what was that journey, like in terms of setting them up for yourself and getting getting processes stood up not becoming overly process driven, but process driven enough as a startup that you're able to set yourself up for scale?

Yeah, that's, it's a great question. Because I think, you know, honestly, I still kind of struggle with it a little bit, because you have, and you have to, you have to change those things as you grow as you hit, hit different levels. So I think it's, it's something that, um, yeah, I think it's something that's really really challenging to figure out, you know, how do you you know, what were the right places for you to start and put in put in the right processes to create, you know, like, I think one of the most important things is your customer onboarding experience and you know, how do you you know, when on the the lead gen side, making sure like you can easily like on our side, we have automation setup, so that we can respond to leads that come come in immediately. And, you know, the whole thing is an automated because we want to be able to really We understand that customer that prospects need and the challenge that they're trying to solve. And we also want to make sure that we can help them too. So we we try to automate enough without going, you know, too far or making it a bad experience for someone to. So again, kind of back to my point, it's about, you know, letting go of some of the reins, but But you know, not not too many, as well. And I would say, you know, one book that I'm I'm reading and rereading right now is called buyback your time by Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur and business coach. And it is like hard, like, you know, knowledge bombs and tactical advice for processes that you should put in place. And ones that are critical to really putting in place the right guardrails for growth, so that you don't have constraints. And it also helps, it's interesting, because he talks about even like mental constraints that we as entrepreneurs, often will put on ourselves, that are that that can slow down your growth, and those can change throughout like your your business growth and different different experiences that you might have. So it's really, really fascinating, I would recommend doing that. Because we were, you know, right now, I'll say, I'm redoing our whole sales process. And, and I'm kind of learning some from that book and from from others, because we needed, you know, as you grow, certain processes will break. And you'll just realize, okay, what worked, you know, for the first year, the business isn't going to work five years and isn't going to work 10 years in. So it's about making sure that you're revisiting those things. And you're also creating an environment with your team that encourages people to speak up, like I tell, I try to tell every new employee to not be afraid to say, why are we doing it this way? Because I don't want people to have the mindset of like, oh, that that's always been done that way. And I think a lot of big companies operate that way, and have people that will say, it's always been done that way, you know, and that's telling other other employees and team members don't question it. Like, even if even if you have a better idea, or you think it's broken, or you think the company is losing money, because of that process, you know, or we're losing team members, because of that process, a lot of big companies make that, you know, create that environment. So I really try hard to make sure that I'm fostering an environment with my team, where they feel comfortable saying, Hey, I think this process just doesn't make sense. It's creating more work, no one's even looking at it, or we're potentially losing money because of this, or we're creating a bad customer experience, whatever it might be sure, I want people to feel open to questioning that. And, you know, I tell them, I'm like, just because you suggest something doesn't mean we're gonna do it. But I want you to feel comfortable bringing up those ideas, because it doesn't matter how junior or senior the person is, everyone is ultimately a user to and everyone is entitled to that opinion, and has value has valuable recommendations.

What are what are some of these mental constraints that you've put on yourself in the past?

Oh, boy. You know, that's a good question. I think. I think part of it is, I wish I could remember some of how, like, Dan is so good at articulating these, these constraints, and I am not, I will certainly admit that. But I think, you know, some, some of it is about trying to try and basically thinking that you're the only one that could do certain things at your company. And you have to get you have to get over trying to hold on to too much. And you have to, which is hard for an entrepreneur, when you're building everything up, this is your baby, right? You're creating something from from nothing. I have two kids now, but but shoppable is essentially my first so I'd say we've three, um, you know, but it's, you know, you really, you want to control it and you have to as you grow, you have to start letting go of that control. And you really have to create processes that replace yourself that make it so that you your team and your company can operate without you essentially not because you're trying to get to fire yourself or whatever. But it's you have to enable that At otherwise, you'll be the bottleneck because too often entrepreneurs become their own bottleneck to their growth into their success, because they're trying to control too much. So, there, they have multiple level levels of employees. Like, you know, I don't I only have two direct reports. So I don't have this problem. But I know a lot of entrepreneurs will have, you know, be CEO of their company, and they might have 20, direct reports, or, or, or more, and it's just too many for a CEO to have. But so it's really about I think about kind of, yeah, figuring out how do you replace yourself, so that you are not constraining growth and becoming the blocking factor for parts of your team from being able to move forward?

Yeah, I see if if I were to divide things up into like, five $5 an hour, $50 an hour, $500 an hour and a $5,000 an hour tasks. I see most CEOs doing five and $50 an hour tasks with 95% of their time. That's, I think that's just that's like, you know, that's just a habit that people fall into is taking on some of these things, when you can you hire people to help you out for a reason. So you can take on the entire end to end lift. So it's good to hear you've had some experience in that same, right.

