15 minutes of eComm Wisdom: Seb from Genie

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I feel like the the space you're in, it's a very complex space. and, and you've managed to get to market quite quickly. So I wonder are there any tips you'd have for other people working in e com SaaS who are trying to get to market, but they're trying to build very complex solutions.

So we're not talking about a bundle builder type of application or, simple, things you can do via apps within Shopify. We're talking about tackling inventory challenges and maybe going after some really big players. how do you, yeah, how do you, like, how do you get to market so quickly?

I'm happy you say it's quickly, it feels like for us, it was a work of love, for a bit over a year.so it doesn't feel that quick to us. what's happened is we've grown really quickly. I think we, it's, we spent a long time building this with two, three brands. And then we went to closed beta, which, we're about to go out of that and allow anyone to sign up. And that's where we went from,a handful to like north of a hundred in [00:01:00] weeks.

But I think in terms of building it, it's a couple of things that worked well. I think one is Shopify is really helpful for this as an ecosystem. And I think really unique. and that with almost anyone that's built a big e comm SaaS in the last couple of years, right? It's if you start with Shopify, you havea lot of fast growing merchants and, a really well designed platform.

And obviously you guys all know about the Storetasker as well, right? Like it's amazing how.documented the APIs are at Shopify, how easy it is to start developing on top of Shopify, how easy it is to even work with a customer. if you think back to, I worked with friends back in the day who had, Magento installs.

And where I needed to go and try to pull inventory data out. It was hard for them to create an account for me that allowed me to access certain amounts of data. Today, when we troubleshoot things with a user, if we get stuck, we're like, Hey, give us a collaborator request. And that takes two minutes and we're able to go in and see exactly what's going on and go, okay, cool.

we're getting this data wrong because [00:02:00] you have two locations and they're actually, only one of them is a real location, so we'll have to go ahead and maybe take that out or something.but so one, Shopify just helps you build and grow really quickly with this.

I think the other one is probably, we've been obsessed with solving this in the right way, which kind of means almost like working backwards.

So we didn't want to have, a million features that are very narrow. And that sound great in a sales process. But then when you start using them, you keep hitting the limits. We have to start by building a couple of things end to end that worked really well, and so that the user can onboard and use shop and use genie as part of their stack, but not fully yet.

And to give an example of that, we initially really focused on insights. That was like the biggest thing we heard from people was like, If I'm a fast growing brand from going from 500k to 5 million to 20 million, I don't really know what's going on [00:03:00] even in just the DTC part of my business. So we initially just focused on getting that right.

And we're a bit like, okay, seeing incoming inventory is difficult. you need people to create their purchase order somewhere, but actually That's a big, complicated thing to fix. So we'll just have really good insights with a really clear dashboard with, what we call a spreadsheet on steroids, which is basically our way of bringing together product data, supplier data, and, sales and inventory data, and being able to let you play around with that in a super, super intuitive way.

We just built that and then said, okay, everything that's purchase orders, like import them in Genie.io. Obviously, if we do hundreds of these, that's allowed us to actually understand how this works. And you start applying the technology to do that faster. But so we've built something in this space in,a year, not two, three, four, five years by focusing on like solving a part of the problem really well, really fast, really [00:04:00] intuitively, and then moving on to the next and the next.

So where we're at today with that is we want to make analyzing planning and ordering inventory really intuitive. We want to make that like a superpower for any merchant. And today with Genie, analyzing is super easy and, highly flexible, but you wouldn't notice how complicated it is under the hood.

and, you talked about some really good customer feedback. And I think that's probably what's propelling you guys to, to get a lot of customer growth in such a short amount of time. you've gone from zero customers to hundreds you mentioned or around that mark,in a year, what's, but also while being in a closed beta.

So how does that all work for you? Is it, did you crack something? Like an acquisition funnel, or is it really just you've built a good product and there's good word of mouth and honestly, if you had to pinpoint it, you couldn't quite tell me, Hey,Twitter DMS work really well or something like that.

