Why People Buy: A Practical Guide to Consumer Behavior in Ecommerce

Summary

Podcast Summary: Operators – “Why People Buy: A Practical Guide to Consumer Behavior in Ecommerce”

Date: August 12, 2026
Hosts: Sean Frank, Mike Beckham, Matt Bertulli, Jason Panzer

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Episode Overview

This episode of the Operators podcast dives deep into the real reasons consumers make purchasing decisions in ecommerce. The discussion goes beyond standard tips and surface-level marketing strategies, aiming to equip brand founders and marketers with a nuanced understanding of consumer psychology, product positioning, and the mechanics of category domination. The “Operators”—four high-performing leaders in ecommerce—share both frameworks and hard-won lessons, including how to ride category waves, discover (and rediscover) your core customer, and craft no-brainer offers that supercharge conversion and retention.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Fundamentals: Why Do People Buy? (00:00–03:38)

• Emotional Over Rational: Purchases are driven primarily by emotion—identity, status, fear of loss, or hope of gain—far more than rational calculation.
  • Quote (Matt, 01:29): “People make a decision emotionally and then they rationalize it and justify it afterwards.”
• Classic Motivators: Products solve pain, increase attractiveness/status, fulfill identity, or simply fill emotional gaps.
• Beyond Problem/Solution: While some goods are bought to solve direct problems, others sell due to design, social proof, or belonging.

2. Evolution of Product Positioning: The Ridge Wallet Example (03:03–07:04)

• Multiple Angles, Same Product: Real scale comes from offering the same product to different buyer personas for different reasons—utility, fashion, gifting.
  • Quote (Sean, 05:01): “We still have a $20 million a year buyer showing up that is totally function focused… Then we have a $40 million a year customer who’s just showing up because they want the coolest prints… and another $40 million a year person showing up just because it makes a good gift.”
• Caution for Founders: The reason you created a product may not match the reason your largest customer segment buys it.

3. Understanding and Mapping the Buying Journey (09:03–13:52)

• Awareness First: Success is easier in “hot” categories where natural demand and attention already exist.
• Spectrum of Demand: Creating a category is “hard mode.” Entering an existing, high-demand category allows even mediocre execution to succeed.
  • Quote (Sean, 12:09): “You want to be in categories, you want to launch products where even if you’re bad at your job, you get filthy rich.”
• Importance of Category Selection: Ride the waves of existing or growing demand rather than struggling to build it from scratch.

4. Triggers & Entry Points to the Buyer’s Journey (15:44–22:46)

• Trigger Events: Consumers enter buying journeys through specific life events or needs—not everyone is in-market at once.
• Leverage of Algorithms: Modern ad and content algorithms do the heavy lifting—identifying active buyers at the right moment.
  • Quote (Matt, 18:51): “The algorithms are actually your best friend in this fragmented world. They find the moment and serve the message to the person at the moment.”
• Who Is Your Customer? Start with a thesis, but let real market data and behavior tell you who actually buys and why. Be ready to pivot based on what you discover.
  • Founders’ Bias: Brand founders are often wrong about their core customer and must stay open to unexpected high-affinity niches.

5. Influence, Trust & Creator Marketing (25:45–31:23)

• Types of Influence:
  • Influencers: Large, focused endorsements (“pay for post”).
  • Partnerships: Deep collaborations, amplifying messages via trusted voices.
  • UGC: User-generated content offers scale and unpredictably unlocks new customer segments and trust.
• Building Trust: Strategic use of both celebrity and grassroots voices “deposits” into brand trust, so when the buying moment arrives, the brand feels familiar and credible.
  • Quote (Sean, 30:08): “Influencer partnerships deliver the ability to borrow trust from people.”

6. The Offer: The Core of Conversion (31:23–39:59)

• Conversion Tactics vs. Offer: While optimization tools (conversion rates, cart abandonment) matter, the offer trumps all—especially in categories with true demand.
  • Quote (Matt, 31:23): “Conversion rate, heat maps, card abandonment… all this stuff doesn’t freaking matter… What you have to figure out is offer.”
• Elements of a Strong Offer: Not just discount—think guarantees, urgency/scarcity, proof, value stacking.
• No-Brainer Offers: Perceived as an “obvious” choice, such as Ridge’s “Never Lost, Forever Fit” guarantee for men’s rings.
  • Quote (Sean, 38:12): “And it’s because what we found out in our research is the biggest problem with men’s wedding bands is they lose them… so we’ve got to solve that problem.”

7. Beyond the First Purchase: Brand Loyalty, Retention, and Expansion (40:01–47:18)

• Product Expansion: When selling more of the same is hard (e.g., wallets), expand into adjacent categories.
• Loyalty Mechanics: True loyalty comes from trust and repeated proximity, not from forced loyalty programs.
• Buying Modes: Different categories lend themselves to gifting, replenishment, discovery, education, entertainment, or deals.
• Retention: The number one factor is product experience—not the timing of marketing touchpoints.
  • Quote (Sean, 47:18): “If the product tastes bad, people aren’t going to buy it... It ends up being product for all this.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Emotional vs. Rational Buying:
  “People make a decision emotionally and then they, they rationalize it and justify it afterwards.”
  — Matt (01:29)

• On Category Selection:
  “You want to launch products where even if you’re bad at your job, you get filthy rich.”
  — Sean (12:09)

• On The Power of the Offer:
  “Discounts aren’t offers. Like, discounts are a part of offers, but when people hear offer, they’re like, oh, you want me to go on promo? No, like, honing your offer over time is like, what, what promises are you making to the customer? And like, what problem are you solving? Why do they need to buy this right away?”
  — Sean (37:20)

• On Product-Led Customer Discovery:
  “You have to put your product out there in the world and let the customers tell you who they are… If you keep leaning into the wrong customer, cacs just go up.”
  — Sean (47:18)

