S16 E9: Why DTC Brands Need AI-Driven Personalization (with Liam Millward, Co-founder and CEO at Instant)

Summary

Limited Supply – S16 E9: Why DTC Brands Need AI-Driven Personalization

Host: Nik Sharma
Guest: Liam Millward, Co-founder & CEO at Instant
Date: May 27, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode is a candid, in-depth conversation between Nik Sharma and Liam Millward about the transformative impact of AI-driven personalization on DTC (Direct-to-Consumer) brands. They discuss how AI is fundamentally altering brand operations, email marketing, retention strategy, and even team structures. The dialogue emphasizes speed, experimentation, and the need to break free from legacy limitations—whether in technology, workflow, or agency relationships—to capture the full value of today's AI advancements.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. AI's Rapid Evolution in DTC Business Operations (01:06–06:41)

• Liam and Nik reflect on how AI tools (notably Claude and OpenClaw Hermes agents) have quickly become integral to optimizing both their personal and professional lives.
• AI is now proactive: Not just executing commands, but anticipating needs by connecting data across services like WhatsApp, email, calendars, and IoT devices.
• Quote:
  “On the day I’d booked my flights... I got a WhatsApp message being like, your flight's coming up... But I've noticed that all your other events in the day are in Sydney and this flight is leaving from Melbourne. So it looks like you've booked it from the wrong city.” – Liam (03:03)
• The norm has shifted: “Questions that used to take ‘let us get back to you by Thursday’...now I've got immediate [answers].” – Liam (06:07)
• AI slashes cycle times, increases team output, and enables instant insights for decision-making.

2. AI as a Competitive Equalizer for Small and Mid-Sized Brands (06:41–09:07)

• Smaller brands can now outpace legacy players due to agility, unburdened by outdated systems and slow decision chains.
• Quote:
  "Everyone's job now is product or revenue. Everything else is a waste of time." – Liam (07:35)
• AI blurs the lines between roles—customer support agents can become mini product managers, directly implementing solutions.

3. Human Review, Design, and the Speed of Automation (09:08–11:31)

• Human review is almost obsolete, mainly serving as a psychological assurance for now, but trust in AI is surging.
• The bottleneck is shifting: “It used to be the other way around, you’re waiting for something to come back...now it’s the opposite where I’m like, wait—sleep is a waste of my time right now.” – Nik (11:12)

4. Adopting AI in Brand and Agency Contexts (11:31–15:18)

• Fear of replacement: Staff worried AI might cost them jobs, but the reality mirrors Canva's effect on creatives.
  “Best marketers in the world are not going to be replaced. The best marketers in the world are going to be using the best AI tools to drive their business forward.” – Liam (12:29)
• Agencies must become “AI-first” to stay relevant; brands should seek partners who advance them, not hold them back.
• Speed and experimentation trump legacy workflows.

5. Website as the Central Personalization Hub (15:18–16:31)

• As AI takes over flows and retention marketing, the website becomes the core driver for seamless customer experiences.
• “Your website is actually now the most important thing. You can kind of fuck up everything else, but if you get your website right, everything else starts to become easier.” – Liam (15:18)

6. Deep Dive: Evolution & Vision for Instant—AI-Driven Retention (16:32–22:45)

• Instant’s journey: From identifying anonymous shoppers ("instant audiences") to full-fledged AI that personalizes every interaction.
• Personalization, redefined:
  “We give the brand the ability to send a unique email to every shopper. No two shoppers receive the same email twice.” – Liam (19:31)
• AI creates, audits, and iterates without hand-holding: Brands are shifting from skepticism to full trust after seeing real conversion gains.

7. Three Pillars for AI Success in Retention Marketing (23:21–26:26)

• 1. Hyper-personalized abandonment flows: Unique subject lines, copy, timing, and even localized shipping messaging.
• Quote:
  “Personalization, like 12 months ago was the first name...Now it’s like every email is different...” – Liam (23:47)
• 2. Dynamic timing: Not simply sending messages 2 hours post-abandonment, but aligning with personal behavioral patterns.
• 3. Unified platform: AI agents orchestrate all retention touchpoints—pop-ups, campaigns, SMS—in a single, data-driven loop.

8. AI-Native Experimentation & Learning (26:53–31:45)

• Instant constantly experiments, incrementally improving flows and campaigns based on user response data, with no management required by the brand.
• Over time, personalization deepens, and conversion rates rise, creating compounding advantages.
• Example:
  Custom abandonment emails reference the actual products and context of a visit, pulling in relevant discounts or shipping info, not generic reminders.
  “It was including things like the type of shoe, maybe what it’s for, you know the discount that's on offer, the shipping, how fast the shipping was…considerations when you’re making a purchase.” – Liam (34:44)

9. Case Studies & Notable Brands (30:31–32:39)

• Rapid results and compounding improvements seen by brands of all sizes—from upstarts to industry leaders like Third Love, Liquid IV, and Naturium.
• “The longer brands are with Instant, the more results they see...the more we learn about your shoppers...the better the platform gets.” – Liam (30:52)

10. Looking Ahead: The Marketer’s New Superpower (41:13–45:14)

• Marketing teams will become “supercharged” via AI—no longer stuck waiting on data analysts, they can act on instant insights.
• Shift from bolt-on tools (“our old tools will be AI soon”) to true AI-native solutions is where outsized gains happen.
• The opportunity is not to replace the marketer, but to make every marketer exponentially more effective.

