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Limited Supply
S11 E12: Unlocking Revenue and Scaling a Startup (with Liam Millward, CEO + Co-founder at Instant)
00:41:26
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- [00:02]
Nick Sharma
Welcome to season 11 of limited supply, a place for hot takes on what.
- [00:05]
It'S really like building and scaling consumer brands.
- [00:09]
I'm your host, Nick Sharma. Let's get into today's episode.
- [00:12]
Liam
As a brand, you know that you're spending your hard earned dollars driving traffic to your site. The problem is 98% of that traffic is anonymous. You don't know who they are and once they leave, it's hard to find them again. There's a new tool that helps you identify these visitors and get in front of them. It's called Instant. Instant gives you another chance to convert these shoppers into buy using their retention marketing platform. You can use their platform to Send up to 10 times more site abandonment emails, which you know generate meaningful revenue and build audiences to retarget on meta. Double your email revenue and increase your roas with Instant. Want to see it in action? Don't miss your chance. Sign up by April 1st to get your first month free. Just go to Instant One Limited to claim it. That's Instant One Limited.
- [01:02]
Nick Sharma
Welcome back to Limited Supply. My name is Nick Sharma and I am your host. Today we've got a fun episode. We're going to be interviewing Liam. Liam is the founder of Instant, which is a retention marketing platform that I've worked with before and is also the sponsor of this season's podcast. So I'm excited to talk to Liam. Liam is super young. He kind of reminds me of myself when I was, you know, just basically hustling as a kid and he's built an amazing company. We go into his founding story, what got him here, his background in publishing and audience development and eventually how that carries through into E Commerce and now SaaS. So enjoy the episode. If you've got any questions for either Liam or myself, feel free to email either of us or drop us a line on Twitter. Enjoy the episode.
- [01:56]
All right, Liam, it's awesome to have you here on the podcast. Thank you for being a big sponsor of Limited Supply and I'm excited to get into your story here.
- [02:05]
Liam
Yes. So great to be on. I mean, this is a long time coming. So great to be here and thanks for having us on.
- [02:11]
Nick Sharma
Absolutely. So, Liam, I know you spent two years building Navigate Australia, which is a travel publisher. I also spent a few years working on the publisher side or the audience development side. I'm curious, what did you learn about audience development and driving traffic that you think isn't talked about enough with consumer brands?
- [02:29]
Liam
Sure. I mean, I started my first business when, before Instant, when I was 16. We were actually traveling around Australia and the world. So my, my mom, dad, sister, we went traveling around the world for, for four years full time. And I mean, I couldn't go and get a job at McDonald's or something like that, you know, for people my age. And so I started this online travel magazine called Navigate Australia and it grew to 50,000 readers in 12 months. We partnered with like 190 councils and tourism brands. And I think the biggest thing was we just created very relatable content both on social in the magazine. People started to naturally or organically share it amongst each other and it just went from there really. And then that was probably know the most exciting part where we were paying people to travel. They were, they were writing for the magazine, creating content and it was just kind of naturally evolving. And that was my first, first business and kind of have gone from there.
- [03:31]
Nick Sharma
That's amazing. Was that around the same time where sites like 22words and Upworthy and those types of sites were really taken off?
- [03:38]
Liam
Definitely. I mean that was a pretty crazy time. It was pre Covid. Everyone was traveling a lot online content magazines were kind of, everyone was moving away from print onto online. People would subscribe for free, advertisers would pay to be in the magazine and it would go from there and it just kind of naturally grew.
- [04:01]
Nick Sharma
That's amazing. So after you worked on that, then you started Instant at 17 and today Instant's one of Australia's fastest growing startups. And I think the company was just valued at $100 million. I saw from an article a couple weeks ago. So how did you get here?