• On Book Recommendation:
  “My recommendation is that everybody goes and reads Cialdini's Influence. I think that book is by far the fastest way to get up to speed on, like, the basics of what influences people's purchasing behavior.”
  — Matt (48:22)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Why do people buy? (00:00–03:38)
• Evolution of product angles at Ridge (03:38–07:04)
• Awareness and demand creation vs. riding hot categories (09:03–13:52)
• The role of triggers and journey entry points (15:44–22:46)
• Identifying who your customer really is (20:05–25:14)
• Influencer, partnership, and UGC marketing for trust and breadth (25:45–31:23)
• What matters most in the sale: The power of your offer (31:23–39:59)
• Category expansion, loyalty, and retention mechanics (40:01–47:18)
• Final takeaways and recommended reading (48:22–49:11)

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Summary Takeaways

• Start with emotion, not logic: Consumers buy based on emotional needs; rationalization comes later.
• Test assumptions about your customer: Your ideal customer profile may be dead wrong until you put product in the market and observe.
• Category is destiny: Ride market waves—avoid inventing demand unless you have runway and a huge risk appetite.
• Offer trumps tactics: Your product’s offer defines conversion potential. Strong guarantees, value stacking, and no-brainer perks can out-leverage conversion tricks.
• Trust is everything: Borrow it from creators, build it through consistency, and enhance it with exceptional product and service.
• Retention is product-driven: No amount of marketing fixes will make up for underwhelming product experiences.
• Be relentlessly data-led and open: Adjust your targeting, creatives, and product positioning when the market gives you new feedback.

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Recommended Action: Read Cialdini’s “Influence” for foundational consumer psychology, then ruthlessly diagnose your product, offer, and category to ensure every lever is working in your favor.

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For further insight, listen to the full episode or join the Operators community for deep dives on growth, offers, and advanced ecommerce strategy.

Transcript

[Matt]

Let's start with why do people buy? Right? And I think this is like the basics of if you're going to build a brand and you're in consumer, you really need to understand like some of the major levers that drive people's purchasing decisions. So Sean, when you're building, when you're thinking, like, where, where do you start? What, what is going through your head for, like, how do I sell to somebody?

[Sean]

Yeah. And this is often called like the problem solution thing. And you know, if you listen to this podcast, maybe you're too in the weeds, right? And like, you know, we're talking about consumer behavior. It's not, you know, your conversion rate on your, on your landing page, right? And like Matt said, it's very easy to go very high level, like, oh, the economy. So nobody's buying widgets right now, Right. And the question Matt just asked is really like the, the why, why are people buying your thing? And we often boil that down, if you're in the weeds into problem solution, right? Like, you know, what are some of the reasons people will actually give you money for your thing? And you have to solve pain in their life. You have to make them more attractive for the opposite sex. You have to, you know, fix something about their, their body, their sleep, something, right? You have to give them status. Like, these are classic things that are like a little more high level than just like, my back hurts. So by my, you know, back brace, right? It's like that is. That goes into one of these bigger consumer buckets.

[Matt]

Yeah, I think it's, there's like a simple framing for this which is like you're either leaning into like a fear of loss or a hope of gain. And to people, like a lot of the times it's identity driven. So like people buy things to fill gaps in their life. So even if it's not problem solutions. So like what you're hitting on is what a lot of the supplement companies, health and wellness companies, or like you're just selling a tool or a widget that gets a job done. Like, those are very like problem solution products and product categories. Then there's like straight up, like, I'm, I'm going to feel better if I own this thing or my friends own this thing, or I've seen creators talk about this thing. Like, those are really, those are different reasons to buy, right? Like, those could be status. Those could be, I don't know, those could just be straight up, like design. Like they just like the, like, they like the look of the thing, but the Important thing is like they're not buying often they're not buying for rational reasons. Like these are not logical choices made first. Right. People make a decision emotionally and then they, they rationalize it and justify it afterwards.

[Sean]

Trust, social proof, right. Seeing yourself in the product like, you know, you, you brought up like oh, I like the design. It's probably because the design speaks to you and who you think you are. Right? So there's a sense of identity. There's. Why are. When you're checking out, it works. If you say there's only three left and it flashes red, right. Like why is that a classic thing on, on scammy landing pages? It's because scarcity is another one of these, like, oh, I have to buy this number for somebody else. Right. Like it's, it goes into your decision making process.

[Matt]

Yeah. I think the, the basic of this is if you're building a brand, think about the emotional reasons that somebody is going to buy your product, not the logical reasons. Sean, with Ridge, My recollection of your history is that you guys started out very functional utility like materials, but you've clearly evolved the brand over time and there's lots of ways that you've sold. Even just the wallet, right? Not even just like the new products, the new categories, but the wallet. So can you give everybody like the, the evolution of like where you started to how you guys think about going to market now?

[Sean]

Yeah. And you know, Zack Stuck talked about this on the Titans episode. Um, you want to get into product categories that have natural angles to different consumer groups. Right? Like this episode's about consumer behavior and what makes a, you know, 22 year old guy buy your product is different than what makes a 55 year old guy buy your product. And that's just age. It doesn't take into account personal experiences or part of the country they're in or, or you know, their job or how they vote or whatever. Right. And you want to find a product that can serve as many of those groups as possible and the natural size of a wallet business. Like if you just wanted to sell wallets on the Internet, it's probably like 10 to 20 million dollars a year. And anything above that, you're doing something unnatural. And why is that? It's just because it's, it's a bad product category. It can be served to a lot of men, but men don't really care about it. You know what I mean? It's like, it's like I'm selling, you know, egg beaters or something. It's like Yeah, I guess everyone's gonna have one, but nobody really cares what egg beater you're buying. So it's like, it's like that's. Yeah, yeah. So it's, you know, it is. It is a large tam, but it's not a passionate tam. So how do you find those passionate groups of people?

[Matt]

Okay, so like you go from utility to fashion for that reason. Is that why, like, you're just finding different groups of people?