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Notable Quotes

• "Everyone's job now is product or revenue. Everything else is a waste of time." – Liam (07:35)
• "The best marketers in the world are not going to be replaced. The best marketers in the world are going to be using the best AI tools to drive their business forward." – Liam (12:29)
• "Unique emails has been really exciting...The dream email to every shopper, which has never been possible." – Liam (23:47)
• "You are behind as a brand if AI isn't generating at least 30% of your revenue." – Liam (29:30)
• "It's not that the human's been removed, it's that the human is now more powerful." – Liam (45:08)
• "There hasn't been a change this big, this large, since basically the start of the internet." – Liam (44:48)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:06–06:41 – Personal and professional life optimization with AI; speed of progress
• 09:08–11:31 – Human review’s fading relevance; adopt or be left behind
• 15:18–16:31 – The new centrality of the website for personalized marketing
• 17:04–22:45 – The journey from identification tech to full-fledged AI retention marketing
• 23:21–26:26 – Three key advancements in AI-driven retention marketing
• 30:31–32:39 – How brands see compounding improvements over time
• 34:44–36:08 – Comparison of generic vs. AI-personalized abandonment emails
• 41:13–45:14 – The future of marketing teams with AI

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Memorable Moments

• The “flight booking” AI story showcases how proactive AI can preempt human error (03:03).
• The analogy between old marketing emails and shouting across floors in a building highlights just how much better AI-generated messages can be (35:38).
• Liam’s perspective on the inevitable expectation shift for shoppers (“Amazon changed everybody’s brain...That is going to happen in the retention world shortly.” – 33:07).

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Final Takeaways

• AI is no longer a speculative future—it's already fundamentally changing the DTC game.
• Early and deep adoption of AI in retention and personalization offers a compounding advantage.
• The best brands and marketers aren’t being replaced by AI—they’re outpacing their competition through it.
• Skepticism and attachment to legacy processes are the real threats; those who move first and fastest have the most to gain.

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Summary prepared for listeners who want the core lessons and memorable moments without the noise—just as Nik Sharma would want it.

Transcript

[Podcast Host]

Here's something that should bother you. Two shoppers visit your site. One looks at a $30 product, the other one looks at a $200 product they both abandon.

[Liam]

And most brands will send them the

[Podcast Host]

exact same email, which is insane. Instant fixes this. It watches what each shopper does on your site and builds the perfect follow up around their behavior. The right product, the right message, the right offer and the right timing. And for the operators who care about incrementality, this is the part that matters. Instant now lets you measure performance on the same attribution window you're already using inside kl. So if your team lives by a one day click, you can see exactly what Instant is adding up on a one day click view. And believe me, when you see how much revenue your standard email setup is still leaving untouched, you're going to want Instant live. Today over 1500 brands are live, including Third Love, Liquid IV and Kind Patches. And this month only, you can get 50% off your first 60 days at instant one. Slash. Sharma.

[Liam]

All right Liam, welcome back to the episode or welcome back to the podcast. This and now is this the third or fourth time?

[Instant AI Founder]

This is our third time. Right. Excited. Thanks for having me on a third time going.

[Liam]

Excited to have you back.

[Instant AI Founder]

I feel like everything changes so much every time we catch up. Everyone changes, raves about the episodes. You know, we've gone through product changes and we've shipped so many new features, but then just the, the, the industry as a whole, I mean things used to happen in like three year increments. Now it's like every three months things are changing.

[Liam]

Yeah, I mean I feel like when we first recorded, I think like ChatGPT was the main interface, right?

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah.

[Liam]

And then the last time we recorded, honestly I think it might have still been like ChatGPT, maybe a little bit of Claude in there, but now I'm fully on the open claw, Hermes agent side of things. I don't use any native interfaces. Where have you gone in the world of AI?

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah, I think we're all in on, on Claude, particularly internally and just in the day to day. I mean I think the everyday consumer is still using ChatGPT 100% but for business operations and actually doing meaningful things with AI. I mean there's so many AI tools now that are, that are just exceptional and then for day to day work, I mean Claude is just amazing and crazy. To think six months ago nobody was even. It's like I. Anthropic. Yeah. Like they're cool up and coming. Yeah, I think They've even surpassed ChatGPT now in. In. In revenue, which is possibly. Which is crazy. Yeah.

[Liam]

Yeah. I feel like my entire life has now become fully optimized thanks to AI in weird ways. Like my. I just got this switch that I'm gonna plug in tonight into my router at home which will basically search for my 8 sleep and Internet enabled light switches and that'll then connect to my OpenClaw Hermes agent, which I'll then be able to, you know, it'll just tell me, hey, your bed's on or, you know, you slept like this. You didn't sleep like that.

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah, I know. I mean, it's amazing. Even with OpenClaw, I, I was traveling between two cities the other day and it's like connected to my WhatsApp.

[Liam]

Yeah.

[Instant AI Founder]

And you know, a simple mistake that is normally so annoying. On the day I'd. I'd booked my flights the, the wrong way around, I was, I booked it from the, the city I was meant to be departing. I booked it as the arrival the wrong way around. And I got a WhatsApp message being like, your flight's coming up in two days time. Like this, this is the flight information, it's on time, you know, blah, blah, blah. Here's the link to do your, your meal pre order. But I've noticed that all of your other events in the day are in Sydney and this flight is leaving from Melbourne. So it looks like you've booked it from the wrong city. Would you like you should change, should you change this? Yeah, I'm like, oh, whoa, that's actually really cool. So it's not only solving problems that I ask it to solve, it's now proactively solving problems. And I think that's the exciting state that we're in now.

[Liam]

I agree. I feel like where we went from the ChatGPT, you know, ChatGPT is basically the question and answer interface. And then we went to a point where it was like, okay, let me send a prompt and you can go and run and do things. And now we're at the point where it will now as long as it has context. Like I'm sure your openclaw is connected to your email, your calendar, you know, like I have mine connected to GoDaddy and like I said my eight sleep now. And so it has the most context possible. But now it can then proactively say, oh, by the way, this person in Slack tagged you. You owe them this from two days ago. Here's a draft. You want me to send this over?

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah, yeah.

[Liam]

And yeah, it's amazing how that. It's also amazing how fast that's happening. Like that is. That has all happened in the last couple of months. Really?

