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- [00:02]
Alicia Yoon
Connect data, automate busywork, and empower teams like nobody's business with the one platform that grows with you every step of the way. Learn how Salesforce works for small business@salesforce.com SMB.
- [00:18]
Josh Christensen
Hi, I'm Josh Christensen, executive producer of Inc Podcasts and this is from the ground up's fall programming. For today's episode, we have another panel from this year's Inc. Founders house in Philadelphia. Social media director Andrea Hardalo and her fellow panelists. Woody Hilliard, co founder and CEO of the men's personal care brand W. Arthur Leopold, co founder and CEO of the ad platform agento and Alicia Yoon, founder and CEO of the skincare beauty brand Peach and Lily discussed the future of e commerce. They chatted about the challenges of starting your business online, which trends are still relevant in their business strategies after the pandemic, and the difference in selling products on your website compared to selling them online on social media. Enjoy.
- [01:05]
Moderator
Hi, everyone. How's everyone doing? Oh, I love it. I love a crowd after a break. They're very excited. So welcome to the future of e commerce. This panel is featuring three very unique businesses. I could intro all of you myself, but I think you will all do a better job doing that. So Woody, do you want to go first?
- [01:28]
Woody Hilliard
Perfect. I'm Woody Hilliard. I'm the co founder and CEO of W a men's personal care brand. I co founded with Jake Paul.
- [01:37]
Arthur Leopold
Hey everyone, my name's Arthur Leopold. I'm CEO and co founder of Agentio. We're an ad platform automating the buying of creator content and influencer content.
- [01:48]
Alicia Yoon
Hi everyone, I'm Alicia Yoon, founder and CEO of Peach and Lily. Peach and Lily is all about powerful and gentle skin care and we retail in ulta beauty a little bit on Amazon and our website and we are, you know, all about glass skin, if you've heard of that.
- [02:07]
Moderator
Amazing. So to kind of get into it, you know, everyone has their business online for the most part, or starting your business online is always challenging. What were some of the biggest challenges for you to start? Woody, how about you go first?
- [02:22]
Woody Hilliard
Yeah, I think for us we actually launched our business initially in brick and mortar, which is really interesting. And I think the way we leveraged the Internet was for distribution. In our first four months as a brand, we drove over 300 million impressions driving people to Walmart. So I think for us one of the big challenges was just helping people understand where to buy the product, where to what we were about as a brand and really connecting with the right audience. I think when you launch a brand, the cold start is a really, really hard moment. And doing it on the Internet, you're kind of yelling into this echo chamber, wondering, will anyone hear about us? Will they see this ad? I think the audacity of zero is quite an exciting moment, but also a really scary moment as a brand.
- [03:14]
Moderator
Yeah, Alicia, you could go.
- [03:16]
Alicia Yoon
Yeah, I would say that, you know, the reason I started Peach and Lily is because I saw this white space in the market. I have very sensitive skin and severe eczema. And I started the business when I was in my 30s and at that time I started looking for things that could really be clinically effective but still gentle enough for my sensitive skin. And I couldn't find anything. So it took years of R and D and a lot of our products are patent pending. And it really is now finally combining powerful and gentle skincare and educating people about that, you know, convincing people, yes, there's this 10% glycolic acid in it, but even if you have very sensitive skin, you can use it. So getting the word out in a new kind of innovative formulas that you have that people haven't experienced before, that was a really big challenge. And you have limited resources and you're really trying to educate while you're also trying to grow your business. So that was like the biggest challenge. When you're actually pioneering something, you have to really get the word out and you have such limited means to do so. Yeah.
- [04:24]
Moderator
And I think getting the word out too. Arthur, your agency really helps connects brands and influencers together. Can you kind of expand a little bit of that partnership between the two or really when you started your company, like what was the fault of how this was happening before you started?