[Sean]

It isn't an on and off switch. We still have a $20 million a year buyer showing up that is totally function focused. They want the slimmest wallet possible. They want it to look cool next to knives and guns. That's why they're buying the Ridge wallet. Then we have a $40 million a year customer who's just showing up because they want the coolest prints on their wallet. So, like, they want cool designs or want something else. Right. And then we have a. Another $40 million a year person showing up just because it makes a good gift. So it's like those are different angles of the same product. The gift giver, the fashion person, the. The full utility and function person. And that is like solving different problems with the same product. And as you want as many people you can hit with the same product if you want to launch something.

[Matt]

Yeah. And that's the angles thing. So it's like as many different ways to hit that same person. So like people buy for self interest, they buy for identity, they buy for status, they buy for belonging to. And what you're hitting on with Ridge is like at first with utility, somebody was buying something because it was more capable. Right. So like, it's slimmer, it's stronger, it's like whatever. Right. But then if you sort of go down the stack, it's like all products, there's. People buy things to be more organized. They'd be more attractive, more responsible, more tasteful, prepared, more successful, like more generous. They're basically going for more in. In something, some version of their life. And your job as a marketer of a product is to like, find as many of those reasons as possible for the same product. Like that's what I'm hearing from you?

[Sean]

Yeah. And, you know, more isn't necessarily better, but it's.

[Matt]

Right, it's.

[Sean]

It's. You want to find the deepest pocket of people. If you only have to hit one, like, amazing. Good for you. You know what I mean? If you can just ride that one angle to a billion dollars, hats off, brother.

[Matt]

Simple, simple scales.

[Sean]

Yeah. Yeah. But in the wallet space, that's only $20 million a year. So you have to layer on these different angles to get to an unnatural or artificial level of revenue.

[Matt]

A common mistake on this too is that the often products are made by founders who are scratching their own itch like they're solving their own problem. And I think what we have to be aware of is that the reason that you made the product is likely not the reason that your number one customer is buying it. Right. So like the founder's choice may not be the most scalable source of customers.

[Sean]

Yeah, and often probably too niche. If you're making something, you're a product person. The average person isn't a product person. The average person is a consumer. They like buying things. So, like you can see founders get like really into the weeds about why this angle is better. And I tried this, but no, this is, It's. It's their baby. Like, this is the best version of it. Right. But they could just be wrong or wrong to the masses. And the masses like the color. You go, I like it because it's red. Right. So your job as the marketer is to take the product decisions and find other groups of people who will have high affinity for them. Fulfill is the ERP built specifically for DTC and E commerce, brands, inventory, purchasing, warehousing, financials, all in one system, built for the way your operation actually runs. There is not an ERP on this planet, not one that has more direct 3 PL integrations than fulfill. They integrate with over 4003 PL locations globally. And most of you listening to this right now are either running your own 3 PL relationship or you're about to. And the second, your 3 PL and your ERP aren't talking to each other in real time. You're flying blind. You don't know your true landed costs. You don't know your real margin. You're reconciling spreadsheets at 11pm trying to figure out where $40,000 went. I know because I am on Fulfillment. The visibility we have now versus what we had before, it's not a marginal improvement. It's a different game. Fulfill is the only ERP I've seen that was actually built from the ground up. 4D 2C. And it's not some vive coded piece of crap. Believe me, those exist. Fulfill isn't one of them. Go check out Fulfill. Tell him Sean sent you.

[Matt]

The second thing we want to talk about is like, where. Where does the buying journey really start? And as a marketer, as a brand founder, Sean, like, how do you like, if you're launching a new product, how are you thinking about like the market and the customer and where they are in their journey? And like, where do you insert yourself initially?

[Sean]

I think we could take this a couple different ways. Because if I'm launching a new product under ridge, it's different than if I'm launching a cold brand from start. So I've done both this year, right? If you're launching a cold brand from start, you have to look at where is the zeitgeist going, right? So the question is, where does a buying Jordy really live? And like, you don't want to be selling people Atkins right now. Like, it's just like, it's not like, like Keto. Keto's dead. It's not interesting anymore, right? So like, you know, you, you want to build an attention machine to generate awareness, but it's easier.

[Matt]

It's.

[Sean]

If there's, if, if there's already people searching, if there's a subreddit that's exploding in a category, that's where you want to be, right? So we launched Gut Culture. It's a fiber supplement. And it's because of GLP1s, right? Like GLP1s, people are having a hard time pooping. This is a new problem. We need to get out there and solve this, right? Like there's, there's people searching, search interest for fiber spiking. It's gonna be the new protein. So it's like you wanna just be in that category. I don't have to build as good of a machine because the awareness is already being solved for me.

[Matt]

Is that because there's a spectrum of demand. So like I guess on one, on the very hard end of like, where does the buyer journey begin? It's like you have no demand. So like you actually have to create the demand. You're creating a new category, a new product that's hard mode. So that would be like lomi. What I did, like we basically created a new thing to build all the demand ourselves. It's super expensive. I don't recommend it. And it's. Then what you're saying is like, then there's this big spectrum of like awareness and category demand. And then like all the way on the right hand side of that. And the other end of Lomi and category creation would be like, there's a bajillion people who have this problem right now that are aware they have this problem. They're even aware that there's solutions for this problem. You are simply going to Enter the market with your version of the solution. Did I get that right?

[Sean]

Totally. Would you rather sell toilet paper during COVID or like, you know, wallet. Yeah, yeah, at least. At least wallets. Wallets is better that. What you're describing is you invented an at home composter. It's like, dude, before you did that, no one was interested.

[Matt]

Yeah. We had to create demand.

[Sean]

Yeah. I mean, I can't think of even a worse example of trying to sell something to somebody, but.

[Matt]

Yeah, I know, it's terrible. Yeah.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Matt]

Somebody convinced me that creating a category is the best way to build a really big company. And I think there's like, some truth to that. But the odds of success are so low that I just don't recommend it to people. I think you should just build on a big one in a big existing category.