[Instant AI Founder]

Absolutely. Yeah. No, it's exciting.

[Liam]

Do you use your open cloth setup a lot between personal, professional crossing over or.

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah, I mean I feel like separate. I mean kind of. We would be in a similar state where our business life overlaps with our personal life. Totally. A lot. And I feel like that's pretty common for most people, right? Definitely.

[Liam]

Yeah. At the point where you're building an open claw.

[Instant AI Founder]

Exactly.

[Liam]

You're probably in that boat.

[Instant AI Founder]

I think that our engineering teams use Claude to, I mean significantly increase their output. We've gone from three week cycles to like one week cycles. Our demos on Friday, our internal demo is gone from like one hour on a Friday to like three hours now. Just showing all the things we've shipped. Wow. I think that there's so much happening in like just business operations. I mean even the job of like a finance manager has changed so much. Like I no longer need someone to tell me when is someone's probation period up? When you know, how much money can we save by doing this, this and this? How much money is it going to add by doing this, this, what was our performance? This, you know, this month versus last year at the same time or three years ago. I mean now I'm just chatting with a interface that can either one, do it proactively if I set it up to or two, it's giving me an immediate answer. Questions that used to take. Let us get back to you by Thursday. Close the business. I've now got immediate. I'm going into a board meeting. Being able to make a decision rather than needing to put together a full deck. I'm being able to go into a meeting prepared rather than asking questions. And I think that's the exciting part of a business. It's gone from asking so many questions to this is what we're doing.

[Liam]

Totally.

[Instant AI Founder]

I still think there's such a need for human creativity and humans actioning a lot of the insights that AI is finding, but there's so much less wasted time. And I think that's especially the case in the world that we play of ecom. I mean it's never been more possible in my opinion for a brand to grow extremely fast.

[Liam]

Totally.

[Instant AI Founder]

And we're seeing a world now where really small brands are overtaking massive players because they don't have the baggage of legacy business, legacy tools, legacy operations.

[Liam]

They just like legacy decision making chains. You know. Right. Oh, we have to get this approved. All right, let me run it up the flagpole.

[Instant AI Founder]

Exactly.

[Liam]

Happens instantly.

[Instant AI Founder]

Whereas now it's like, does this meet our brand guidelines? Yes or no? Huge.

[Liam]

Yeah. It's amazing.

[Instant AI Founder]

Even someone in customer support, you know, a ticket comes in. This link isn't working. This button isn't working. This tried to check out. It didn't work. 1. You can just ask Claude to, you know, to break down what the problem actually was.

[Liam]

Yeah.

[Instant AI Founder]

So this is now a support agent that is no longer a support agent. They're actually now building a new landing page and shipping code to your website that significantly stops these problems from occurring. And so rather than needing five people to be involved, you're either now, I mean, everyone's job now is product or revenue.

[Liam]

Right.

[Instant AI Founder]

Everything else is a waste of time.

[Liam]

Agreed. Yeah. And I think, too, to your point earlier, like, the more that I spend time in basically inside Telegram, the more I do realize, like, the human touch.

[Instant AI Founder]

Are you like a telegram versus WhatsApp? Yeah.

[Liam]

And for no reason, honestly, I just haven't gotten around to setting WhatsApp. I tried to set up iMessage the other day, and it didn't work. But I have, like, you know, 16 different agents now in Telegram, so I feel like porting it all over is gonna be a process.

[Instant AI Founder]

What are you plus WhatsApp?

[Liam]

If I open WhatsApp, everybody else is gonna see I haven't responded to that. I was just online.

[Instant AI Founder]

True. I turn that off.

[Liam]

That's the downside.

[Instant AI Founder]

What agents are you using?

[Liam]

So every project I have going on. So, like, I was just telling you about zirp, I have, you know, maybe a consulting project. Every project has its own. I call it like a GM bot, like a general manager. And what I do is I basically say to my main bot, I'm like, hey, we're gonna start working with this company, or we're gonna do this. And you need to make sure that everything you see, if it talks about this, route that information to this bot so it can constantly stay smarter. So if I'm on a call with my assistant in the morning and we talk about zirp, make sure that that context of that paragraph goes to the Zerp bot. When I get an email about something, make sure that that goes there. If it's mentioning zirp. And basically, well, one, it just keeps the main chat kind of clear for more urgent stuff, but it allows the individual bot to kind of build its own brain and personality and just kind of its own, like, cron jobs. Even occurring tasks within that specific chat interface.

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah. Love it.

[Liam]

So, you know. Yeah. So as I was saying, like, the more I play with it, the more I do realize that, like, design is a huge piece that doesn't exist and human review is obviously a huge piece that still, I don't. Although I don't know for how much longer the human review thing is going to be needed. I'm guessing like six months or less before you and I will probably be in a spot where we don't feel comfortable without Human Review. That's my guess.

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah. I mean, I even think today human review is almost not needed.

[Liam]

Yeah.

[Instant AI Founder]

It's very. Actually the human holding it back.

[Liam]

Totally.

[Instant AI Founder]

And I think in many ways that's kind of fair. It's so new. It's happened so fast. There's so many marketing managers and even like CEOs and creative directors that are like, oh, hang on a minute, like, we need to check this. Which is, which is totally valid. And I think that that was kind of the same even when, you know, tools like afterpay were launched. It was like, hang on a minute, are we giving credit?

[Liam]

Yeah.

[Instant AI Founder]

Like, wait, is this unethical?

[Liam]

This is too fast.

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah. Is this too fast? And, you know, as the industry learns and as people learn, it just changes so quickly. And I think the speed of change is happening faster than ever.

[Liam]

Totally.

[Instant AI Founder]

I think there's still a push and I think there will still be a push for a very long time for AI to give you the ability to have as little or as much control as a human wants though.

[Liam]

Right.