Yeah, I think you know, and you reminded me of another one is that one of the other constraints is that you don't need it to the thought that you don't need an assistant and or that you don't deserve it and an assistant and for, you know, for me, I had an assistant early on, and then I felt like, like, you know, I didn't really make Oh, I don't really I didn't like I didn't know how to properly use an assistant. So we ended up not having that position after a while and kind of transitioned into something else. And then I didn't have an assistant until about two months ago, after reading Dan Martel's book for the first time, which is like, you know, he's like, if you, you know, if you don't have an assistant, like, you're gonna be doing these $5 tasks, because you're answering your own emails, like, no matter what calendar system, you've got set up, you're still answering your own emails, and you're filtering through, and you spent way too much time doing those types of tasks. So I had to, you know, I had to kind of get over mental mental thought, because I don't know if to have an assistant, it felt like a luxury in some sense. And like that. I don't know, it felt like I don't need one, I don't need an assistant like I can, I can do do this. And again, it's that I think part of it's that entrepreneurial, hands on mentality, like roll up your sleeves, I've just Can, can can let me just get through this. I'll just do it myself. You know, and so I had to get get through that. And I mean, my assistant is killing it. I went to Cannes, lions, and then immediately had a family vacation right afterwards. So I was gone for two weeks. And I came back to a calendar full of booked meetings with customers with prospects. I'm like, Oh, my God, I didn't have to follow up with all these people. She did. Yeah, booked all of this for me. So, you know, so that was a constraint to that I just had to get over. And I had to also learn, like, the proper ways to, you know, proper, you know, requirements for, for that job role, and what should I really hand over? You know, and I think one quote that I love, and it's super relevant to this topic is, you know, 80% done by someone else is 100% Fucking awesome. You know, because you could do it 100% Right, yourself, but you're doing it, you know, so if you can, if someone else can get do something, even to 80%, you're only spending 20% to get it to 100% or maybe 80% is good enough for whatever that project is. Right. So anyway, something

well said, Where, where did you get your assistant? It was at a referral or, you know, outsourcing agency. How did you find her?

Yeah, well, I found her through through growth assistant. So it's an outsourcing company. And, and that's what they what they do. So it made it really easy. They did all of the hiring, the interviewing, they took it all on and made it happen. I think it took two weeks, I just told them, you know, what I was looking for. And as a New Yorker, I also you know, certain certain personality types, you know, wanted to make sure that they would not be offended by you know, really simple quick emails, communications, things like that. That I just know was my my style. So little things like that, Tim.

Excellent. All right. Well, this is It's been super fun. I want to, I don't want to end it. But we got to end it with the founder, five here. So five quick questions about you and your growth. And the first one is the number one metric or KPI that you are relentlessly focused on.

Number one is orders at shoppable total orders through the system.

A little bit of why, why is

because it's the one metric that aligns on the success all the way through. So as orders grow, our customers that are licensing it are obviously growing their revenue, our retailers, or brands are growing their revenue, and then shoppers are successfully finding what they want.

Well, that's great, you are all about the customer shopper experience. So that's all right, top tip for growth stage founders like yourself,

my top tip would be to focus on your expertise, and make sure that you are laser focused on what your company does best. And that you partner with other companies to take over other parts of your business that are not your, your core, because I see even myself and I have made this mistake multiple times. Sadly, that, you know, we're so hands on. And, you know, in technology, everything's possible, like, Yeah, we could build that we could build that. Let's build it. And, you know, so many times looking back, I'm like, I should have partnered with someone on that. And at this point, I've learned my lesson. And I'm like, we do not need to build that we don't need to build this other thing. You know, I mentioned this image recognition partner. I'm like, we do not need to be an image recognition company, too. So anyway, so partnering with the right companies, and stop trying to build everything is really, really, really critical.

Well said, All right, a favorite book or podcast that's helped you to grow as a founder.

I'm gonna go back to buy back your time with Dan Martell. That's front and center in my mind right now.

I had a feeling that's where you're gonna go. You might be the number one spokesperson for his book. At this point. I think it was like five times in an hour. Dan, Dan, yo, yo, Heather, a little bit of a shout out here. All right. Oh, yeah, he's alright. I never number four, piece of advice that counters traditional wisdom, I would say

don't raise venture capital. So I think most people, you know, think I'm just going to start, you know, want to start a business, I'm going to go out and raise venture capital and think about it as an assumption. And I would challenge people to, you know, think differently. And, and also think about your equity. Because you're giving, you're giving up a lot of that if you go that route. So that's, that's what I would say,

yeah, as a former VC myself, I will double down on that. Not in every case, but theirs is incredibly important for people to listen to. Alright, last one, what is going to be the title of your auto biography?

So what I would like to say probably something like, like grit or grit and glamour, or something along those lines, I think that kind of sums up you know, some some things up top, what comes to mind, the

grit and glamour, the definitely mixes the best of everything that you've been in contact with for the last couple of decades. So that's, that's great. You got a lot of grit from being entrepreneur, a lot of glamour from being in luxury, and now serving kind of end to end. I love it. That's good. That's excellent. So you've given a ton to our listeners today, Heather. So I always allow for a little bit of self promotion here at the end. How can those listening help you out?

Yeah, I mean, we as I have mentioned, we want all direct to consumer brands and retailers integrate into shoppable catalogs. So if anyone you know is running a direct to consumer brand, and you want more sales, we would love for you to reach out. We don't charge brands to integrate into our catalog. We want to keep growing that so but you can find us@shoppable.com Or we're also on very active on LinkedIn and Instagram at shoppable. And yeah, we'd love would love any recommendations or you know, any interested parties on that respect.

All right, Heather Trudeau changing the shopping experience for the better. Thanks for joining us on the dirt into the audience. We've got a ton more insightful conversations coming up you won't want to miss. So stay tuned. And if you haven't done so already, please subscribe. Thanks either. Thank you. If you love today's Episode of The Dirt make sure you rate it on your favorite platform and if you really liked this go ahead and leave us an honest review thanks again for tuning in to the dirt