[Sean]

Yeah. And look, restaurants are the famous example. I know a guy, his name's John. He has a pizza chain called John Vinny's. I play tennis with him sometimes. He got very rich in restaurants. Okay. So you can get rich in restaurants. Like, he built an amazing business. It's great pizza if you're ever in Los Angeles. And I think he's expanding, you know, nationally. There's a. There's a. Next to my house, there's a restaurant that always like, there's like a location that always goes out of business. And it's like, it's like that's. It's like no matter what concept you put in there, it always goes out of business. And that's most restaurants. Right? And so what I'm trying to say is you want to be in categories, you want to launch products where even if you're bad at your job, you get filthy rich. Okay? That's Peptides. Right now, people who suck at E Commerce are making a million dollars a month because they just are in the right thing at the right time. Right. You know, the other example is you hear, you hear Alex Ramosi talk about this med spas. He's like, yeah, every. Every med spa has ran horribly. He's like, I've never seen one that's ran well. But they're all doing $8 million a year. It's like, he's like, as soon as somebody figures out how to do good med spas, they'll be a billionaire. Right? And so what we're saying is, if you. You're trying to take customers down this buying journey, okay? The first part of the buying a journey comes with awareness, okay? And you have to build an attention machine inside of Whatever ambient background awareness there is. Right. And make your life easier by not trying to sell at home compostable things. Get into med spas or peptides or whatever. El hot right now because there's just easier ways to make money when everyone around you is making money.

[Matt]

So it's awareness first before you get to like I now have to persuade somebody to buy my thing. Right. So it's like we just need attention number one. And what you're saying is the category matters a lot here because the bigger the category, the hotter the category. Hot being like it's growing really fast, you can suck and still get attention.

[Sean]

Yeah. And if it's growing really fast it's like, you know the peptides thing, right. I mean this is a little bit old at this point but everyone wanted, you know, a GLP1 equivalent. Everyone wanted some sort of peptide and they're willing to go to great lengths to get it. Like they're willing to go to sketchy websites and they're willing to wait long periods of time and that's when you can tell during a good category. Right. Like you know, to cross into a different non consumer thing. Right now it's like memory. It's like okay, yeah like very large companies are willing to buy three years of memory for cash right now that hasn't been produced yet. And that's like okay, that's a pretty good market, right. If someone's willing to give you a bunch of money for something you haven't done yet because they just need it so bad, I'd rather be in that than wallet, you know what I mean? If you're scaling an E commerce brand today, ads alone aren't enough. After sell focuses on the one moment that every brand already owns after checkout after and turns the post purchase moment into more profit. Monetize every order with post purchase offers and thank you page experiences without disrupting checkout or hurting conversion. Enterprise grade tech used by Gap, Ticketmaster, Macy's and Target. Now driving results for brands like True Classic, hexclad, Ridge and Jones Road. I would know. This is the reason I ended up buying three pans from Hexclad instead of two. Aftercell has already generated over 1 billion in additional revenue for E commerce brands. Revenue that doesn't require more traffic or higher cac. So check out after sell and tell them that the operator sent you.

[Matt]

If you go Sean, if you go from. If you just follow the buying journey, right. First we have to get attention the immediately what comes up for me is how do I Get the attention of somebody. So, like, there's the different channels we can go into this paid social, there's TikTok shops, like there's all those places, right, that we all have talked about a lot of. But to me, if I'm thinking of just the consumer behavior part of this, there must be triggers, right? So like when somebody is on a buying journey in a category, something put them there. So like the famous story that comes to mind for me, do you remember when Target got in a pilot because they figured out that some teenager was pregnant before she had told her parents, right? Because they could look at her buying behavior and be like, hey, we're going to mail like, you know, pregnancy things or like baby things to this house. And it showed up at the person's house. I'm butchering this story. But like the parents were like, who the hell's pregnant in this house? Like, why are we getting Target flyers about like buying, you know, strollers and cribs? But, you know, every, every buyer in their journey has a trigger that put them into your market, right? You can't say that everybody is your market. So like, you go out and build attention, but you still have to think about what are the triggers that put them into a buying journey. Am I wrong?

[Sean]

No, totally. And yeah, I, when I worked at, in an agency 10 years ago, people would come in and say, my target customer is everybody. And that's just wrong. Like, because even the best categories on earth right now, like I brought up peptides and GLP1s. That's not everybody. It's just people who are overweight, right? So even there, a trillion dollar market, their customer is not everybody, right? So, you know, let's say you, you're smart and you chose a good category that has ton of awareness, like Peptides, right? And then how do you make sure you're getting people into your funnel that, that you're reaching the right people who have the right triggers, right? And a lot of that has just been outsourced to the algorithms of the world. Okay, Like Meta knows who's in market for whatever, right? So you take your offer, you tell Meta what it is, and then it'll go serve you impressions. What most of, the, most of the heavy lifting is done for you. And that's why we say, you know, you, you start with paid ads, you start with organic video, because those algorithms have gotten so powerful, they know what people want, right? It's just, it's just the reality, like maybe 25 years ago, you'd have to do Studies and like try to figure out your core demo and then like do billboard ads, try to reach moms in suburbia. You don't gotta do that anymore. You make one video being like, hey, if you're interested in peptides, please watch this video. Anyway, here's my offer. And it'll be served to 10,000 people who are the exact audience of that, right? They'll share it to their friends so that like the buying journey, it's different if you have to push people in, right? Like Rich has to push people into a buying journey. You gotta push people in. And that's why we had to build our own awareness machines. That's why choosing the right category is so important here.

[Matt]

I love that you mentioned the algorithm thing. Algorithmic ad platforms or even just like content social media, whatever, they have taken a, what used to be a relatively simple buying journey, right? And they've really made it so that like customer discover brands in fragments now like they, it's like an ad, a creator, a direct mail piece, an Amazon listing. They saw it in a store. Like there is so many ways to discover a brand and it's so fragmented that the algorithms are actually your best friend in this fragmented world. They find the moment and serve the message to the person at the moment. So like they're taking away some of that old school like guesswork that we used to have to do simply because they have way more data, right? So like they can pick off the customer in the journey at the moment that you want them to. All of this like buying journey stuff, we're still skipping over the who is your customer, right? And how do you figure that out? So like we've talked about reasons that people buy, we talked about the journey, but how do you think about like figuring out the very first thing, who do I, who. How do I develop a thesis on who my customer is?