- [04:41]
Arthur Leopold
Sure. So prior to starting agentio, I helped start Cameo and saw the friction that we were able to reduced through building technology to connect first fans with their favorite people on the brand side. For anybody here that's in marketing or has worked with creators and influencers before, there's this very like archaic sort of hand to hand combat that's necessary to try to get a deal done. And our belief was that, and still is today, that the future of advertising is creator led. It's a creator and influencer sharing why they love a product and why a product resonates so well with them. And but for a brand to scalably work with creators today, unless you have Jake Paul as your co founder and CEO, is an uphill battle. And if you consider global digital media spend, there's about $600 billion flooding through Meta And Google and the trade desk and every ad platform, but there's only $10 billion that go to influencers and creators today. So you have this incredibly constrained pool of the most talented people in the world with the most authentic and most engaged audiences. And our belief was that we could build an ad platform to automate all of the hard things that marketers have to deal with today. And we could leverage large language models to do the entire buying process. That was a great save and we've done that. And it's been an incredible unlock for nearly 100 brands, all the leading DTC brands and tech companies that are now leveraging our platform.
- [06:17]
Moderator
Yeah, and I think we're talking about the future of E commerce here, but I'm going to bring it back a little bit. So trends change quite frequently. Five years ago we had the peak of the pandemic and obviously online shopping was very different then, even compared to how it is now. What trends are you finding from the pandemic that are still kind of relevant to how you run your E commerce business today? Or what was something that you didn't do prior to the pandemic that you. You now implement into your strategy? Alicia, would you like to start?
- [06:52]
Alicia Yoon
During the pandemic, we saw that people were very excited to consume, like, a lot more information and education, especially about skincare online. And so we started this thing called Peach Skincare Academy, where a few times a week at a very set time, I would go, I'm also an esthetician, so I would go online and answer just live questions about skills like, why do you get hyperpigmentation? What do you do about it, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And we saw this incredibly engaged community and people really wanted to dive deep into skincare. And especially with the advent of then TikTok, et cetera, you're seeing that skincare has now evolved to being so education focused. So we have kept that up and education has become, has always been, but even more so, a huge pillar for us. So, you know, in the sea of skincare information out there, I know it can be very confusing and sometimes you're like, well, this expert said this and this expert said that. And so we take our jobs at education very seriously, where we make it digestible, but we also source everything. So it's always backed by science. And if the verdict is out on something, we say that that's the case. If an ingredient definitively does help with a certain concern, we'll show examples and the actual science as to why. So education and and how you really deliver that across different channels. That's something that just has continued since the pandemic.
- [08:24]
Moderator
Yeah. Woody, do you have anything to add to that with kind of just the newness of your company as well?
- [08:30]
Woody Hilliard
For sure. I think during the pandemic, one thing you saw people gravitating towards was community. People were looking for ways to connect on digital platforms, connect with brands. There were all these brands hosting workouts, hosting workshops, which I think was a really fascinating behavior that customers started to develop. So we've taken that and we're really trying to lean into community. Like our brand w is all about inspiring young men to have more confidence. The brand stands for win. It also stands for the work you need to put in to have the win. And we're really trying to tap into the audience that's authentically being created around the brand. We've already had dozens of people get tattoos of the brand, and we're only 10 months old, which is pretty crazy. So we're really resonating with customers. And one of the things we launched in the last couple months is a discord. And every day we have, like, thousands of people interacting with each other, creating content for the brand, talking about the brand, talking about the product. So I think, you know, very similar to, like, you know, talking about ingredients of your product, educating your consumer. We're seeing our community educate other. Other members who are engaging with the brand and their friends who are interested in the brand. I think that's one thing theme of COVID that we've carried into, like a modern strategy that you need to have as an e commerce brand today. You need to tap into community. And it means, I think community today is so different than what community was five years ago.
- [09:58]
Moderator
Yeah, you all touch on a good point when it comes to community. So I would love to talk a little bit more about social commerce. Obviously, TikTok Shop, I'm definitely a victim of it. I'm sure most people in this audience too, are curious when it comes to selling your product on the social platforms versus selling your products on your website. Like, where do you find, I guess, the balance and how do you treat both? Do you see one doing better than the other? Alicia, would you like to start?
