5 minutes of eComm Wisdom: Ron from Obvi

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The single biggest unlock for Obvi in the last 2 years that's really exploded our growth has been able to really figure out how to monetize our community.

Community initially was grown for us for the purpose of sharing, learning, and having a place where we can get all our customers together. Now it's become a place where we launch new products (and) where we scale, availability of products.

We really can guess 'Hey, we're about to launch this new SKU

we're probably going to make $100k the first 18 hours' only from the community. So it's kind of cool to being able to monetize it because then you can scale and see where you're getting diminishing returns. And, we haven't been able to hit that part yet which is good, which means there's a lot of room to grow.

So there's 2 parts to R&D, right? " R", which is research. "D" which is development. So let's break those up: So research for us is synonymous community. We don't do any research with anyone else. We go straight to our community, which everyone else can go to just their customer base, open your Klaviyo account.

And you ask, 'Hey guys, what are you looking for next?' When you ask this question, you prompt a research question. Cause you're researching right. And figuring out what do people want? Then when you get a good list of, okay, 'these 3 things seem to be what people want next'.

You take that and you go to your development, which is for us, we have 3 really good manufacturers we work with.

I'll give all 3 of them a chance at making these 3 ideas come to life.

So the other month they'd said 'apple pie', 'cheesecake' and 'salted caramel'are the flavors that the community wanted.

I took all 3 flavors, I emailed all 3 of my manufacturers. They all know I work with each other. And I said, 'Alright guys off to the races. Get me samples. Faster the samples, faster I can order, faster I approve them, the better'. So, within 3-5 days, I have 9 samples.

I get the entire Obvi office, which is we're not remote, we work in an office. Everyone, tastes and samples. We do a blind test. From the blind test, we usually pick 3 to move forward with and from there, I'll also send it to some of my top community members to taste and test. Once we get full approval, we order right away. labels are getting made while the order is happening. Labels are sent and they get the product ready to go online within 4-6 weeks.

So Obvi from a retention standpoint, our retention comes from launching new things, right? So I don't care if you were, if we retain you because you buy the same collagen over and over again. I almost don't want you to, I want you to be more excited.

So we will launch a new flavor every month. And I want you to collect it all. I want you to treat Obvi like a Pokemon. Okay. You got to catch all of them.

Now on the Paw Rangers end, I want the one product you buy I want that to last the lifetime of your pet. Okay. So I go deep in education, fear tactics of stopping, telling you what happens when people stop, not just telling you what happens if people continue, right? We go deep in knowledge base, and really explaining to people that this is a routine, this is not a one time fix all thing.

So, the methodology and delivery, the type of SMS we send, the emails we send, the push notifications we send, the messaging we write, the frequency we send, the promos we do is completely different.

So every Sunday I meet with my virtual assistant. Her name's Estella. I meet with her for an hour. And I plan my entire week, any meetings that are scheduled incorrectly, any overlapping, anything that I'm like wait, I scheduled this weeks ago. What it's about, we'll write descriptions. That meeting probably mentally preps me better than anything else. Because I have no surprises and I go back to back pretty much from 9am to 6pm, 5 days a week. So there's no like big patches of work time or anything. and so I think that meeting is probably my best for prep. My best for being optimal for my team is my all hands meeting that we have every Wednesday at 1pm.

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