[Sean]

You can be customer led or product led in that, in that decision flow, right? You know, there's a friend of the show, he launched a sports drink, okay. And it was just going after athletes or whatever. I think, you know, he's a golfer, he wanted to make a sports drink for golfers. They raised money or whatever. It turns out that the number one buyer of their product was nursing women because it really, really helped with breast milk development. Like it was shared in all the forums, it was all over the Facebook groups. Like they were selling out everywhere they could go because it was like really good for breast milk development. Now that is, that is a product led customer discovery, right? Like he had Customers pulling his product in, and that's the product market fit he ended up leaning into, right? But when he went to go invent the thing, he was like, my customer is athletes. I'm a golfer. That's who we're making stuff for, right? So both ways are valid, right? There's, there's, there are success stories on both sides where you're like, you have an ideal customer. You go out there and you make it right? And the flip side is you let the world tell you who your product is or who your customer is. When you're launching a brand, I think you have to be customer led. You have to tell us who your customer is. You have to make ads, right? But you have to be loosely tied to that because if you're going after the athlete and the cacs are $1,000, but you open up female targeting and it drops to 100 bucks. Well, you don't have a sports company. I'm telling you right now, like, you will go out of business trying to make that work, right? And going back to my agency days, I would see this all the time is, you know, we had five fashion brands and they'd all show up and they say, my core customer is, they live in Silver lake, they make $200,000 a year, they would never eat at McDonald's and, you know, they only shop Lululemon and Irwin and whatever else, right? And I'm like, okay, well, you just, you just described less than 1% of the population. So you're going to have a very small business competing with the wealthies on earth, or let's try to open the aperture and find a new bucket of customers, right? So anyway, when you're launching something, be super focused, have a customer in mind, put it out there, but then be willing to look at the data and pivot, right? And when you have a brand trying to find a new angle, ask your customer base. You know, this is when the surveys actually really matter. You send it out like, hey, who are you and why did you buy this thing? And you'll see, you know, who you think your customer is. But then you might find a thread of somebody new, right? And then that's how you can open up a new angle to your business.

[Matt]

Most AI tools right now are all promise and no delivery. You know exactly what I am talking about. Super fancy launch videos. This is why I'm loving what Rich Panel is doing. They have AI and support smashed together. Made it practical, made it useful, made it valuable to brands today, not on some future promise. And instead of asking you to spend weeks writing prompts and uploading help docs and babysitting. They flipped the whole script. Their AI builds your support team for you and everything it needs. I've watched it, it works. It's freaking amazing. Rich Panel even guarantees 50% of your support volume will be automated by AI within 30 days or your money back. I call that a no brainer offer. The pricing is also kind of wild. About $0.20 per conversation instead of most other vendors being like a dollar to $3 which is a little nuts. If you are Interested, go to richpanel.com demo not for some generic demo, but to actually book a call and watch them build your act. When we launched Pela, this I'm dating, this is going way back like eight, nine years ago. Eight years ago when I launched it. The what we did at the beginning was we actually came up with five different customers and different reasons that each person would buy because we didn't really know, like we don't actually know what's going to work, we don't know what the pricing should be like, the message, all that stuff, right. So we came up with five and we were dead wrong on the one. So. And of the five, none of them worked. But out of one of them came this like little pocket of people called zero wasters. And these are like YouTube creators and Instagrammers at the time who were trying to live their life on absolutely no waste. They used to like do videos, guys where they would have like a mason jar and that would be like a year of their personal waste in like a little mason jar. So this customer turned out to be a massive fan of a compostable phone case. Right now we went into it thinking like, oh, people who care about sustainability are going to be our customer. Well, it turns out it was actually this like little tiny niche that was really where all of the noise came from and all the initial traction came from. So I think on that what you're hitting on, Sean, is like you probably, if you're launching a new brand, you probably are wrong on who you think your initial customer is. And then you really want to think about over time like, is that customer? How deep is that customer? Right. You know this earlier and am I going to have to evolve or expand out from this like sort of toehold customer that I have acquired?

[Sean]

Yeah, look inside of Ridge, our biggest, deepest customer pool is gift givers. Right. But the problem is it's very hard to have that. As always on this year, there's birthdays all year, but like it's very hard to target people who are, who are interested in giving a birthday gift and really rely on that. But for the holidays it is. Half my revenue for the entire year comes from people who are gift givers. Right. And when we launched the brand, we were trying to sell cool wallets to cool guys, right? And just like how that's changed to be like this very big deep pocket of customers.

[Matt]

Okay, Sean, So on the customer thing, Meta's partnership ads are all the rage. We've had multiple people on the pod talk about like, this is how you're winning on Meta right now with, with ads. When it comes to influencers partnerships like ugc, when you're early on as a brand, you don't really know who your customer is yet or you're still trying to figure it out. How wide and how deep do you go with influencers, partnerships, creators, all of those things?

[Sean]

Influencer marketing is the overarching bucket here probably, right? Because like the three things we talked about, influencer partnerships and user generated content are just different tools for different parts of the ecosystem. So like let's, let's take each one for what they are, right? When I, when I hear the word influencer, I think pay for post. I am paying a big celebrity or a big account to post about us and hopefully drive meaningful sales. Right now they might give us ad right to that content and then I might run it as a partnership ad, right? And then that kind of bridges the gap there where, you know, I have Hailey Bieber, she does a post about us and then I take her ad account and I run from the Hailey Bieber account and now it's a partnership ad, right? And then so that's one end and then that's the middle and then the other end is user generated content. This is TikTok shop affiliates mass posting videos. I get right to that content and then I run it on my ad account or their ad account. I'm running those partnership ads and each one of those are different tools in the tool belt for different things. So look, I brought up Hailey Bieber earlier. Ridge should probably not work with Hailey Bieber. It would be $300,000 for a post. Her audience probably isn't buying that many rich wallets, right? Even though gift giver is a big part of it, it's just, it's just that's very hard to activate, right? One Hailey Bieber post will actually see money from that, right? So when we go out there to do our influencer post, we're working with people like JerryRigEverything or Marques Brownlee, like tech focused, you know, building credibility, really trying to sell to a smaller, more core audience who will respond well to those value props. Right now with Marques, it's a partnership because he'll post about us, he'll be in his YouTube videos and then we'll also run him in ad content. So he's kind of bridging the gap there, right. We're taking his words, we're bringing it to our platform and we're amplifying that. And then on the user generated content side, we're working with hundreds, if maybe thousands of people, right? They are shooting tons of content. We're taking it down, we're editing it up and there we're really seeing just what works, right? We don't really know who these people are, we don't know who they're really speaking to. We're feeding into the algo and one of them will just hit and we'll get a million dollars in spend and that's our best performing ad. So different tools for different parts of the ecosystem.

[Matt]

It also sounds like you're using all these tools to attack trust in the brand, right? So like all of these like you know, influencers, partnerships, ugc, like all ugc, like there's paid for ugc, then there's legitimate customer ugc. All of that is sort of like as a brand you need to, you're constantly trying to deposit into the trust bank, right? So like that when somebody is ready to buy, it's like, oh yes, Ridge Wallet. Like I saw Marquez post about it. I've seen like 50 people in my feed talk about gifting it to their boyfriend. Like that must be some element of this, right? Is like it's not just awareness, but it's also like I've got to have the brand trusted. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are coming. Are you ready? Not in the normal marketing calendar offers prep sense. I'm talking measurement and attribution. Are you even going to know what winning and losing looks like when the big Q4 season hits? Reality is the businesses that win set up their measurement solution when the times are slow, not the night before the big weekend. There's a reason for this. You see with North Beam, you're getting a totally independent, completely new set of ad performance numbers with infinite look back windows. That means that the longer that the data grows, the more valuable it becomes. So when CPMs are spiking in November, you will know precisely where every dollar is coming from. While your competitors are guessing this Is important. Black Friday is one in the summer, not the day before. Book a demo with North Beam today. The link is in the description. Go check it out.

[Sean]

I would say influencer partnerships deliver the ability to borrow trust from people. So like, in your life, think about who's the most trusted celebrity voice. You, you, you would go to for information on stuff, right? And maybe you're very well read and it's Malcolm Gladwell or maybe you're a chef and it's Gordon Ramsay, right? Well, you know, all of those people have podcasts or, you know, have agents and you can borrow that trust for money and have them stand behind your product. And we saw hexcloud do that, you know, in spades, right? Squarespace does that with the Malcolm Gladwells of the world. So you can, you can really borrow that trust and you can be associated with that person with the user generated content piece. It just helps you unlock new surface areas of angles. For instance, Ridge probably would never think to sponsor a Spanish language creator. Like, it just. I'm not opposed to it. I just would never think about it, right? But with user generated content, you're getting such a wide aperture of people, experiences, videos coming in that some of them will be Spanish language and some of those will actually work in ads. And now we have a new angle we never thought about. We have a new pocket of people to go out there and serve. So, you know, some of it's attacking trust, some of it's actually just expanding your surface area.

[Matt]

Let's move to the fourth thing, which is ultimately, how do you sell to the customer? So you've got attention, you figured out awareness, you figured out, you know, who the customer is, how to reach them, like all, all that stuff. Okay, you still gotta, like, how do I sell? And to me, I said, I wanna start this off by saying a bunch of things that don't matter when you're figuring out how to sell. So here's what doesn't matter. Conversion rate, doesn't matter. Heat maps don't matter. Card abandonment doesn't matter. Checkout process, segmentation, all this stuff doesn't freaking matter when it comes to learning how to properly sell to the customer, right? What you have to figure out is offer. Ultimately, if you don't nail the offer for whatever you're selling, none of that matters. Do you agree or disagree, Sean?

[Sean]

Don't just abandon looking at conversion rate because I think it's a helpful, yeah, I think it's a helpful data point to let you know if your offer's working. But let's talk about, you know, checkout flows, heat maps, card abandonment. The best industries, okay, have so much demand that they can be bad at all of these things. The reason why consumer is so hard is it's purely discretionary. If my cart is a little too confusing, people are going to bail and buy a competitor. But go try to buy a ticket to a sporting event, a ticket to a flight. Like the, the industries that are, there's so much demand. There's like, they don't give a. They're like, they're like, no, we're going to make you click nine buttons. Oh, you know what? We crashed. Who cares? Log back in and do it again, right? Because those industries, just like they, they are better, they have more demand, they are gated to some degree, right? So you want to be in an industry or have a product that there's so much demand for, that even if your website sucks, people are still going to buy it, right? And we've seen examples of this. People with very ugly websites, like, hard to check out. You know, I always bring up James Purse as an example. They still charge for shipping. No matter how much money you spend. Fifteen hundred dollars order, they're going to charge you 15 bucks for shipping. And it's because, look, their customer wants the stuff. They'll, they'll pay whatever. So when you get down to commodity goods, competitive goods, that's where you have to get really good at conversion rate, really good at Cardiban, and really good at segmentation, right? And the lesson to take away from this is try to elevate yourself to an industry where you have, you know, wind at your back. Like it's a growing category. There's tons of awareness. You don't have to work that hard to get sales, right? And it could just be totally abandoned the business you're in right now because it's too difficult. But let's say you're selling, you know, dog beds in 2026, very competitive category. Everyone has dog bed. Well, then you have to get good at conversion rates, heat maps, card abandonment, and more importantly, the most important thing Matt talked about is the offer. Why is your offer better? Why is your offer going to win?

[Matt]

I'm, I'm so happy you hit on the, like the category you're in and the demand it automatically has. You know, it makes me think of this. Like if you told my daughter that she needed to hire a carrier pigeon to buy a Taylor Swift concert ticket, she would do it, right? Like that's how much demand there is to go See, a Taylor Swift show is like, she could just make everybody send it in by, like snail mail, like you send a donkey, and she would still pack the stadium.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Matt]

The rest of us, you got to think a little harder.