- [10:28]
Alicia Yoon
We definitely see TikTok shop as a really interesting place to do social commerce because first of all, it's not the same as your DTC site in that the journey of how people convert on TikTok shop, it's so different. It's. It all starts with like a visual, right? It has to be so demonstrable. So there could be a bestseller on a website that's like an everyday serum, like the glass skin refining serum. But when you show it on TikTok shop, it's a clear serum. There's nothing very wow about it when you just apply it. It's more with long term use. So we're seeing on TikTok shop the products that do well for us are things that like, you see that instant gratification. And so it starts with just even skews. It's just different in terms of the entry point. And then we also see that, you know, it's, you have to be with TikTok shop. I do think that consumers are a little bit more price sensitive. So you either need to be a leader in terms of offering deep value or you're in a category of your own where you're not really competing with price because it's such an innovative product. So that's like another big difference that we see. And then finally, you know, as we view that as part of our e commerce ecosystem. And so we really track that cohort to see and it's hard to do because TikTok owns that data. But we try to encourage people to sign up for a newsletter and we do surveys on like did you shop it through TikTok shop? But we can also tell because if you have a specific campaign going on TikTok shop and you have like a whole bunch of customers who like bought it during that time. So we track that cohort, we try to then nurture them and then bring them into our DTC community. And then, you know, there's. But you still understand the psychographic of that consumer is a little bit different. So we have different kind of email flows and how we nurture and you know, kind of bring them into the peach community. So we, it definitely is this complimentary kind of place where it really does feed into your DTC business. Yeah.
- [12:35]
Moderator
And I think, you know, Arthur, your company also connects folks with like YouTube brands. Obviously with TikTok shop, that's a whole different platform. And I know we, we've talked about that potentially a gentio would be on kind of connecting brands through TikTok shop. Can you kind of expand like when these DTC companies come to you, what are they finding difficult to connect with influencers, especially with what your company does to help them.
- [13:00]
Arthur Leopold
Yeah, the current process today is just very broken. So from discovery, who are the right creators that most authentically fit and resonate with my brand, my audience to how do I negotiate what is the price I should be paying for a creator? Nobody knows. And you end up with this game of chicken between people who are incentivized to create friction. And that stifles the entire overall ecosystem. So our belief is by automating these challenging things, then you get this amazing storytelling through short form and long form platforms. And as a brand or brand marketer, I think it's important to understand that there are certain mediums that can be really impactful and each medium serves its own purpose. So for TikTok, it's lower consideration products. It's great bits of information, but the average viewability on TikTok is a few seconds. Whereas on YouTube, if you want that deeper storytelling, you sit down to watch your favorite creator for 20 minutes on YouTube. And for higher consideration, products, either more expensive products or products that need more storytelling. YouTube can be an incredibly powerful medium.
- [14:12]
Moderator
And I think, you know, you mentioned working with influencers and obviously Woody, your co founder is Jake Paul. When it comes to working with influencers or having that influential person part of your company, do you see that as an advantage? Do you see it as an opportunity to get more social influencers to work with your brand?
- [14:31]
Woody Hilliard
For sure. I mean, it's a huge competitive advantage for us. I call it attention arbitrage. Like when all these D2C brands first launched in the 2010s, there was the Facebook arbitrage. And now I think there's really an attention arbitrage. If you have a platform to distribute your content to tens of, if not hundreds of millions of people, that's going to allow you to perform much more efficiently as a business. So I think having having a creator as part of your brand does. It needs to be the right creator and it has to speak authentically to your customer. If it's not the right creator, product brand fit, it's not worth investing in. But I think if you have the right brand and the right creator and their message and who they are speaks authentically to the brand and the customer, it makes a lot of sense. And yeah, there's a huge advantage in getting other people to want to participate in your brand if they see value in who you've partnered with. As you know, as your co founder, we have a lot of people that will do things for us for free just so that they can also be on Jake's platform. So it's been a huge advantage to us and we're going to continue to leverage that. And I think it really, you know, that just gets back to all the Things we've talked about around like community and customer. I think it's about tapping into the different communities that these different creators have so you can speak to people with a different level of authenticity.
- [15:54]
Josh Christensen
We're going to take a quick break but when we come back, more from from the ground up.
