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- [00:01]
A
Any sector that evokes some sort of emotional response during the purchase journey is a great fit for this type of technology.
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B
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by Frontlines IO, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with Venture backed founders and marketers. Where they talk, all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now with all that said, let's jump into today's episode. Today our guest is Theo Satloff, co founder and CEO of Remark. Theo, welcome to the show.
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A
Thanks for having me, Brad. I'm excited to be here.
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B
Of course. Let's talk about the problem that your technology solves.
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A
Yeah. So we're working on the commerce space and basically we have this hypothesis that consumers on brand properties don't really know how to shop and they don't really know where to begin. And this hypothesis comes from really just analyzing how brick and mortar retail has worked for the last, call it 100 years, where you walk into a store and there are things you can touch and feel and there's somebody you can chat with and you can ask them questions or get their take on which products might be good for you or good for someone else. Online just doesn't have that. There's no person can't really touch and feel anything. You don't really know what a product looks like when you're wearing it or holding it. And so we wanted to build technology that closed that gap, basically, technology that brought every consumer on any brand property an expert who could take them through that shopping journey and help them find the right products, help them, you know, put together gifting set for a friend or you know, maybe family and could even help them with things like post purchase, you know, order tracking returns, anything of that sort. But the hypothesis stems from offering every shopper a very premium, high quality consultative experience. That just isn't what E Com historically has been about.
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B
When you're saying all that, my brain thinks chatbot, is this a chatbot or where does it manifest? You know, what's that interaction look like?
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A
Yeah, chatbots are, they're cheap. I'm sure you sort of get the recoiling sort of reaction that I do when you see something floating in the bottom right hand Corner and it, you know, promises to help you resolve your warranty issue or your return issue. And the moment you start chatting with it, you know, it's the most annoying thing ever. And the immediate response that we all have is, you know, get me to a human, help me figure out how I can get connected to somebody that is, you know, much more capable than you are. Remark is not that remark is basically like talking to a friend. It should feel more like texting. We take over a larger surface on a brand's website. We make it a lot more engaging with an enormous amount of texture, whether that be, you know, styled images that are curated specifically for that user, cards that let users take action on their own behalf, like maybe changing an order soon after it was placed all the way through to, you know, doing a login or password reset or all of that can take place right in the platform. So I would say visually, the way to think about it is almost like an app that just lives on a brand's site where you actually don't really ever need to leave that app. You can kind of just do everything from discovery through post purchase, all right there and then when you look at
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B
your customer base, I have to imagine that they spent a lot of money and a lot of time, a lot of energy thinking about the web experience. How do you come in and convince them to change that experience?
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A
It sort of comes down to the same principle that we have for guiding customers. So having an expert guide is a really important factor in getting a shopper to cross the finish line. It's the same thing that we do with our brands. So we basically present to them hard and, you know, real data that shows that we are experts in this sector. So our backgrounds as a founding team come from really early LLM research. So we can present to them that we were sort of on the cutting edge of thinking about using LLMs in this way as influenced by real human expertise. And from that we can actually just demonstrate the efficacy of the product to them. So we can take them through a reduced cost, proof of concept period and then run an A B test that can prove to them that against their existing solution or their existing platform. Remark's way of thinking about Commerce can drive 10, 12, 15% more revenue for them in these, you know, really true and fair controlled experiments. So a lot of it just has to do with level setting, guiding and letting users experience the future without a lot of blockage or risk appetite.
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B
For the brands that say yes to this, are there any patterns like is it more the direct to consumer brands. Is it the old retail brands that have been forever a mix of both?
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A
It's a mix of both. I think that has been maybe one of the things that has been most surprising about the business. We started the business as really an outdoor focused, high consideration business that was focused on categories, bikes or skis or really high complexity goods. And what we found is while those product types certainly do need guidance, they're not the only category that needs guidance. So, you know, brands like Darn Tough Socks, who, they sell socks. Yes, they happen to be expensive socks, but it sucks. They still have an enormous amount of friction before a user checks out. Where you basically end up guiding a shopper through this enormous catalog of tons and tons of different skus, helping them understand, you know, which socks might have a certain pressure point or hotspot, what socks might have a certain pattern kind of taking them through that journey. So we work with brands that, you know, are super, super high end luxury. We work with brands that do home furnishing. We work with brands that do beauty and skin care, even medical devices. You know, at this point, we found that any sector that evokes some sort of emotional response during the purchase journey is a great fit for this type of technology.
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B
This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Frontlines I.O. podcast. Now back to today's episode. When it comes to the category, what's the category that customers are buying? Or what's the line item? Maybe a better way to phrase that.