[00:05:00] yeah, I looked at this yesterday and we've been from like. Yeah, all this growth basically happened in about four and a half, five months. I think there's the whole bit that you wouldn't see in the graph, which is building the core platform,the second half of last year, and then getting. Getting like the self onboarding like as stupid as it sounds, but making it something people can set up in a couple of minutes.

Once that was in place, what was easy is, or not easy, but what I guess works really well in our space is, everyone really struggles with an element of inventory. It's the sort of the stereotype is that you either have too much or too little, but never just enough. Everyone struggles with inventory to some degree if you're building a brand.

because you need to understand how much you have, how much you need to have and getting it wrong tends to be quite expensive. So the good thing about that is that we're not,

one of our customers compared it with going to the dentist, but like we're not [00:06:00] out there putting a problem to people that they haven't experienced. If you have a brand, you're fast growing, maybe you're a small team. Like you've had this problem.one of the brands we worked with, right? Solo built the brand to a really, sizable scale and then realized he needed someone to literally just help him fulfill demand.

And that was like packing orders that was making or in from suppliers. It was getting like design processes through things like that. So we're reaching out to people on the topic they care about. mostly via email, but a bit LinkedIn. we're about to start doing a bunch of content. but we've been very down low, right?

We've not been sponsoring big events. We've not been, we've not actually made an awful lot of noise about what we're doing. But we reach out to people and be like, Hey, Are you struggling with having too much or too little? Do you know what it costs you right now to be holding the inventory you're holding?

We had a couple of different ways that we're approaching people on this.and the next step is you can literally find out in sub five minutes if you, it's almost [00:07:00] like,these like personalized, marketing audits that people used to send out a couple of years ago. Yeah, for sure. In SEO and site speed and those types of spaces.

It's like that, but you click a button. and so that's what's worked really well in terms of getting people to install I think what's worked really well to keep people to get people to keep using a tool like ours because I think You know one thing is to install the other one is to adjust your workflow a little bitis one the way in which the product works and we've designed it which is basically to pack As much value in as little time as we can almost the opposite of what you have with legacy systems here Which play this game almost of you spend a long time implementing it and then everything hopefully workswithin a couple minutes of signing up you get a dashboard that usually You know when we get people live on a call doing this leads to some really interesting discussion, right?

People are like, oh, I didn't realize i've got this many products that are not selling that are stale or Shit, I'm about to run out of this bestseller. [00:08:00] Like I didn't actually realize that. So that's like the first level is just land on this easy, simple to use dashboard. The second level is then we try to teach you how to do some day to day analysis based on what you told us is important to you, in an extremely straightforward way.

And so that's,either a set of emails we might send you with ways in which you do that analysis or it's literally like a feature that we call saved views where basically you go and go into our spreadsheet on steroids and just pull up a template that was created by somebody else for how to do this particular analysis, which you can then save and rerun and export and work with, et cetera, et cetera.

the third thing that we've started doing recently. I think a lot of this is like internally about how we activate customers, but I think it is cool because it's, it makes a difference to the problem is we notice that different people interact with inventory, but sometimes they need like an anchor point to come in.

And I think the best way to compare this [00:09:00] is.you may not everyone in the team will want to see the same data all the time, but some people want to see what an insight is. It's like the equivalent of having a really great data analyst. It's Hey, I've crunched things and I've seen that,we're actually selling a lot faster in Australia than we are in the U S and we're not going to, we're going to be running out of stuff in the Australian warehouse.

so you started automating more of that in the app and outside of the app where basically we'll go and tell people things they may not know about their business as a way to build up their confidence and understanding their inventory data and then acting on that. That's cool. Yeah. cause that's what broadly like in a nutshell, we've got most of our initial cohort through pure outbound.

So I get a bunch of referrals, we're starting to get a couple of agencies, partners that want to work with us on implementing, but so far, we've just reached out to brands and had really good conversions on that. And then once they start using Genie, it's really just the fact that, they're able to easily understand and act on that data and build that confidence and see that impact.