[Instant AI Founder]

And I think what we're seeing, particularly today, being, you know, a leader in AI tech for e comm brands is brands generally start off like 25% AI and the rest human.

[Liam]

Yeah.

[Instant AI Founder]

And then over time, like the first six weeks, they might get to like 50, 50 human versus like AI doing it after like three months, they're like, oh, well, AI is performing better. We're generating way more revenue. It looks better, it is better. Our customers are resonating with it. Conversion rates skyrocketed. By spending way more time on the things humans actually need to spend time on, we're learning way faster. And all of my doubts have been crushed. I'm not getting a huge influx of support requests being like, what is this copy? My Shopify is just converting way better. And to be honest, that's what matters most.

[Podcast Host]

Right?

[Liam]

Yeah, it's, it's, it's like, like you said, like, we are the now the ones holding things back. It used to be the other way around, like you're waiting for something to come back and then that is your cue to go finish that. Whatever that one task was. Yeah, but now it's the opposite where I like, I'm like wait, sleep is a waste of my time right now. I need to hurry.

[Instant AI Founder]

Absolutely. I mean I think there's two things holding people back. I think that founders, CEOs, the people generally at the top are pretty receptive to AI and they're receptive most because they want to grow, they want to grow the business. They're seeing the numbers, they know they need to grow faster. They see AI as an opportunity to grow faster. I think it's the people like bottoms a rough word but the people that are executing today are like fearing their job. And I think that's the wrong mindset because, and I use this analogy all the time in the sense that when, when Canva first launched, every digital agency hated Canva totally. Canvas stealing our job, canvas stealing our work. You know, we're a designer, this is our skillset. Now the best creative agencies in the world just use Canva and I think that's going to be the same tide. The best marketers in the world are not going to be replaced. The best marketers in the world are going to be using the best AI tools to drive their business forward.

[Liam]

Yeah.

[Instant AI Founder]

And the quicker they adopt it, the better. I think the second thing holding a lot of brands back today is agency relationships. I think agencies are going to remain really important. Professional services are going to remain really important. I mean that's just a no brainer. But I think there's going to be a real shift in as an agency you need to stop holding your client back. Sure, they might still spend $100,000 a year with you, but being an AI first agency man, you've got an edge because a lot of agencies are just like in the world of prior days. Totally. And so as a brand it's really important that one, your executor people feel like they can experiment with AI without losing their job and two, you're working with agencies that are actually pushing you forward as a business versus holding you back in the old days.

[Liam]

Totally. Yeah. I feel like there is going to be some kind of new level setting of agency brand relationships for a category of brands. I think there's going to be still a large chunk of those that remain untouched because they go through procurement and they've got these massive of teams on both sides. But I think a lot of the brands that are like sub 200 million have a huge shot of really kind of basically just eliminating baggage, extra baggage, and speeding things up across the board.

[Instant AI Founder]

It's really about speed in many ways, right?

[Liam]

Yeah, it is speed. Cause also speed is the variable to beat your competitors. Especially if you're in a place where you're not gonna have the money to out compete a big player. You're not gonna have the legal resources or the distribution to outcompete, but you will have the speed.

[Instant AI Founder]

But if you're. I mean, yeah, I mean, and, and if you're working with an agency that is rebuilding your flows from scratch every three months, you know, on the email side of things, I mean that, that's long gone.

[Liam]

Yeah.

[Instant AI Founder]

But the best agencies are better than ever. Like I truly believe that. I mean this, it's, it'd be wrong to be like anti agency or anti human. But I think the world is really changing rapidly on that front. Like you need to be working with an agency that's really pushing you forward.

[Liam]

Totally. Yeah. I'm excited to see how AI just continues to evolve from a creative standpoint too, but from an execution standpoint, it's insane. And like you said, executors who are great executors are finding that with AI, they're able to just do much more good executors are good executors because they understand where the limits are and what's possible, even if they can't exactly do it themselves. But with AI, you can fill those gaps. Like everything you can't do yourself, you can fill it with AI. Like you said, the, the flows, you know, like most brands don't touch their flows after they launch.

[Instant AI Founder]

Now, AI is. Your website has never been more important. I mean, you talk to a brand today and it's like, oh, we haven't updated our product pages in a couple of years. Or AI's AI is not picking our brand up properly. We're not showing up in search results. Well, your website is actually now the most important thing. You can kind of fuck up everything else, but if you get your website right, everything else starts to become easier. You're now showing up in search results. Your email platform is hopefully pulling whatever sale you've just launched. You just launched your Mother's Day sale. It's now pulling all of that information offers the discounts, the products that are on sale, the messaging into your retention, marketing automatically. There's no longer someone sitting up at 10pm at night doing that.

[Liam]

Right.

[Instant AI Founder]

It's now just happening. You're launching a new campaign and you're answering a series of questions versus sitting there with a blank canvas going, right, where do I start?

[Liam]

Totally.

[Instant AI Founder]

You know, new product launch, Mother's Day sale. This product, this product, this product on sale for this. Boom. What segment do I want to go to? Actually, AI probably just picks it for you and it's boom, boom, boom. Series of three emails over the next week.

[Liam]

Exactly.

[Instant AI Founder]

Schedule, send, done.

[Liam]

Right.

[Instant AI Founder]

That is now possible.

[Liam]

Totally.

[Instant AI Founder]

And I think that's really exciting.

[Liam]

Yeah, fully agreed. I'm curious, like, so talking about AI, you guys are obviously building a ton of AI stuff. So when we talked the last few times, it was all about instant audiences, right? Like identifying anonymous shoppers, figuring out who those people are, being able to put them into klaviyo and then message them when otherwise you could not reach those people. And that was maybe like 97% shoppers on the Internet. So, you know, where has that product gone and where has that now led you to?