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A
Customers, meaning our brands? Yeah, yeah, they're buying agent support. They're buying guidance for their shoppers. And that can take many different forms. So it could be live chat on site, it could be, you know, live on site content creation. It could be inbox automation in their help desk. It could be proactive outreach on behalf of a brand. So, you know, one of the things that we take a lot of pride in at remark is basically interviewing every shopper, so making sure that every shopper is given a proper voice and that they're not kind of being taken through these, you know, click trees of generic autoresponders. And the thing that you and I probably have hated for the last 10 or 15 years. They're actually given an opportunity to share what makes them unique. Like, oh, it's, you know, my girlfriend's birthday coming up, or it's, you know, my mom likes this type of pot or pan, or I'm going on vacation to Colorado to go skiing for the first time. There are all these little attributes that are actually super impactful for each shopper. And so we want to act on those and make sure that those are being given the light of day.
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B
Is the line item established for them, though? If you look at the customer base that you have, are they already in market? Like, do they have a budget for this or do you have to go out and convince them that they need to create a budget for this?
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A
It's a good question. It's a little bit of both. So, you know, some of it comes from a classic customer service spend perspective where they might be bucketing it into software spend and saying something like, you know, this is how much we spend on our help desk. Like, this is how much we spend on Zedesk or Intercom or Gorgeous or something. The more proactive brands think about it almost as a proxy for headcount. And so a lot of our brands, instead of hiring temps during kind of peak season or throughout the year, they'll just allocate that budget to us and say, okay, great, you guys don't actually spike the way that we might during Q4. And so we don't need to account for bringing on, you know, 20 or 30 more temps. We can basically just build that into remark and account for this increase of demand, which we know that once we're able to, you know, train the model effectively, it can scale up or scale down as we need. But it is a good question because we're at this moment where, quite honestly, the antiquated way of buying software is just that it's antiquated. And so brands, they need to kind of get with the times and understand how software needs to be procured these days. And given that model usage and model pricing and the way that we think about deploying different pieces of technology these days, it's not necessarily. There's no economies of scale the way that a database might have or classic compute might have. It's not quite linear, but it's closer to linear in spending. And so finding the right approach to accounting for something that doesn't massively, you know, discount with increased usage is something that I think a lot of brands need to learn how to account for
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B
when you look at your customer growth, what's driving the growth, what channels are working.
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A
So we spend a lot of time at trade shows and we spend a lot of time kind of working with brands from, you know, an outbound perspective. But I would say the number one factor and the strongest signal that we've gotten is, is brands are often looking at their competitors websites and when they see a remark on there and they kind of go through that experience and they're able to get really good guidance, maybe have a mood board created for them, have this amazing post, conversation, follow up email, it clicks for them right away that there's something different here than what they have. And so that prompts a lot of outreach for us, which is our favorite type because we know that they found us in the field and they've already experienced what makes us special, what's the
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playbook look like at conferences, at events to really stand out, we want to
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A
take a different approach. So you know, you have the classic big enterprise leaning brands like a salesforce, they're going to have a big booth and they're going to send all of their AES there and you know, it's going to be frankly kind of a boring experience. We don't want to do that. Like we want to make sure that everyone who's engaging with remark sees who we are. We're generally a young company that's pretty fast moving and we're certainly at the cutting edge on almost every piece of tech that's out there right now. And we want our brands to experience that. And so we will set up really engaging, very kind of interactive demos and we'll let brands feel the kind of the future right in front of them and they'll be able to test what's not yet live not in a controlled beta environment, but like, hey, we shipped this thing last week, what's your feedback on it? And so what's ended up happening for us at a lot of these trade shows is we end up building kind of a big crowd because the technology is so much more advanced than kind of what our competition is able to present at those given times that we steal a lot of the attention and the presence from many of those brands, which is just more fun for us. And it makes the feedback we get on these early prototypes a lot more meaningful because it's raw, it's unfiltered and it's right then and there.
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B
Are there channels that you put money into that just didn't work?
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Yeah, ads don't really work the way that they used to. Or maybe that we had hoped they would. And I think that that extends from both physical ads all the way through to, you know, LinkedIn ads or Google keyword ads. They work. They just don't work with the potency that we would hope. I think the kind of the classic, you know, spammy, broad cold email approach doesn't really work either. And so we've done a lot of what we like to call internally, old school selling. So we will write handwritten notes to prospective clients, we'll send them gifts, we will research in depth about each contact before we even send them an email. And so the response rate that we get from doing cold outreach is a lot higher than you'd see as an industry norm, because it actually isn't that cold. It's a lot warmer. From the outset, we've done our homework and we've made sure that basically every person we're reaching out to is the person that should be receiving this bit of communication. And we explain why. This show is brought to you by the Global Talent company, a marketing leader's best friend. In these times of budget cuts and efficient growth, we help marketing leaders find, hire, vet and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70% less than their US and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit globaltalent.co.