[Sean]

You could tell your daughter, hey, we have to walk to the concert. And it's in, it's in Vancouver and it's going to take us two weeks. She's like, all right, well, let's go.

[Matt]

Yeah, I'll get my shoes on. Let's go. Yeah, so, but I guess, like for the rest of us, then all of that stuff is true. Like offer, I think also too, like, when people hear offer, if you're not in the industry, I think the immediate thought goes to discount. Right. And that that is not what makes a good offer. Like, offer has a lot of elements to it. There's. There is price. Like, there's the product, the price. There's a guarantee. So, like Ridge, you're famous for, what's your guarantee? It's like lifetime guarantee on the product, which is a stupid guarantee from a business perspective, but great for the customer. There's like delivery and proof of promise. So, like, you know, do you have a lot of trust and reviews and all that stuff? Like, there's that part of our offer urgency and scarcity. You already hit on those earlier. Like, there's only three left or you have 12 hours before this deal expires. Like, that's part of the offer. So I just think for people that are thinking about, like, how do I sell something, I would spend a lot more time on the offer and how to position it relative to the rest of the category than I would almost everything else in the purchase journey. Like offer can make up for a checkout, in my opinion.

[Sean]

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[Matt]

Okay, so on, on this offer topic, Sean Ridge has been around a long time. You guys have probably tried a lot of stuff. Gift with purchase. I know you guys do a big sweepstakes thing. What, what are some of the offers that have worked best for you? And then are there any that have just completely flamed out that you thought would be a banger and just did not work at all?

[Sean]

Yeah. Well, I'm glad you brought up that discounts aren't offers. Like, discounts are a part of offers, but when people hear offer, they're like, oh, you want me to go on promo? No, like, honing your offer over time is like, what, what promises are you making to the customer? And like, what problem are you solving? Why do they need to buy this right away? Right? So we've, you know, we've expanded the offer. We have a, we have a lifetime guarantee right now. And let's talk about our rings program because I think it's the best offer we've ever rolled out is that it's never lost, forever fit. So what that means is if your ring stops fitting, we will ship you a new one. If you lose your ring, we will ship you a new one. Right. And there's up to two times coverage. So you buy a ring, you get up to two additional replacements. And why was that such a, like, we call them no brainer offers. An offer. When you hear it, you're like, yeah, why would I ever buy from anybody else?

[Matt]

You feel stupid for not taking it.

[Sean]

Yeah. And it's because what we found out in our research is the biggest problem with men's wedding bands is they lose them. It's like, it's like they're, you know, you can't track them. Like it's a small little piece of metal you put around your, your finger. And 25% of men told us that they've lost it in the past 10 years. So it's like, okay, well we gotta, we gotta solve that problem for these guys. And it's just a no brainer offer. And it's got that business to 50 million a year.

[Matt]

I vacuumed up my wedding ring, so I know it's not technically lost. It's just somewhere in my house's central vac system. So I don't know where. Like, if I could somehow get a, like a magnet or something in there, I could get my wedding ring back. But it's gone. So I. This resonates, dude. That's a great way to phrase it. What a killer offer. That's Fricking awesome. So what. What do you call that? Never lost forever fit? Is that the word you used? Is that what you use to the customer, too?

[Sean]

For sure. It's a never lost forever fit guarantee. And, you know, if you ask anybody, before we launched rings, no one thought we'd have any business winning that category. It is omega competitive, right? It's like, there's no. There's nothing proprietary going on. It's little pieces of metal that have existed forever, right? And you know, you can buy them from any jewelry store. You can buy them on Amazon, you can buy them from Tiffany's, right? Like, this is literally commodity goods level stuff. So how we approached it, like, okay, what is. What are problems that are still left to solve, right? And so we launched this, and yeah, it's a. Currently we're doing like, 10% of all men's engagement rings in America. So it's like, we have a huge. A huge penetration in the market right now.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Sean]

So it's been great for us.

[Matt]

So, okay, so on this then. So wallets, rings, you have hit on category expansion a number of times. And that kind of brings me to, like, the fifth part that I want to talk about, which is this sort of, like, brand loyalty. You know, when do you. When do you expand categories? Or when do you try to figure out how to sell people more? So, like, maybe we can break this up into when do you try to sell somebody more of something? And then when do you start to add new products to your brand and expand categories? Like, are there ways that you can help people think about this?

[Sean]

Yeah, well, going back to, like, choosing the right product category, I could beg someone to get a second wallet, and, like, I could be on my knees offering for free. And still, if it was literally free, maybe 50% of people would take me up on it. And that's how you could tell you're in a bad product. Is that like. It's like, you know, if you're starving, like, you'll pay any price for that first slice of pizza, but when you're about to throw up because you just ate a bunch of pizza, no one could offer you anything to eat the next slice, right? And that's kind of like the. The wallet. The wallet line on that is one. Like, nobody needs more than one, right? Um, so, you know, we got into product expansion just to solve that one problem. And I've talked about it ad nauseam on this podcast on Titans episodes. Moparators. Listen, listeners here at Connor talk about it. We talk about it everywhere. Right. Um, so you want to be in product categories where there's a natural need and want for more. And, you know, Mike at Trevi is doing a great job here, right? Like, they're consumable. It's electrolytes. Like, that's why the meta has shifted so much on dot com, like on, like on. On E commerce Twitter, on, you know, E Commerce Fuel. Everyone look, this is the new meta. It's like it has to be consumable, right? Or quasi consumable. Like fashion and clothes or whatever durables is just like, you know, not. Not it anymore. And that's just because you can sell them more. And there's brands that have great brand loyalty. And I think the fashion companies are doing this like Buck Mason, right? And so, you know, how many T shirts do you really need? Like, probably four a year. If you buy four T shirts a year for like six years, you're gonna have a ton of T shirts. You know what I mean? So, like, they have to solve their LTV problems via brand loyalty expansion out into shorts and pants and jackets and whatever else, right? Where if you're Trevi, you just keep shipping people electrolyte packets all day long, right? It's an easier life to have if you're just doing that. So when you get into category, I think category dictates this and that's what you should think about.