- [04:20]
Liam
Yeah, I mean, starting Instant. So I started Navigate Australia, the travel magazine and Covid hit and everyone stopped traveling over Covid. Advertisers pulled out of the magazine. So the magazine naturally died. I was 16, 17 at this point, and I went to uni and studied business and marketing. And one of my marketing assignments was looking into the recent growth of E commerce kind of towards the middle of COVID And one of you know, this assignment we needed to, we needed to set up a Shopify store, drop shipping products from China, advertise them on Facebook ads and see if we could use like our newfound marketing skills to, to generate some revenue. And so that's how I got into E commerce. I chose to do like pet beds, pet products, etc.
- [05:13]
Nick Sharma
How'd you land on that?
- [05:14]
Liam
I mean everyone was buying new dogs, cats in Covid and so it was very hyped up and went from an assignment. I think in our best month we did like 10 or 20k. And that's how I got into E comm. And this was kind of pre shop pay. And so I found that majority of people that were landing on the website weren't converting at the point that they needed to put in their personal information. And that's when we built our first product which was called Quick Checkout. And we would remember a shopper every single time they came back, giving them an accelerated checkout experience. And so that's how Instant came around to what it is today, starting in E commerce myself.
- [05:54]
Nick Sharma
Yeah, so you almost started with like a Shop Pay or a link competitor and then, and then it evolved into a retention software as you started to realize that Shop Pay was now a player or how did that evolution happen?
- [06:09]
Liam
Yeah, exactly. So we started our first product Instant or Quick Checkout and then it renamed to Instant Checkout. And we built this powerful technology that allowed us to remember a shopper every single time they came back to your website or any other website in the network. And so it became more and more powerful by the day. And every single shopper we started to remember wherever they went to purchase across the Internet. And with this we were increasing conversion. We were allowing a shopper to kind of accelerate through checkout. And then one day the competitive environment, we wanted to get into the Shopify ecosystem. We couldn't get into Shopify because of, you know, Shop Pay being a very prominent player.
- [06:55]
Nick Sharma
Yeah, the walled garden.
- [06:56]
Liam
Yeah, exactly. And you know, Shopify makes majority of their revenue from payments. They're super protective of it. And so we thought, okay, well we've built this technology that allows us to remember a shopper wherever they're going to purchase across the Internet. So how do we use that technology? Instead of using it in payments, we wanted to use it on the retention or marketing side instead. And that's where kind of the pivot happens for us as a company which, you know, then we built audiences and grew to 500 brands in less than 12 months using the product, which is crazy.
- [07:30]
Nick Sharma
Can you explain the audience's product?
- [07:32]
Liam
Yeah, definitely. I mean audiences matches the shoppers that visit your website with a deliverable email address. So you're able to retarget and remarket them after they abandoned. We remember your opted in shoppers for longer, opening a whole new revenue channel for brands. I mean most browsers or Pixels klaviyo, Facebook all have I guess what we call like short term memory loss. They all remember a shopper for, you know, very short periods of time, in some cases one day, whereas instant Remembers your opted in shoppers forever. If they come back to your website in seven days a year, two years in your Christmas sales period, we remember who they are allowing, allowing you to bring them back to convert after they've left your website.
- [08:18]
Nick Sharma
And why is it that you guys can do this but like Facebook or Klaviyo can't do it?
- [08:23]
Liam
Yeah, I mean I think for us it's kind of our core strength. They're very focused, you know, saying Klaviyo's case, they're very focused on campaigns, email editing, allowing a brand to set up their emails. They're not very focused on remembering a shopper. It's, it's just not kind of their core business for us. It's all we focus on. And so we use things like server side cookies. We use multiple data points to track a shopper, but we also make sure every single shopper is opted in and has a very high intent of purchasing. So we look for signals and kind of behavior of a shopper. Say like they've come back to your website multiple times, they've added an item to their cart, maybe they've scrolled around for a long period of time to look for these really high intent signals of a shopper. And so then we use that information to trigger an email at the perfect time. But yeah, I mean we use kind of multiple ways to remember a shopper.
- [09:23]
Nick Sharma
Yeah, that makes sense. And do like, you know, I've seen on LinkedIn or whatnot, people find that this might be creepy. Right? Being able to identify visitors without getting their explicit email address. Like how do you, how do you see that?
- [09:38]
Liam
You know, it's, it's definitely a known problem in terms of the messaging, particularly in this space. I think that so many players have done the wrong thing in terms of like buying huge lists of consumer data and then plugging it into a merchant's Klaviyo. Then their spam rates skyrocket and unsubscribe skyrockets and you know, etc. Etc. And so I think that we really fight against the messaging that is just so common in the space that we play on instant side and where we very kind of prioritize standing out is that we only remember opted in shoppers today if a shopper comes back to your website. Most of our brands, across our network or ecosystem of brands now Klaviyo helps them remember or their email platform helps them remember 10 to 15% of their returning shoppers, whereas majority of the time instant helps you remember 60 to 70% of your returning opted in shoppers when they come back to your website. But the key thing is that every single shopper is opted in somewhere, whether they've purchased before they've filled out the email newsletter, subscribe, you know, etc. Etc. They have to have been opted in before and so, and we allow them to unsubscribe at any time. So it's, it's not creepy because we're not just tracking anyone and everyone.
- [11:00]
Nick Sharma
Totally. How do you stay up to date on the privacy laws globally? Because they've got, they're different all around the world, right?
- [11:05]
Liam
Yeah, of course. I mean for us, you know, we're, we're a venture backed business so we need to kind of follow so many rules. There's audits, there's people internally, externally. I would say, you know, we've obviously started Instant in Australia and we're, you know, one of the fastest growing startups here in Australia today, working with, you know, some pretty incredible brands. And so we've been put under the microscope and pressure by some of these massive brands, legal teams, which is the right thing. Right, because it keeps us on our toes and makes sure that we're, we're following all the rules. But you know, for us, Australia is a very complex, you know, country from a consumer privacy perspective and equally is, is the US and so being legal here in Australia ticks a lot of the same boxes as we expand into the US as a business, which is, you know, perfect. But yeah, I mean we, we stay up to date on it internally from our legal team and make sure that we're, we're following all the guidelines. But the biggest thing honestly is making sure that every single shopper that enters our network and that we share with a brand is opted in. If a shopper's opted in, that's the biggest box ticked. And we prioritize that over everything else.
- [12:23]
Nick Sharma
Totally. What are some of the other products in the platform that brands are using a lot and especially some of those larger big box or retail brands that you have.
- [12:34]
Liam
Yeah, I mean we work with some incredible brands like Selfie, Leslie, Toys R Us, et cetera. They use instant to I guess retarget the shoppers that are leaving their website. We've almost doubled their email revenue channel since onboarding with Instant both increasing their revenue by over a million dollars now, kind of joining our million dollar club as we say. And I think they've been using us for maybe like eight months equally. So you know that that's pretty incredible. Other features that they're using, I Mean we have, we have many features within instant like predictive opt in is a huge one where we use behavioral based signals from a shopper to display a pop up at the right time. Exactly. To get a shopper, you know, increase the shopper's likelihood of entering their email address has been a huge one. And then also express checkout identification. This is something that a lot of our competitors or other players in the space fail to remember a shopper or opt in or subscribe a shopper when they use an express checkout like, like Link or Apple Pay. Whereas for us we're able to capture that shopper information and help a brand use it. When it comes to retargeting and remarketing, you know, the next time that that same shopper comes back to their website.
- [13:54]
Nick Sharma
I'm curious internally, have you seen patterns around best practices for you know, you guys are doing the timing for the pop up but have you seen any best practices around what makes a really good converting pop up design wise?
- [14:07]
Liam
Oh, that's an interesting one. I think that they're all pretty different. I actually think it comes down to the, to the offer to be honest. I think that a shop is pretty likely to, to enter in their email address no matter what it looks like as long as I mean free shipping is a huge one. You know the best brands do like 20 off your first order and but I honestly think as well displaying the pop up at the right time. Majority of brands would display a pop up at you know, immediately as you enter the website and almost every shopper just clicks the X button and then when they are ready to purchase they can't find it. Whereas what we do is we kind of build up a point system where certain interactions build up points for that shopper when they're on your website and once they reach a point threshold based on their behavior, we're likely to show a pop up and those points kind of signal towards a shopper being very likely to purchase. They've added an item to their cart or you know, they've come back to the website multiple times or maybe they've got all the way to the point of entering their credit card information but they've exited out of their cart. You know, they're pretty likely to purchase. They just need that last incentive to, to get them across the line.
- [15:25]
Nick Sharma
Yeah, we've seen that that the timing of the pop up can double the conversion rate of the opt in. Like good timing. Will two exit for sure, definitely.
- [15:37]
Liam
And then once they enter their email address, give them like a Second option to enter in their mobile number for SMS as well. And you know that builds up your SMS database equally. So just displaying it at the right time is huge.
- [15:54]
Hundreds of brands like Garrett Popcorn, July Luggage and Selfie Leslie are making six figures in incremental revenue through Instant's supercharged retention marketing platform. It takes 15 minutes to go live and you see results within just days. You most likely already sent site abandonment emails, but because most of the traffic on your site's anonymous, you don't get to email 98% of these visitors. Instant gives you another chance to convert these visitors into buyers and send 10 times more cart abandonment emails than you were before, helping you double your abandoned flow revenue. Want to see it in action? Don't miss your chance. Sign up by April 1st to get the first month free. Go to Instant One Limited, that is Instant One Limited to learn more.
- [16:38]
Nick Sharma
You mentioned the point system. So one of the things that I've always thought about, or not always thought about, but like, you know, everybody's talking about AI lately and the way that I imagine your system works is it has some level of AI or machine learning or it's just getting smarter with every interaction, understanding what leads to intent or what leads to purchase. How did you concept building that whole system and architecting the thinking behind how does Instant know the context and how to think and how to work? How'd you go about that?
- [17:16]
Liam
Yeah, I mean, we are only really just kind of getting into the AI space now. I mean, we started audiences to remember a shopper when they visited your website just last January. And last January we had zero merchants using, using Instant. And now today we have over 500, which is, which is crazy. And you know, almost no merchant leaves. And so today we're like, how? The biggest question we're answering or starting to answer is how do we start to provide so much more value to a brand, not just with remembering a shopper, but also how do we use remembering a shopper to the advantage of the merchant to increase their revenue? Every single thing we do is to increase a merchant's revenue. All we care about is increasing a merchant's revenue. Where we're kind of exploring with AI at the moment is we want to help a brand. I guess the most important thing in email marketing is the design of your flows and templates. Today, every single shopper gets the same email with the same design, with the same offer. Whereas what we can do is we've built up such a profile of a shopper when they're coming back to your Website, we can use AI to generate a shopper bait, you know, a shopper by shopper based email that gets retargeted to, to a shopper on a shopper by shopper basis. Personalized offer, personalized design. We include products in the email that they're, that they're more likely to purchase. A call to action that is going to relate to that individual shopper. And so that, that's kind of where we're, where we're exploring at the moment. And we're, you know, we're baiting that behind the scenes. We haven't actually publicly launched it yet. And you know, some brands like Clutch Glue for example, they're a really small brand here in Australia, have seen incredible results. We completely automate retargeting email retargeting for their brand from email design all the way through to email sending and increasing revenue. It's kind of like an AI powered marketing manager for an E commerce brand.
- [19:19]
Nick Sharma
Yeah. And you could even, I was thinking like in the example of a clothing brand, the color of the email could be different depending on the variant that you were looking at on the site and the way that your address is different. I mean you could really. There's only so far been products where you could insert a snippet to populate a feed that I think like rebuy, you can do that, where you can insert a feed of AI recommended products, but never. I haven't seen anything where you can fully generate the entire custom design from scratch.
- [19:55]
Liam
That's what we want to do. That's it. Yeah, we're launching it pretty soon.
- [20:00]
Nick Sharma
Wow. And so for this brand, do they even have anybody running campaign emails or things like that? Or is it all done through AI?
- [20:08]
Liam
It's all done through AI. We use AI to generate their email flows, generate their campaigns. When they update their website for a certain campaign period, that offer automatically gets dragged into their emails. So all a merchant needs to do is enter in the URL of their website and we pull their logo, pull their brand colors, pull the offers on their website, we analyze their tone of voice based on the language they use to describe their products, pull their product Images, pull their CTAs and product links. We integrate with Shopify and the Shopify Pixel to understand their website better. We plug all of that into an email and it's kind of like magic. We pull it all together and then we spit out an email to it to a shopper. But it all starts with audiences. And none of this is possible if you're unable to remember the shoppers that are actually visiting your website in the first place. So all that product like Lego brick together, it's like we remember a shopper when they visit your opted in shoppers when they visit your website. We then use that information to auto generate an email. We send out that email and increase your revenue.
- [21:21]
Nick Sharma
Right, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. One other question that came to mind as you were talking about the pop up and the offer being a big lever. You probably see so much data in terms of returning customers or you know really anything around retention. Have you seen a shift in, you know, people being more drawn to better offers like this? Is there a bigger pull for offers than there is for brand association or buying from a specific brand? From what you've seen, I think for.
- [21:52]
Liam
Small businesses or businesses really like trying to make a name for themselves, offers are huge. I think for like well known brands, influencer brands that have the hype, I mean people are just going to purchase anyway. I think it's a fine line though, right? Like brands that are over discount or have too many offers, they start to seem less valuable. But brands that are just trying to make a name for themselves or trying to get out there or just getting started. I think offers are huge. But not just like plastered over the homepage of the website. Right, right. Homepage of the website it seems really just makes your products or brand seem very, I guess not valuable at all. So triggering, triggering offers at the right time I think is critical if you want to seem like a valuable brand.
- [22:44]
Nick Sharma
Yeah, totally. And on the topic of AI, I'm curious, where do you think AI is going to find its way in the world of E commerce more and more, especially this year?
- [22:54]
Liam
Yeah, it's an interesting one. I think that where AI is going to really explode I think is helping a brand completely understand their business. But equally and where we're focused is how do we, how do small or medium sized brands I guess are able to execute at the same velocity as these massive E commerce brands that have hundreds of people, whether it's attribution and understanding that the metrics of their business all the way through to content creation, email generation, working with influencers, etc. I mean there's some incredible companies out there now like Icon for example that you know, shifts the way, you know, shifts your videos into, you know, all this content for us and where we're focused we want to can build the first AI powered retention marketing manager for an E commerce brand. Completely automate the need for a marketing manager or you know, the Painful parts of marketing manager's job and allow a brand to completely automate retention marketing for that for their business. And I think that, you know, retention marketing and email marketing, you know, for most brands is about 25 to 30% of their business and being able to automate that is huge. So marketing managers can actually focus on, you know, the more complex or channels that have, you know, a huge opportunity but I think will explode to definitely increase a merchant's resources or the velocity at which they move, I think.
- [24:31]
Nick Sharma
Yeah, totally agreed. Where do you think like when you look at some of your customers that are using instant, where do you think some of them are leaving meat on the bone like they're not taking full advantage or if you were in their shoes, what would you do differently with the platform than what you see some of them doing now?