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B
have you seen that guy on Twitter that's doing cakes as a service?
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A
Yeah, I have seen him. I think it's a great business model. He said he was doubling week over week.
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B
Yeah, exactly. It's so good. Let me know if you guys try the cakes out. What types of gifts are you sending? What does that look like?
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A
Well, we've done simple ones like donuts and coffee before, but one of our best performing gifts was I'm a big cook. And actually much of our team is really into food and unsurprisingly, broadly into hospitality as well. And so we sent custom Japanese chef's knives to a lot of our kind of top prospects. And that had a really exciting kind of viral moment, which we didn't expect to happen, but kind of when we sent the knives, everyone on LinkedIn was posting about the knives. And even today, you know, we still hear from folks who received those. They use it every day or, you know, when can they get another one or when's the next merch drop. We also, you know, we obsess over the details in every part of the business, including generic swag. So our T shirts and our hoodies and, you know, all those elements, those go through a lot of testing too. And so we make sure. That everything we're putting forward that relates to the Remark brand is at the level we want it to be. And it tends to pay off in dividends. Like, there was a trade show recently where I was wearing one of our Mark hoodies. And just walking through the trade show hall, five or six people came up to me and said, that's my favorite hoodie. I have that one. Not realizing that I was the guy who created the hoodie. So it's the little things that stand out. And, you know, your brand should be consistent through and through.
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B
What are the big areas that you're betting on to grow in 2026? Sounds like events, conferences, knives. What else?
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A
Yeah, events, conferences, more knives. Maybe samurai swords or something. We want to be crisper with how we communicate or talk about what we do. I think many people, but especially we internally at Remark, we're getting kind of bored and overstimulated by the same repeated AI taglines that every brand has right now. Like, AI is going to change your workflow or, you know, AI is going to automate your email. It's like, okay, great. Like, Claude can do that for me out of the box. Like, what actually makes you unique? And so we've been spending a lot of time on figuring out how to tighten up or crisp up our messaging, which feels almost as dumb as this sounds. It feels like a callback. Like having to do unique, specific messaging just isn't the trend right now. Like, everybody is looking for, how do we be as kind of horizontal as possible? How do we be something that works for everybody? And I think we're sort of taking a contrarian route there, where we want to be really good at making the customer journey for Ecom exceptional. And we don't want to do everything. We don't want to be the thing that makes you a doctor's appointment. That's not really the goal of Remark. So making sure that our entire ethos is Crisp is a big mission and
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B
final one for you. Let's talk about the big picture vision. We can go out three years, five years, 10 years. What's the big picture vision for everything that you and the team are building?
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A
From day one, we have sort of had this fundamental belief that E commerce is broken, and it's kind of been broken since its origin. If you really think fundamentally about E Comm, it hasn't really changed since 1996. You still have kind of a generic homepage that you land on when you visit a brand's website. You still have a nav tree that you can kind of follow to see what men's products are available. And you know, there's still the classic Kurt page and the classic checkout page. And while the infrastructure around those has improved over time and you know, sites are much more engaging and dynamic than they used to be, and they load faster, they're still the same. There's no fundamental difference. And so Remark is trying to from the inside out, trying to reinvent commerce. And so we want to say to brands, hey, you've done the hard work already of building the product, you know, getting your brand across. You've spent the money on the ads. You have users who are landing on your site, but you're not converting them. Like you're giving them basically a window display that is designed for every visitor. Let's instead give them a site or an experience that is designed just specifically for them. Like, if I know, Brett, that you for some reason don't like the color blue, let me make sure that we're not showing you the color blue. Or if I know that you are dyslexic, then we should actually re render the whole site in a dyslexic friendly font. And so there are a lot of these really kind of low hanging fruit areas that if you understand the shopper from the second they land on site, you can actually make the experience so much better. And that's where we're going.
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B
Amazing, man. Love it. Before we wrap, for those listening and that want to follow along with this journey, where should we send them? Where should they go?
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A
Remark, AI, thanks so much, man.
- [17:55]
B
Really appreciate it.
- [17:56]
A
Thanks, Brett.
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B
Well, that's all for today's episode of Builders, brought to you by the Frontlines. If you want more amazing content like this, visit Frontlines IE where you'll find a library of more than 1500 interviews with founders, marketers and other GTM leaders where we unpack the tactical lessons from their journey. And of course, as always, if you do want to launch your own podcast, we'd love to have a conversation with you. Visit Frontlines IO Podcasts as a service. Mention that you listen, mention you love the show, and we'll give you a 10% discount. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode.