5 minutes of eComm Wisdom: Ben Sharf from Platter

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Platter is a theme and app bundle for Shopify brands. Aimed at improving profitability on your storefront. So our business is built around a couple of core theses. The first one is that a lot of apps in the Shopify ecosystem are features, not products.

And so brand owners get stuck with too many apps, too many support teams and a bloated tech stack, which results in a slower store and a worse conversion. And the second piece to it is that there's a misalignment between brands and most development agencies because agencies get paid for their time.

Whereas brands are incentivized to be as cost effective and fast as possible. And so what happens there is. Development agencies will sometimes complicate things in ways that they don't need to be. And so brands get frustrated and it results in bad outcomes. And so what we've done is natively build a lot of the most popular app functionality around marketing and conversion into one solution to unify your app stack.

And then layer in best practices around increasing your average order value and your conversion rate. So we can quantify making you money and saving you money at the same time.

One of the big things which I alluded to is that there's limitations around what's possible within a theme. Just based on Shopify and the architecture of the, the product itself. And so by building an app very intentionally to supplement the theme and places that you cannot accomplish it.

Allows a more holistic product offering to be more valuable to a merchant. I think that's number one. I think the second piece of it as well is the way in which we think about our product evolving with our merchants, because there's a lot of instances where brands will buy an off the shelf theme and what they get in that current state tends to be the last version of the theme that they're using. And then they start adding customizations in building the future state versions of the theme by themselves in a very bespoke way, which can potentially present challenges down the road. And so for us, what we want to do is continue to evolve our product suite. So at any point, if a new brand decides to use platter, they're getting the latest and greatest. And for brands that have been with us for a while. They'll be able to get access to the new updates and the new features and a future state. Whereas our product is not just pay one fee, get one version of it. And then it's hands off from there. Cause that's how most traditional theme products work today.

I'll give you two answers. the first answer is what we tell clients on day one, because my product team would be mad at me if we didn't, because we don't want to set this unrealistic urgency and expectation that doesn't need to exist because we don't need to set this new standard where you need a new site in two weeks.

Cause like very rarely is it that urgent where it's if I don't have this, my business is going to fail. So we say on average, it takes about 60 days. but we've done sites in a matter of two weeks before. but we say 60 days is the rule of thumb because every brand has different requirements.

Every brand has different complexities. Every brand also has different levels of urgency, right? We have had brands who've come to us like, Hey, we know we need a new website. We know we want to switch to platter. But it doesn't need to be done yesterday. We're not in a rush. We want to make sure we do it the right way.

And there's also checkpoints in our onboarding process that we need the brand to participate in. So if they're missing their deadlines, there's inherently going to be a longer amount of time it takes to get the store alive, but to synthesize that for you in a more succinct answer, it takes about 60 days, but that can scale up and down, depending on the brand's responsiveness.

I worked in a position before starting Platter. That was very specific to e commerce and direct to consumer and the Shopify ecosystem. And my co founders both came from a similar space. So our first couple of customers were honestly just relationships and people who were willing to take a bet on us.

Like I've, with I've talked about this a lot on other podcasts and it's, and on my own socials where you really need to find your champion clients. And like the hard truth is that you have to bend over backwards for those first couple of people who are willing to take a bet on you and you don't have the credibility and the social proof.

And if you can over deliver for them, like when it rains, it pours.

Listening to our customers.I think at the end of the day, one of the things we've done differently, in my opinion, is that we have doubled down on solutions in terms of we raise money to double down on solutions, we built products to solve problems. We didn't raise money to find a solution.

And we didn't just take these like pie in the sky bets on what we think people want. So one of our guiding principles is this concept of knowledge versus belief. So it's instead of thinking, something like know that, something based on like data and knowledge from your customers.

And so I think like serving our customers in the way they want has allowed us to get a good reputation and to get our partners to speak highly about us because we've delivered for what they've expected.

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