- [24:49]
Liam
Yeah, I think that setting up your flows correctly is really important. We have a feature in our dashboard called flow optimization which analyzes all your flows and gives you, I guess, recommendations or tips to increase their likelihood of conversion. So we look for things like, you know, perhaps wrong triggers or maybe where you're missing some shoppers or you're sending emails to two shoppers that don't have a high intent, etc. So we use flow optimization to increase your flows conversion and then second to that is express checkout identification. A lot of brands don't have this enabled, especially amongst our competitors or brands that just aren't using this technology at all. And so they're forgetting or not remembering or basically their website has short term memory loss every single time a shopper uses express checkout. And this is majority of people, especially people that are purchasing say via their iPhone or, or tablet, etc. They're using Apple Pay, Google Pay and not remembering those shoppers and not signing them up to your email list is a huge loss. And then predictive opt in as we've spoken about, you know, increasing your likelihood of a shopper actually subscribing to your list so you're able to remember them using, you know, the behavior of that shopper. And I think the fourth thing is, that's really important is looking for very high intent signals of a shopper to before you send them emails or marketing material. And this is really, really hard to do for a shopper just, you know, by themselves offer a brand just by themselves and so looking for things like they've added an item to their cart, they've come back to your website multiple times, they've abandoned, etc. Looking for those really high Intent signals before you bother them, I think has a huge advantage.
- [26:40]
Nick Sharma
Totally.
- [26:41]
Liam
And you know, some of our brands, like as I said before, you know, we've got like July Luggage here in Australia. They started working with us ages ago. They use one of our other products called Targeting, which helps a brand, helps a brand increase their revenue via Meta, where, you know, because we're remembering these shoppers via your website, we plug Instant or the Remembering shoppers into July Luggage's meta account. And when we increase their likelihood of retargeting the shoppers that have left their website via their social channels. And so that's been a huge unlock for them as well. And you know, at this point we've added millions of dollars to their business, which is huge.
- [27:20]
Nick Sharma
Yeah. It's also crazy, the difference of what you pay to acquire that retargeting customer when you use the instant targeting audience versus just a generic Facebook retargeting audience.
- [27:33]
Liam
Exactly. The way I would describe Instant is like we're a phishing net that captures more shoppers. When, you know, Brandt, if we think about kind of in a, in a, from a funnel perspective, which marketers are just obsessed about all the time, I mean, it's a marketer's job to just get more shoppers into the top of the funnel, landing on their website. Right. That's all they focus on. And you know, then it's generally someone else's job to optimize the website and then someone else's job to optimize the checkout. And hopefully by the end of the day, you know, you get a conversion. And the way we look at it, as, you know, a marketing manager is spending so much effort getting and money getting these people to your website, particularly through meta and Facebook ads, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars getting these people to your website. Whereas what Instant does is all these shoppers are visiting your website anyway and we increase the likelihood of those shoppers who are already visiting your website to convert. And so we actually supercharge your meta, we decrease your, your CAC and increase your email marketing. It's, it's a, you know, a net positive for almost every channel. But brands love it from a meta perspective and they generally see an increase to increase of results because the shoppers are visiting their website anyway. Now we just remember them, capture their information and are able to retarget them.
- [28:59]
Nick Sharma
And what about brands like Oodi and the Collagen company? I saw they were on your site with some case studies. How did they use it and how is everything for them set Up.
- [29:09]
Liam
Yeah. So the Oodie was actually our first customer on audiences, which is wild. I mean, Davey's built an incredible brand there and they actually reached out to us cold. They came inbound and they were our first customer to beta, which we were pretty nervous about to begin with, to be honest. I mean, they're a massive brand, you know, doing hundreds of millions of dollars online a year and, and growing. And so we were pretty nervous initially and. But it kind of made us build the muscle very, very quickly to be able to support incredibly large brands. You know, we went from remembering zero shoppers to, you know, millions of shoppers a day almost overnight. I mean, in Black Friday Cyber Monday, we were remembering over 100 million shoppers a day, which is crazy.
- [29:58]
Nick Sharma
That's nuts.