[Matt]

Most AI tools and software don't give you direct ROI every month, but PostScript does. I run two PostScript AI products at Ridge. Both show up on our P and L Infinity testing runs continuous A B tests on our SMS automations completely in the background. It's driven $446,000 in incremental revenue. Not just attributed incremental, that's a 32x incremental ROAS with click through rates up 43%. Then there's shopper and AI sales agent that answers every inbound text in under 40 seconds. We're running 23x ROI on messaging costs alone. If you want SMS software that gives a proven ROI, go to Postscript IO and book a free demo. And would you say Ridge is like a brand loyalty play?

[Sean]

Right.

[Matt]

So, like, you've built the brand you started, Walt, you're expanding categories and there's like, there's brand equity that you are tapping into. I know Katie from Caitlin Lane. She's done this across a ton of categories. Like Portland leather goods. Like, they just do everything in leather. Is that kind of how you view Ridge? Is like, look, we have brand equity, we have loyalty. Let's pick good categories that we can expand into with the brand that we have for sure.

[Sean]

And it's porting over trust. You talked about trust earlier, right? You're borrowing trust from influencers, social proofs, a real thing. And what we've seen is just like, we can enter into categories and charge more than legacy competitors. And, you know, we had a meeting with Best Buy, and that's a bloat blue. That's what blew them away. It's like, look, you're on shelf next to the anchors of the world, the apples of the world, right? And you're charging more for your products than them. So they're like, yeah, it's amazing. We don't know how you're doing it, but keep doing it. And. And that is. That is the trust aspect.

[Matt]

There's also, like, you hit on this, the gifting element of Ridge, which I think is another way to. So I would call this, like, for people listening, there's buying modes, right, that you can also lean into. So as a brand, Ridge has a strong gifting element to it, right? Like, that is a buying mode that you have, but Trevi is like a replenishment buying mode. Then there are things like, some brands are great at discovery. I actually would put Buck Mason here. Like, I think they do a really good job of, like, curating and designing new things. You just go in and you discover new stuff. There's brands that are really great at education. There's brands that are great at entertainment, assisted buying, deal hunting. Like, we had the. What's his face, the Utopia deals guy on from Amazon. He's literally sold at least one thing to everyone in America because, like, he just focuses on the best deal. So I think for brands, there's just lots of buying modes that you can play with. But I will say this. I think it's very hard to force loyalty. So, like, I think way back when we talked about, like, loyalty programs with brands and why they don't work. And I think that a big reason for that is, like, you just can't force loyalty. You can't put something in and just expect people to, like, tap into it. It's just not how loyalty works.

[Sean]

For sure. Loyalty is just affinity over time, right? Like proximity over time. You know, am I loyal to the milk I buy or is it just like, that's the one that the store had one time? And I guess I'm gonna keep buying it, and after five years, I guess I'm loyal to that milk, you know what I mean? I think this is like really a big part of Shark Ninja's success is that Shark Ninja had a horrible reputation, but they stayed in business and they stayed around in business for 15 years and now they're trusted. It's like that's just all it took. They were at Target, they were at Walmart, they were making knockoffs. But 15 years later, I guess they're the trusted brand in, you know, home goods. So good for them.

[Matt]

Oh, dude, they've crushed. I also, okay, it's like on the Shark Ninja thing, this sort of makes me think of like the second part of this sort of like when to sell them more, which is just straight up retention. There's a lot of software and a lot of companies out there that are going to tell you that they're going to help with retention. But the reality is that the solution to retention is often a better product or a more coherent next product as opposed to like the best time to send out an SMS or the how quickly should you drop the email flow? Dude, it's mostly product. Like that product and then like the experience of the first one, the first purchase, like not just the experience of using the product, but the buying experience from like the first ad to when they got it. That will dictate more loyalty than tactically. When do I send the damn sms?

[Sean]

Well, dude, I mean, I could give you every tip on earth about how to have an amazing subscription company I could tell you about. You know, get them to sign up like subscription only and then don't email them again, like don't send them reminders.

[Matt]

Right?

[Sean]

I could, I could give you every little tactical tip to help churn, but if the product tastes bad, people aren't going to buy it. It's like that's what it comes down to. It doesn't. Dude, it could, it could help you jump higher, it could help, it could make you taller. If it tastes bad, you're gonna have a churn problem. So it ends up being product for all this. Yes, it's always product consumer behavior in a nutshell. If you're listening to this, the one thing to take away from my perspective is when you're going to create your brand, you are gonna have an idea in your head about who your customer is. But you have to put your product out there in the world and let the customers tell you who they are. You know, I've seen tons of brands launch and they're like, my customer is this super successful, whatever X, Y and Z. Look, this avatar they have in their mind of who they are, who they want to be. And then a totally different customer shows up. And if you keep leaning into the wrong customer, tax just go up. So put your product out there and then whoever loves it, that's your customer, lean into those people. Matt, what's your takeaway from this episode?

[Matt]

Okay, I'm going to piggyback off of what you just said. And I think that if you are, even if you are very experienced in consumer and you've been in this space a long time, you want to learn as much as possible about why. Why people do what they do. Okay, so what Sean is hitting on is brilliant. Never. You just don't. You can't make assumptions around who you think the customer is. You have to listen to the market, listen, look at your data. My recommendation is that everybody goes and reads Cialdini's Influence. I think that book is by far the fastest way to get up to speed on, like, the basics of what influences people's purchasing behavior. You could probably just read that book and you will be a better marketer. I don't care how good you are. If you haven't read it yet, go read that book.

[Sean]

All right, guys, thanks for being here. Thanks for listening. Matt just told you to read a book. You got homework. I want to hear. I'm not going to read the book. So you read it. You tell me about it in the comments below. Tell me what I missed. Thank you guys for being here. Appreciate you. Talk to you later. Goodbye.