- [16:01]
Alicia Yoon
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- [16:36]
Moderator
With the influencer conversation. It's also, do you, I guess you could all kind of answer this. Do you look for the person who has the most followers? Do you look for their most engaged community? Like what makes a successful influencer someone you want to work with when it comes to selling your product? Alicia, you could start.
- [16:55]
Alicia Yoon
We, you know, it really depends on the purpose of what you're looking for in a specific campaign. But general rule of thumb, we definitely look at the comment sentiment and the engagement. So you know, somebody could have, you know, a ton of followers but maybe their average views for each video on their, their social platform, like TikTok for example. It's like widely variable. Or you like look through the comments and let's say an influencer is talking about a product but all of the comments are like, you're so beautiful. I'm the first to comment, you know, I love your lashes. And it has nothing to do with the product. Then the comment sentiment, you know, we're like, I think people are just like really into this person versus really thinking about what they're sharing versus you might find a smaller influencer where the comment sentiment is. Where do I get that? How does that compare to this other product? So there's like high consideration in those comments. So we, that's like the number one thing. We look at the comment sentiment and then you know, depending on the campaign, if we're like, but we also want to collapse the funnel and make sure that the conversion is there. But we're also trying to get as much reach as possible. They're kind of unicorns to find like the macro influencers with like high, you know, sentiment in the comments with consideration to purchase. But you know, it'll, it'll just depend on what the campaign is. But that comment sentiment is number One for us.
- [18:21]
Moderator
Yeah, especially because you're trying to get more customers, which I'm sure everyone here is curious as well. When you have your e commerce business, like how are you, how are you retaining customers? How are you getting customers to begin. Woody, would you like to start with that?
- [18:36]
Woody Hilliard
Yeah, I mean, I think it starts well, I guess like I kind of touch on a little bit of the influencer topic. I think influencers definitely hit different purposes. Like some are macro for awareness, some are lower funnel converters and I think in terms of getting customers bringing customers to your E commerce platform, for us we're really trying to form that one, one to one connection. We go after a much younger customer. So we're leveraging SMS as a big channel for us, trying to. And also DMs trying to really be speaking to the customer where the customer lives like this younger. Our demo is 10 to 25. That customer, as we all know they are using their DMs, they're using Snapchat, they're using SMS. They're not really an email customer like an older generation might be. So we're really working in those channels as a way of creating that one to one connectivity. And then in terms of finding customers, a big bucket of customers for us right now is Jake's audience. So we're really leaning into that audience and finding those points of connectivity that create authenticity between the fan and the product and the problem we're solving in their life. We really view our brand and our product as a core essential for this young male to have in their life. So I think we're just trying to really help them understand the problem we're solving. We always talk about the problem solution framework and where we fit into their life. And so it's about articulating that to them in a way that a 12 year old or a 14 year old really understands authentically.
- [20:11]
Moderator
Yeah, really targeting the key audience there. And as we look into the future of E commerce, AI is definitely a topic of conversation. I would love to get all of your thoughts on when it comes to AI. How are you implementing that into your business? Arthur, how about you start.
- [20:31]
Arthur Leopold
Yeah, and I'll tie this answer back to what Alicia and Woody just shared because I think they were spot on around finding creators and influencers with true engagement. Followers are a meaningless metric in this day and age and being able to deeply semantically understand a creator through all their content. Content is where AI can be really powerful. So one great example of that, a very popular supplements brand that we work with historically had worked with a lot of health and wellness creators. That's the obvious type of creator they should be working with through AI and through large language models. We identified a lobster fisherman in Maine as being a great potential fit. This guy, Jacob Knowles, if you don't follow him, amazing follow. And Jacob's constantly on a boat. It's really fucking cold, he gets sick all the time. And the supplement brand would be a great fit for him and he could authentically speak to it. And lo and behold, he became their top converter. So that's just one of the ways where AI and LLMs can enable us to have this deep understanding that everybody in this room, if we watch content for the next thousand hours, we still might not be able to identify that individual. Same with things like brand safety. Like, we could all sit here with 1000 tabs open and watch 1000 different creators for an infinite period of time. But an LLM can tell us instantaneously if a creator is brand safe or not. So brands should be leveraging these tools as best as possible. We just did something really fun and exciting where we onboarded Claude as a new employee to agentio and walked the AI, the LLM through all of our onboarding docs. Now they understand the company deeply and now they're an unbelievable resource. So there are so many ways, if you have this like, AI first mentality, that you can get this 10x and 100x leverage in your day to day and for your companies.
- [22:36]
Moderator
Yeah. Alicia, what about you? How are you implementing AI into your company?
- [22:41]
Alicia Yoon
We're excited for where Skincare is going to go with AI, similar to kind of biotech and the medical field. When you think about all the different ingredients that you can formulate with and all the different ingredients that you can combine and the different patterns that you see, like two surprising ingredients when combined. You might see that the reviews always say it's very soothing, things that are not so obvious. So I think in R and D, we're really trying to get our labs and partner with them to focus on that. We haven't found it's not exactly there yet. And there has to be a lot of kind of supplemental oversight. But it's been an interesting way to kind of think about cataloging ingredients, et cetera. And then our company, organization wide, uses AI in just like, surprising ways. For example, our marketing team put together this, like, we just came back from ulta, has this annual conference every year. We were very excited we won Skincare Brand of the year. You guys are the first. I'm Sharing this with and, you know, we've quickly grown to become the second largest skincare brand at Ulta Beauty. And you know, they, they ask us like, oh my gosh, like your booth, for example. Last year we had this like, incredible booth that we created at like the Ulta conference where you bring your brand to life. And I didn't even realize this, but it was just like the backdrop imagery that the booth was set against was just so beautifully done. And I asked our marketing team, I was like, who on our team, like, which designer worked on this? And she was like, oh, it was AI combined with like a little tweaks from our team. And so, you know, just across the organization we're seeing that come to life. Another fun example, you know, there's like usual things, like we're seeing our teams use AI for, like project management, for even copywriting. Like, for example, we'll have like our PDP page and they need to have a description that's like 50% of the length somewhere else. And they'll just like pop it into AI and you know, it'll come out like actually very well written or even taglines, like very creative marketing taglines. AI comes up with some very creative taglines and names for products and things like that. But one of my favorite examples is last year we had this influencer activation where the team put together these hand deliveries of skin emergency kits and rolled up in a skin emergency car. And it was this whole thing. They were dressed, er, folks, it was this whole thing and they had come up with this entire rap song and a beat and then music and it was choreographed. And again I was like, how'd you guys write this rap song in this music? And again, it was with the help of AI and so it's just, I think AI is evolving so quickly. It's just going to have more and more capabilities. And I think one thing we talk about a lot in, in our teams is the cognitive labor behind AI. Right? That's going to be everything, like the prompts that you know how to use and how creative you get to use it as a tool. And so, you know, we're doing, starting to do more training around that and different aspects of teams using it, but it's really that cognitive labor and how creative you can get with it.
- [26:08]
Moderator
Yeah, I love the rap song. I think that's so funny. Marketing folks, be aware. Get ready to use that. Woody, what about you? How is AI helpful for your business?
- [26:18]
Woody Hilliard
These are some awesome examples. I think we're using it very similarly. I'm encouraging everyone across my company to use it just to speed up workflows. Some of the more junior people on my team, if they want to send me a presentation, I'll have them present it to AI or drop it into AI first and say, hey, I'm presenting this to my CEO. Like, what holes is he gonna poke? Like, try to just get prepared a little bit more using AI, I think it's like a great second brain for people. And on the marketing side, I'm using it all the time with my marketing team just to knock out brainstorms or quick visualizations of ideas we have. Whereas before that would take days to turn around. You can turn around in minutes. I think it's just such an amazing tool for creativity. And then we've been using it a lot. On the social media side, Jake's team loves creating AI videos because it just again, unlocks creativity. We had this great video a couple weeks ago where Jake had a team member throw knives at his head and it looked real and he like popped.
- [27:20]
Arthur Leopold
Balloons, thought it was real.