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah, I mean, building instant audiences was the thing that really got us going, I think, enabled us to build so much trust in the market. And what we did was we. And what we still do is enable brands to remember a shopper every time they land on your website. And you know, you could argue that this is probably the most important thing for a marketer. If you don't know who a shopper is as a marketer, you have no ability to send them an email or an sms, no ability to retarget them on meta and you're basically just wasting shoppers that land on your website. And I would, you know, we built the best identification technology for an E commerce brand. And you know, amongst every test that we could possibly do and brands just, I mean, it's so exciting when you jump on a call with a brand and they're like, well, we've spent no, no more money. But our meta ad return has gone up because we're now sending emails and SMS's to people who land on our website. Our retention marketing has tripled and we've basically had to do nothing. And that was huge. And we spend a lot of time with our customers in like, I would say customer success is such an important thing for us. We take a lot of pride in offering a very good customer success experience to our customers particularly. We work with a lot of large brands and we were sitting down with a lot of our brands and they're like, we want our attention to go further. This is Meta. Ads are going up, you know, everything's changed, budgets are tighter. How do we make more Money from our existing customer base, particularly during sale periods. And we originally built like this email optimizer tool which would scan all of your email flows and like provide you a list, basically a summary of all the things you could do.

[Liam]

Like an audit.

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah, like an audit. Right, like an automated audit.

[Liam]

And you were basically the idea there was like, hey, we have so many brands understanding we can build a knowledge base and then scan your stuff against that and basically tell you where the optimizations lie.

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah, like, where should you have a new cta? Maybe it's not loading properly in a certain browser. This link is wrong. These colors look bad when it's in dark mode. This isn't working. And so we would tell a brand how to improve. And we sat there as an instant leadership team, you know, a year and a half ago, and we said, hang on a minute, the world is changing so fast that why don't we just do this for them? Why don't we just help a brand build the very best retention marketing without having to lift a finger? We know who all their shoppers are. We're the best at identification, so we know how to send an email and an sms. We've now built the ability to audit your emails so we know what emails convert the best. Why don't we just do it for you? And that's been kind of the rise of instant AI. You know, we launched instant AI around 10 months ago. We have over a thousand brands on instant AI now sending, you know, so many emails and SMS's for brands every month and seeing the wow factor when they jump on a demo. I think it's really easy to get a brand excited. I mean, we give the brand the ability to send a unique email to every shopper. No two shoppers receive the same email twice. Subject lines copy images, everything is different to every shopper. We learn about every shopper. So we know what it takes to convert you as an individual and we do it with as a brand. You give us your brand guidelines, we know your tone of voice, we're constantly looking at your website. You can have creative control if you want, but then you just leave instant AI to grow revenue on complete autopilot. And I think that wow factor has been really exciting for brands.

[Liam]

Yeah. And honestly, the setup is pretty much just as easy as that. I did the setup a couple times and the hardest, or not the hardest, but the part that takes the longest is just getting your internal creative team to basically give the sign off that, hey, this is on brand and good to go.

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah.

[Liam]

And then Once that happens, like you said, you're pretty much done. It does it on its own.

[Instant AI Founder]

Well, yeah, I mean, and it just does it on its own. Like, I obviously speak on stage a lot and I share the story of instant, but I'd say a unique part of our journey has been really the surprise of like not needing to push the hard sell. I think so many tools are, you know, it's just like a ram down your throat consistently. For us, like almost like 95% of our new brands come inbound. They hear about us from like on a podcast or at an event or. Honestly, a lot of our customers just come from word of mouth. And so, you know, I strongly believe a company is built on two things like people and product. If you have the very best team and the very best product in the market, your customers come to you and they love you. And that's, I would say that's been the most exciting part of the journey so far, is just when a customer discovers instant AI, they walk away in almost every case, like, oh, well, this is pretty cool.

[Liam]

Yeah. And, and, and that too, especially with how fast you guys are shipping product or shipping updates and new features.

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah, we, we ship new features almost every week. I think we're really focused on bringing an edge to personalization. You know, we, we see the fastest growing brands across all the brands we work with today. Generally the fastest growing brands, about 30 to 40% of their, their revenue comes from retention marketing. And you have to Note that like 40% of most brands revenue come from meta. And so retention marketing in many ways is just as important as meta. And everyone focuses on the new shopper. The new shopper, the new shopper. Absolutely. It's important. You need to keep the top of the funnel full. But there's such a huge base of revenue that is like almost free, right?

[Liam]

Totally. Well, also, not to mention that a lot of the so much of acquisition is assisted by good flows. Like if you don't have good pop up on the site and if you don't have good flows, you know, you're missing a lot of those users who are coming to the site and maybe they're putting it in or not, but then they're leaving. You know conversion rates, what like 3 to 5%? So that means 95% are leaving without buying.

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah.

[Liam]

And if you can collect, you know, 10 to 15% of emails on site and then get the rest through instant, for example, then you're basically, it's like, it's just free money. It's right, it's free money right there.

[Instant AI Founder]

Absolutely. I would say there's three really big things that are. That are top of mind for us at the moment. Number one is you need to send a unique email to every shopper when they abandon your website. That's never been possible before. It's not possible for a marketing manager to sit down and send 30,000 emails a day.

[Liam]

Yeah.

[Instant AI Founder]

But now you can.

[Liam]

And when you say unique, you're basically name, subject line, email. Like, you know, clothes or whatever they looked at.