- [29:59]
Liam
And so how UDI and college and company, et cetera. I mean, they're both part of our million dollar club as well. So instant we installed the Pixel on their website. They integrated Klaviyo into Instant. We duplicated or cloned their existing email flows and we started triggering emails to retarget, retarget their lost shoppers. After they'd left their website, we'd plug that email address into Klaviyo, which would trigger the flow. So, you know, it's, it's very plug and play. It took them about, you know, I'm going to say, maybe a day and a half to go live. And, you know, they've never had to edit or change anything since. So it's, it's basically just a new revenue channel on autopilot. They both see over like 30, 40 times ROI with instant, you know, and, you know, it's that, that's basically how it works. It's super simple.
- [30:58]
Nick Sharma
That's amazing. And in the, when you duplicate those flows, is there anything else you do to them?
- [31:03]
Liam
Yeah, I mean, our customer success team will always sit down with a brand and understand, you know, the, the, the way that they have their flows set up today. A lot of brands use different triggers or, you know, they'd rather send an email after four hours instead of two hours. We make sure they don't get duplicate flows or a shopper gets bombarded with emails. So we're very particular because increasing a merchant's revenue is a benefit to the merchant, but it's also really important to us, otherwise the merchant just leaves. Right. We put a lot of effort into making sure that merchants actually see results. And then we also have a guarantee if you don't increase your revenue with Instant or see a positive roi, you know, we'll give you your money back. So making sure our merchants actually set up and increasing their revenue from day one is super important. But then we also do things like I think attribution is you know, one of the biggest, I guess question marks for so many brands. Whether it's you know, how much Met is delivering or you know, Klaviyo's over attribution sometimes or you know, instant. And so you know, allowing a brand to ab test instant when they first use use us is, is important. We'll send you know, 50% of emails to, to it to a shopper and we will hold 50% of emails and see which one converts better to kind of prove our product works. We have features like a shopper timeline which shows you the complete, the complete transaction or shopping journey of a particular shopper when they landed on your website, how instant identified them, what shopping behaviors they had. Like add an item to their cart when they left your website, when instant triggered an email, what email they clicked on when they came back to purchase. So we show you the complete timeline of a shopper which is not just powerful for, for us but also powerful for a marketer as well to see what channels are best performing for them. So yeah, I mean attribution is really important for us.
- [33:09]
Nick Sharma
That's pretty cool that you could run a full holdout test just within the platform.
- [33:14]
Liam
We're super confident, we're confident in the results. So yeah, you can do. I mean there's very, I almost can't think of another tech platform that allows you to a b test their product just by switching it on in the dashboard. That's how confident we are.
- [33:30]
Nick Sharma
What about like, what's the, what's the ideal stage for a brand to jump on? You mentioned there was that one smaller brand that you know is a basically like a startup and then you also mentioned you have Toys R Us. So what's like the perfect time to get on instant?
- [33:45]
Liam
Yeah, I mean I think for us we generally see the best results once a Merchant has like 50 to 100k a month in revenue. I think is probably the optimal time you can come on earlier. But it's most powerful once you have 50 to 100k a month in site revenue. Just because we need a high velocity of shoppers visiting your website to be able to remember them, etc. I think that there's other channels that deliver fast paced growth for say entrepreneurs just getting started and then come to us once you have, you know, 50 to 100k in revenue is like the, the ideal time Perfect.
- [34:29]
Nick Sharma
And are there any brands that are not necessarily good fit either category wise or product type?
- [34:36]
Liam
Fashion. Fashion and apparel, Beauty and cosmetics are huge verticals for us. They're definitely most powerful. I think that, that you know we work with every vertical in every industry. I don't think, we don't cover, there's no vertical industry we don't cover these days and no size of brand. I mean there's brands that have joined the platform that are doing you know, one or two K a month in revenue. There's definitely smaller brands and you know there's huge brands doing you know, over 200, $300 million a year. And so everywhere in the middle is every vertical, every size of brand. No matter your setup or team size, we can, we can support and I think that's true because you know we're very plug and play product. You don't need someone to resource it. We, we send out your email, you know, we send out the data of how the products working and the revenue that we're driving to for your business every single day to your email inbox, etc. So yeah, I mean it truly doesn't matter who you are. You can, you can join instantly, get set up and going and if you don't have your email flows or klaviyo set up, we can do that all for you within the platform.