- [27:21]
Woody Hilliard
Yeah, I know all AI. We have like a great AI team that we work with. And then I think one of the coolest things we did last summer when we launched, when kind of the deep fake mania was going around the Internet, we sent 75 influencer kits out to a lot of kind of big names in the world. And inside the influencer kit, we had a TV screen that would play when you open up the lid. And we made these AI Deepfake videos where it was that person talking to themselves from six months in the future saying, hey, you know, don't like, don't mean to rain on your parade, but you smell horrible. No one wants to be your friend. Like, I hooked it up with Jake Paul. He sent you this product. Like, use it, you're gonna love it. And we had like our. Probably the most successful one of those was Little Yachty. He posted it on his Instagram. It got like 40 million impressions complex and hypebeast then posted it on there. So I think overall that one box got us probably 100 million impressions. And it was just such a fun, creative use of AI and like the team had so much fun putting these scripts together of what should this person say to themselves in this video? And we leveraged AI to make the scripts. It was a really fun like, like 360 moment that still took us a lot of time to do. But if we hadn't had these tools, it would have been an impossible task.
- [28:42]
Moderator
No.
- [28:42]
Arthur Leopold
Yeah.
- [28:43]
Moderator
I wanted to ask you all about AI because I think people are a little intimidated by it. It's one of those where I feel like if you ask Most folks are 5050 on using it or not using it or figuring out how to use it. So I loved all the examples you shared to kind of I guess top things off for a last question. Where do you see the future of E commerce? Like we started off in the panel, five years has already changed since the pandemic started. So where do you kind of see E commerce going in the next five years with AI?
- [29:14]
Woody Hilliard
It's going to move pretty quick. It's going to be hard to predict. I think one thing I've really seen and talked to a few companies who are doing this, a lot of it leveraging AI. I think it's going to be like that one to one connectivity between a brand and the customer. And I think commerce is very much going to where you want to be, where your customer shops. Agnostic of the channel and I think where the E comm layer is going to play a bigger and bigger, bigger role is helping answer the questions for customers no matter where they're shopping so that you can know who that customer is, understand their pain points and understand like their path to purchase. But I've seen some really cool technology around. Like you know the I think the FAQ question in websites is going to or the section is going to be dead. You're now going to have like a one on one agentic conversation with brands and I think that is going to kind of be where where E commerce goes at least that's one of the probably the most impactful thing I've seen of late.
- [30:12]
Arthur Leopold
The amazing thing about AI is that it equals the entire playing field just becomes similar in terms of what their abilities can be and it's like a true equalizer. I think that lowers the barrier for anybody to start great brands and whether it's like understanding great marketing themes or how to go from zero to one, like everybody has the world's greatest executive coach and performance marketer on their team now. So I think that will be really powerful. And then for the brands that really stick out it'll be those that are able to build true community and have people storytell on their behalf to get their message out in a very unique and differentiated way.
- [30:59]
Alicia Yoon
Yeah and I think for skincare I've seen some incredible uses of AI where you can just even upload a very high res picture of your face and AI will analyze your skin looks overall healthy. I see some dehydration and I think it's going to get more and more spot on. That consultative approach where you feel like you're really shopping right next to an expert and that assisted commerce. And so I think it's going to feel incredibly personalized. Like, forget the days of creating, like, all these different landing pages of, like, where your customer's coming from. It's going to just be, you get there and through AI, you're going to be able to, like, customize and personalize that shopping journey. And I think, you know, fully agree that it's going to. The sites that are going to be very differentiated are the ones that are going to be able to capture attention through whether something it's very entertaining or, you know, the information is just superior. You know, I think content and what you know, can't be done through AI that creative, you know, what you're offering. Your community is going to be what sets people apart.
- [32:10]
Woody Hilliard
Perfect.
- [32:11]
Moderator
Woody, Arthur, Alicia, thank you so much.
- [32:16]
Josh Christensen
That's all for this episode of from the Ground Up. Our producers are Blake Odom and Avery Miles, with help from Sam Gabauer and Hawa Ottore. Editing by Matt Toder, mix and sound design by Nicholas Torres. If you haven't already, subscribe to all Ink podcasts on Apple, Podcasts, podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.