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah, I mean, it used to. Personally, it's funny because personalization, like 12 months ago was the first name. Everyone was like, oh, first name. That's personalization. I mean, that's just like the basic. Now got something. Hey, like insert Liam comma. Oh, shit, I forgot the comma there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now it's like every email is different and every email is written differently. The subject lines are different. Some subject lines have an emoji, some subject lines include the first name. Subject lines don't even include that. Yeah, we reference the. The products that they view, but not just the product. We describe the product they used and why they might like to buy it. We take into account things like the time of day they're looking at your website, their location. Is it summer, is it winter? What country are they in? Is shipping time fast? Because we don't want to put fast shipping in the email when they're in some other country. And so now all of a sudden you have the dream email to every shopper, which has never been possible. So unique emails has been really exciting. The second thing that's been really exciting is the ability to. The timing of marketing has always been a big factor. And if you read any kind of playbook today, it'll say send an email or an SMS two hours after someone abandoned, say, cart. And I actually believe that's false, that that's not the right strategy. You need to be learning about your shopper. When do they purchase? Because I might browse, as, you know, I don't know. Maybe let's use the example of like a really busy mum. For example, their kid's gone to sleep. They're browsing the Internet at midday or something at noon and they're browsing around. Maybe they don't purchase. Their next available opportunity to purchase is probably at 9pm at night when they're finally. Their kids have finally gone to sleep for the day and they're just relaxing and I want to send them an email then not two hours after they abandon their cart at 2pm in the afternoon that they just never see.

[Liam]

Right.

[Instant AI Founder]

And that's been a really exciting like uptick in revenue as well.

[Liam]

Yeah, yeah. I think that's so cool. There's been so many apps that have tried to do the personalization thing, but

[Instant AI Founder]

too manual, too limited.

[Liam]

Yeah. And what's cool is like you took all the things like you know, the audiences piece you took. You know, there used to be a software that would only specialize in, oh, we know based on browser behavior when to serve the pop up. Now not only are you doing that, but then you're deciding, oh, we can take all these things, ingest them, match it with our database and know when to send this email out again.

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah. Which is instance AI agents, just a

[Liam]

better way of using all the tools that you have at your disposal.

[Instant AI Founder]

Exactly. And like we have a very strong vision that as a brand you should rely on meta, you should rely on Shopify, and you should rely on Instant to grow your business. And as a marketing manager, I think a big skill set over the next 12 months will be managing instance agents to run your business. Pop ups, emails, SMS campaigns, identification, all in one platform. That's really important because they all need to speak to each other at lightning speed.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Instant AI Founder]

That kind of goes on to my third point which is like it's also never been possible before before for a marketer or a founder of a brand to experiment as fast as they can today. And it's one thing to plug all this data into Claude and for Claude to spit out something, that's fine, like whatever, do that. But Instant is running your business from a retention point of view. We are helping you grow your revenue and the volume of experiments, you know, different subject line, different copy. We're then telling you what's working. We're then incorporating those learnings into the new flows without you even needing to do anything. And you know, we're seeing like huge increases in in click through rates, then open rates, then conversion rates while you sleep.

[Liam]

Right.

[Instant AI Founder]

That's really exciting.

[Podcast Host]

Time for the retention tip of the week brought to you by Instant Founders. If you've launched a subscribe and save and you haven't touched it since then, you're probably bleeding subscribers and you don't realize it. Here's the reality. Most D2C subscription programs have a churn cliff somewhere between month three and month five. And the reason is always almost the same. Customers over ordered, they got products stacking up, they can't cancel. Instead of skip the fix is active subscription management. That means building triggers around Key Churn signals. If a customer hasn't opened your email for the last three months, that's a flag. If they skip their last delivery, that's a bigger flag. If they haven't visited your site in 60 days, that's another flag. The best subscription brands don't wait for the cancellation. They intervene early. Maybe it's a hey, we noticed you might have extra product want to swap to every other month type of an email. Maybe it's a surprise gift on month four to bridge the churn cliff. Maybe it's a personalized bundle option that makes the subscription feel fresh. Tools like Instant can help you spot these patterns with AI and trigger the right message at the right time. Stop letting subscribers quietly churn. Go to instant1/sharma for more.

[Liam]

So how does Instant layer in with legacy ESPs?

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah, I mean we really help a brand to try Instant really, really quickly. So a lot of brands will get started with instance AI generated flows. They'll go live. I mean, as you've seen, like most brands go live in like a day. They get started, they get experimenting, no pressure, see how it goes. And that's the beauty of the platform. And so they will, they'll start to see the results for themselves and then over time they will just use the product more and more and more. You are behind as a brand if AI isn't generating at least 30% of your revenue. And one of the easiest way, just

[Liam]

on the retention side, I mean, let's

[Instant AI Founder]

just say it's a business overall to start, right? But retention is like one of the easiest right now if you really put your mind to it. Retention is really important.

[Liam]

So for the most part untouched, like no one makes solutions for the retention side of the business.

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah, it's really, it's. And that's, that's the wow factor that a lot of brands see that when we demo them, they're like, okay, shit, like, we have to give this a go. But we, yeah, we're kind of the AI first solution for retention. We're helping marketers bring a new edge to their business, helping them stand out and we're helping them grow their revenue. And you know, there's so many tools on the market today that save you time and save you energy and make things easier. But really we're in the world of business, right? Like we need to grow revenue and we need to grow fast. We need to stand out fast. We need to convert shoppers better than ever. And that's what we're really obsessed with, is keeping your brand voice. And keeping your brand tone and helping you stay completely on brand, but convert way more shoppers faster is kind of our mission.

[Liam]

What are some of the brands that have really taken the AI platform to the next level on instant?

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah, I mean there's so many. I mean you've got Third Love, Billabong, Neurogum, we've got Liquid iv, you've got David Protein. I mean every we onboard like 100 new brands a month.

[Liam]

Yeah.

[Instant AI Founder]

And the, the caliber of brands go from, you know, your smallest brands who want to see some, some revenue growth all the way through to your largest brands with the largest marketing teams and, and, but the reaction is the same, is, well, this is growing our revenue and while we're learning really, really fast, the best thing I really love is that the longer brands are with instant, the more results they see. It's very rare for a platform to be able to have that value proposition. The more we learn about your shoppers, the more we remember your shoppers and the more we run experiments, the better the platform gets.