Awesome. Cool. [00:10:00] So I, I have one last question for you, more for the other operators in the room for the ones who, because we have a lot of partners.

Who are building SaaS, who are in the agency world , and catering to merchants. And so they're facing similar challenges to you as a business owner. and I want you to reflect on your building of Genie.io from the beginning. So probably two or a little over two years ago around that time,what's been like the biggest challenge do you think in getting Genie.io to this stage?

Am I allowed to use swear words here? Yeah, of course. Go for it. I think inventory and e commerce have been like a right mindfuck. so

I thought initially, because I worked with friends on this problem and fixing it for their business that I understood it, and then you understand it for one customer or for one user, and then you add more to it. And there's always, it's, there's always like a trap door almost, right? It's okay, I can do this.

I understand this to get to correct data, but what if [00:11:00] that, and that trapdoor can be easy to solve, or it can, which, is like a technical problem, or it can be hard to solve, which is like human behavior, right? Like people aren't, people are generally not good at picking up a task and finishing it in different threads.

They're very good at finishing it end to end. And so when it comes to something like mapping a bundle or adding suppliers, like you don't want someone to go through part of the process and finish it. And so I think the hardest thing in building Genie has almost been to keep conviction with us and the team that the problem that we're solving is so worthwhile while having to figure out all these trapdoors and decide which ones to deal with and which ones to ignore.

and I think that's been particularly hard for us. And I think it's hard for anyone that's building something complicated in e com because The bar is pretty high. I've got friends who are building businesses that help enterprises do certain things. And sometimes the bar is really low there, like you're basically replacing a couple of [00:12:00] people doing a very manual process.

It doesn't have to look good. It can be very specific, et cetera. I think when you come, the bar is quite high because the quality of product is almost consumerized. And so it's keeping the faith when it's taking like a while to build that foundation. And while you're building it, finding all these like trap doors that make it take a bit longer.

Like we thought we launched a product in six months. It took us a year. the best thing about it is that once you've done that, you start seeing how much customers valued up and you start seeing what a difference it makes for them. And I remember. The first time early this year, when we sat down and tried to calculate what the impact was that we'd had for one of our, early users, it's they kept telling us every week we got like Slack messages from them.

They would call us and be like, this is awesome. We love it. We've been using it.I've made these decisions. I'm seeing this change. I want to grow this much more next year. And I'm very confident that we've got like all this stuff. And then one day we sat down [00:13:00] and we're like,is it actually true?

So we went and pulled the historical data, pulled the current data, compared it, tried to understand it. And as you went through it, we saw metric by metric, how much better their business was being run. And not all that is our credit, right? they're the ones running the business.

It's fully their credit for doing the right things.but that was the first time I think in a year of building it that with the whole team We had this like sense of it has been difficult to get here And it's absolutely worth it because look at this brand basically growing 2x Look at them doing it with less cash Look at doing it more profitably and now we're seeing that sort of happen over and over again In much shorter time spans like people basically within Two weeks, three weeks going shit.

I made a much better decision on that.now it's really worth it So I think for anybody else that's an operator building in this space I think one part of the advice is be patient, but I think the other part of the advice that I would take much earlier is Try to [00:14:00] almost accept that something is imperfect because there's a lot of things to build an econ But get a really good feel for what the impact is of the things that you're building and that sounds really easy but it's like You will be building for some time.

You'll have a lot of things to do. If you're building an eComm SaaS, you'll choose to do certain things when you do them, don't just ask your customers and solve the problem, actually go into the data and try to understand if it does. Cause if it does, it a drives you and it really steers you. And if it doesn't, you've only spent,a couple of days on it, not a couple of months.

Yeah, there's a base layer of patience and then also like picking the right battles because it's going to be a long war is another way to look at it. Um, awesome, man. Yeah. Thanks so much, Seb. I really appreciate it. Thank you, man. Speak soon.

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