- [35:46]
Nick Sharma
Oh amazing, amazing. Okay, so you mentioned the AI email generator coming soon. What are some other cool either features or products you have coming within instant?
- [35:58]
Liam
I think the AI email generator is definitely the one we're most excited about. I mean it's huge. It allows us to bring AI powered personalization to retention marketing. It allows us to help a brand build their email flows using AI in a click of a button. All they need to do is put in a URL of their website. So I think that's going to be huge. We're very, very excited about kind of building the first AI powered marketing manager for an E commerce brand. And you know it's just going to have so many benefits where I think today a brand sits down maybe once, once a year, twice a year, optimizes their flows and, and then they really just don't give us stuff about it for you know, you know, every other time in the year it's such an effort to set up or they've paid an agency, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars to set it up on once. Whereas with instant AI you can change, optimize your email templates consistently daily. We do it for you. You can do it yourself. We use the information that you're updating on your website to update your emails and we use on a shopper, by shopper basis to send, you know, hyper, hyper personalized emails to the shoppers. So I think building, you know, this AI powered marketing manager is, is going to be huge. But we also have other features like, I mean the shopper timeline thing we just, we just launched which allows you to. Yeah, that sounds shoppers journey. You know, we have huge improvements to, to attribution where we're helping a brand understand the profitability and revenue across each of their channels. You know, I think the way we describe it internally is a brand logs into to meta as the first thing every single day to understand their ads and, and where they're performing. You know, we think that over the next 12 months, the second, the second platform that every brand logs into every single day will be meta will be instant and that'll drive huge benefit for a brand.
- [37:56]
Nick Sharma
And Liam, last thing is I would love for you to leave us with one actionable retention marketing tip that brands listening can immediately apply after this episode. You see everything in the world of retention. So what is your number one takeaway?
- [38:11]
Liam
Remembering shoppers throughout the year when they're landing on your website across Q1, Q2 so that during your Q4 sales period, you've remembered all of these shoppers throughout the year that over Christmas, Boxing Day, you're able to fire out so much more attention marketing to these shoppers that are coming back to your website because you've built up this database or brain across the year that remembers the shopper. And so getting these tools like audiences live now at the start of the year to build up this database has huge benefits in your most important, important sales period of the year in Q4. So that, that, that would be my tip. Invest in it now so you reap the rewards later.
- [38:57]
Nick Sharma
It's always something that everybody wishes later they started sooner.
- [39:01]
Liam
Exactly. 100%.
- [39:03]
Nick Sharma
Yeah. All right, Liam, well, thank you so much for coming on today. Where can people connect with you or chat with you to learn more about instant?
- [39:10]
Liam
Yeah, it's been great to be on. Thanks for having us, Nick. And we're really excited about expanding into the U.S. i mean, as I said, we've grown so quickly here in Australia. 0 to like 500 brands in 12 months. We just raised a huge capital round and we're expanding into New York now. And so people can connect with me on LinkedIn, visit our website, many of these e commerce events as well, or just shoot me an email Liamstant1 and we'll connect up.
- [39:41]
Nick Sharma
Amazing. Thank you again Liam.
- [39:43]
Liam
Cool. Thanks Nick.
- [39:46]
Nick Sharma
Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut.
- [39:48]
Liam
Through the noise on CPG retail and e commerce.
- [39:50]
Nick Sharma
If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend?
- [39:53]
Liam
And be sure to subscribe wherever you.
- [39:55]
Nick Sharma
Listen so you don't miss the next one.
- [40:02]
Liam
It.