[Liam]

Yeah, that's interesting too because one thing you're basically doing there without the customer, or the customer in this case, the brand having to do it is organize and synthesize all of that information and all of that data and then constantly updating memory in real time as things are then going out. Right?

[Instant AI Founder]

Exactly. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. We just know so much about your shoppers in a way that makes your brand feel really on brand. We know the types of products they've looked at the time of day they're looking at your website. Are they, you know, what type of discount do they need? Do they, are they a shopper that really loves free shipping and maybe you don't need to give them a percentage discount or, you know, maybe Nick only purchases if we give him 20% off. So let's just give it to him and get the conversion done. You know what, you know, you just start to build a bit of a profile about this shopper as if they're shopping in person. You can kind of bring the human edge to AI. A lot of people think that AI is like, you know, robots, but really it helps you as a brand bring, bring a bit more of an on brand edge, a bit more of, a bit more of a human touch.

[Liam]

Totally.

[Instant AI Founder]

And I think shoppers are way more interested when they see an email or an SMS that is actually about the item that they just viewed or the item that they're interested in versus just a random catalog email. Hey Liam, saw your band in your cart come back to purchase, they click on it and it lands on the homepage of the website. I mean no, like of course you're losing conversions. I mean it's just one, it's manual.

[Liam]

Yeah.

[Instant AI Founder]

So you just don't have the time to set it up. And two, it's just so unoptimized.

[Liam]

Yeah, I think too just like you know Amazon changed everybody's brain to realize that they should get two day shipping always from everybody, all the time, no matter what, for free. That is going to happen in the retention world shortly. Like as AI gets more and more involved and companies like Anuragum or David are sending these personalized emails it's going to be expected from other brands that consumers see that otherwise they're going to think wait, I have to do two clicks to get there. I'm out. Yeah, and that's a very real thing.

[Instant AI Founder]

It's funny, one of our largest brands is like we have you know, Naturium who's part of E L F Beauty, you know they're obviously huge but one of our other big brands is Zero Shoes. Zero Shoes, a very fast growing brand signed up self service on our website and I was on a call with an investor in Instant the other day and I was explaining our Instant AI to him. He's like no, no, I've seen something like I'm like he's like what other competitors are there in the market? Like oh like of course there's a few but like this is what we're doing, that's better. And he's like no, no, no, I've seen something like this before. I got an email in my inbox with like I didn't know how they, they knew exactly what products I was purchasing and I just purchased it. Like there has to be. I'm like pull it. We'll pull up the screen share and show me the brand ended up being Zero Shoes. I'm like well that's our customer.

[Liam]

No, he's like and so what was different in that email than that he would have or I guess if you just look at that email objectively like what do you think is different from that email versus like the average follow up abandoned flow that somebody has?

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah, well we showed showed the exact item that he was interested in but we didn't just show the items he was interested in. The copy of the email referenced all the items that he was specifically viewing. It was including things. Yeah it was including things like the type of shoe, maybe what it's for, you know the discount that's on offer, the shipping, how fast the shipping was, you know, referenced. Things that actually are considerations when you're making a purchase. Then in the subject line, the name of the item that he was viewing and his first name and how much discount that particular item had was referenced in the subject line. Yeah, that's not been possible before.

[Liam]

Right.

[Instant AI Founder]

And we're automatically pulling that information from your website. So, you know, we're determining the difference

[Liam]

being like, like we're in this building on the 15th floor. The difference is option one is scream down to somebody on the ground floor and you say, hey, you forgot this. Right. Do you still wanna buy it? And then the other option is you go down there and you're like, hey, by the way, you were just upstairs. This just came back in stock. It was really good for running. You were just talking about running. Do you wanna buy it real quick on your way out? Right. That's kind of the difference. Like a very curated message experience compared to almost what feels like maybe more of a broadcast.

[Instant AI Founder]

Exactly 100%. And that drives conversion significantly. I think it's only possible though, because of the behind the scenes experimentation that is constantly occurring. You know, we are constantly running hundreds of experiments a day. What subject line is best to open? What subject line gets the best. Click through. What subject line gets the best conversion? What copy is getting the best conversion? Do we need long copy? Some brands are really educational, they want long copy. Some brands are like, you know, quick purchases, like they want short copy. Some brands are really discount heavy. Maybe let's experiment not running a discount and seeing if it impacts anything. Some brands have different. Their different collections have different discounts. That's so complicated to build out all those flows. But now we're stripping the information. We're looking at the information from the specific page that that shopper viewed on your website. We're looking at that specific product's discount and we're taking that into account. And so when you launch your mother's day sale or your Black Friday sale, it's all just taken into account. The branding, the discounts, the messaging.

[Liam]

Yeah, that's amazing. And is that done through Instant Labs or. Instant Labs is completely separate.

[Instant AI Founder]

Instant Labs is part of Instant AI. So Instant Labs, I guess is the interface where two things. Like Instant Labs is the interface where we show a brand the experiments that we're running and show them the results that we've found. And then I guess part two of Instant Labs is all the behind the scenes. So all the analysis of data, all the experiments that are ongoing all of the variants that we're creating and then plugging that into your email and SMS marketing for you.

[Liam]

Amazing. And what other sources are you plugging into that allow you to have basically all the context?

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah, I mean we learn over time. So majority of the time we can learn a lot from just plugging into your Shopify for example. And from Shopify we can see, you know, things like opt in and make sure all the privacy regulations are met. But more importantly we can look at things like order history, the type of shopper this is, are they a repeat shopper, is this their first time? And so we can get a lot, and we, we do get a lot from, from Shopify and then there's just a lot that we, we analyze and we, we build ourselves.

[Liam]

Totally. Is there any particular, I guess what feature do you currently have that you're most excited by or you feel is, you know, has the most potential and is there any that's on, that are on the horizon that you're really excited about?

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah, I'm really excited about. I think we've done a lot to really build. I, I think today Instant probably has the best retention flows experience for an E commerce brand and I think that's pretty, pretty real. You know, there's, we've had historic gaps in things like reporting or you know, things like that that we've slowly built over time. And today I would say the results and the customer status actually shout out to you.

[Liam]

I remember I texted you about attribution and you said you're gonna have it in like a couple weeks and it was live in a couple weeks.

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah, we, I mean we listen to our customers a lot and as a startup we've always had customers coming in the door so quickly and sometimes like oh, it's a couple of weeks away, just give us a bit of time. Instant AI flows today are like world class. I mean it is never been possible before. What we do, it is so on brand, it is so personalized and most importantly it just drives really good revenue results for a customer. What I'm really excited about is the work that we're doing with campaigns. We see a really strong vision with agentic campaigns. So a marketer is able to create a campaign in seconds rather than hours. We're able to send a unique personalized email or campaign email to every shopper or cohorts of shoppers. We're able to run experiments across hundreds of thousands of campaign emails and summarize the results for you. So you can either one, bring those into your Next campaign or two, we can just bring those result, those, those learnings into your next campaign for you. And so that's what I'm really excited about. I think flows is really important. I think SMS is really important, I think attribution is really important and I think campaigns are really important and we have a really strong edge across all four of those kind of channels now, which is like a no brainer of why so many brands like, you know, start to use the products. Yeah, the, so many people trying, you know, just like in loyalty or other verticals, like so many people try and compete commercially to race to the bottom cheaper, not necessarily a better product but

[Liam]

you know, they try to do the whole land and expand thing.

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah, exactly.

[Liam]

I think you're more just like, all right, this person at the brand, like what other tools do they need to do more?

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah, you know, drive more revenue and yeah, we, we just, we really focused on having the best possible product in the market. That has never been possible before without AI. So many brands are obsessed with bringing AI into their business and now it's never been a better time.

[Liam]

Yeah. Outside of instant, what, what are you excited about with AI?

[Instant AI Founder]

I'm really excited for marketers to have the ability to become really important and marketing managers and marketing teams have been important for, forever for a brand and, and marketing is the heartbeat of a brand's business. And I don't think that will change. I think that there's a strong, there's a lot of messaging around like, you know, who will lose their job because of who, because of AI. And I actually think that what I'm most excited about is giving marketers the ability to double or triple their performance, double or triple the revenue that they're driving for a brand. And I think a lot of marketers scratch their head sometimes in like, all right, I'm working really hard. We're launching new collaborations or new campaigns and we're just, we're just reaching our revenue targets. Or you know, maybe the meta algorithm has changed, like, oh, out of my control now. There is so much in a marketer's control. There is, you know, things that you would rely on weeks for from data and analysts to look at. You can get that at your fingertips now.

[Liam]

Right?

[Instant AI Founder]

Like how exciting things like creative. I mean that is, I mean that's really exciting for me. Me. You know, six months ago everyone hated creative. Now most brands use it. Next will be video. And so I think that marketers, giving marketers the ability to be like supercharged marketers is something I'M really excited for most.

[Liam]

Yeah, I'm stoked about that. I also think, you know, like AI at first was not complicated to use, but I think a lot of people were intimidated by it and I think as it's evolving it's becoming easier to onboard and get up to speed at the same time. So I'm really excited to just see more people just get onboarded and kind of embrace the technology. And another thought I had while you were talking before was for example, if you were to onboard with instant and add and plug everything in, the cool part is the next time there's a new model that you guys plug in on your backend, everything gets upgraded across the board. And so yeah, I feel like the more people just need to get on it faster, earlier, sooner.

[Instant AI Founder]

Yeah, yeah. I think that there's a lot of businesses and a lot of people still thinking about AI as a hypothetical. Like it's coming. Our tools that we use today will be AI soon or we're using bolt on features and I think that's going to be a big shift is I'm not so bullish on older companies becoming AI driven solutions for your business overnight. They have huge teams, so many legacy like things going on that I think a lot of these smaller businesses are really going to overtake either the legacy brands or the legacy solutions in the market. You must be using tools that are in today's world not tools from 10 years ago that have just basically bought your trust. Totally. And you, you kind of have to have an internal reset of we're not going to go after every bright shiny thing to, you know, have some scale our business, triple our business overnight. But we are going to start using AI tools to at least double our revenue overnight.

[Liam]

Totally amazing. Well Liam, anything you want to leave with here?

[Instant AI Founder]

No, I think that there's just, I mean there's never been a more exciting time to be building in my opinion. There hasn't been a change this big, this large since basically the start of the Internet.

[Liam]

Yeah.

[Instant AI Founder]

I think a lot of people are forgetting the exciting time that we're living in and embrace it. Like don't fear it, don't fear the little details, just overcome it. And what I'm seeing is like when a brand starts, as I said, like using 25% of the product in the first couple of months, by month six, they're just like, like AI is better.

[Liam]

Right.

[Instant AI Founder]

It's not that the human's been removed, it's that the human is now more powerful.

[Liam]

Yeah.

[Instant AI Founder]

And as a brand leader, as a marketer really embrace the tools that are driving revenue, not the tools that are safe. Because if you truly want to grow, you need to be using tools that are that are growing your revenue like never before.

[Liam]

Totally amazing. Well, thank you for coming on.

[Instant AI Founder]

Well, thanks for having me on. Third time. Lucky. I mean, time.

[Liam]

We'll do it again.

[Instant AI Founder]

Yes. Fourth time. And I don't know what we'll talk about next time, but it'll be so much. I mean, the world's just changing so fast.

[Liam]

Yeah. Truly. Thanks for listening. We'll be back. Next time to cut through the noise on cpg retail and E Commerce. Commerce. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend? And be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss the next one.