Tui Allen - Ampla

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What's up, DTC Pod? Today we're joined by Tui Allen, who is the VP of Product and Design at Amplus. So, Tui, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about your background, some of the companies you work at, and your recurrent role at Ampla.

Yeah, great. Thank you. Well, thank you for having me. It's an awesome pleasure and honor to be here with this great group and be able to talk to and get my voice out there to so many different brands and operators. So, for those of you who don't know, Ampla ampla is the premier financial platform for consumer brands, providing growth, capital, banking, and bill pay services to omnichannel businesses. So we are, like, directly in this space. This is the space we serve. And super excited to be here to chat a little bit about my background.

I've been working at the intersection of technology and solving really hard problems and removing friction from doing business. So that both prior I was at Shopify and now at Ampla, and my mom is actually a small business owner, really helping small businesses thrive and succeed through leveraging technology and really kind of working to sort of make hard problems go away through technology.

I love that. I feel like it's something that both me and Ramon definitely resonate a lot with. Being founders and operators ourselves, it's kind of like we wake up in the morning and we're like, where's the friction that we can get rid of today? And then we start building different processes or solutions to do it. So having the experience that you've had being in kind of the commerce entrepreneurial landscape for a while, being at Shopify, now being at Ampla. One of the reasons we're really excited to have you on the Pod was to be able to talk about learning a little bit more about what those problems are for brands. Right. I think this conversation is even more relevant today because financing and cash flow is so important to businesses. As the economy changes a little bit, that becomes even more in focus.

So I think it'd be really helpful if maybe we just started, if you could paint, like, a little landscape of what is Ampla and also what role do you play in the broader commerce ecosystem, and what problems are you guys building to solve for founders and brand operators?

Yeah, absolutely. So for me, it all starts with really understanding the customer and the market that we serve and going really deep and having a lot of empathy for that space. So one of the things that I've spent a lot of time and continue always to spend time with brands and with customers and even thinking about the full supply chain of CPG. So even on this sort of manufacturing and supply side, and you touched on it, but the stress that comes with having enough funding and managing cash flow is incredibly taxing and exhausting. And there's this huge overhead and burden that businesses sort of carry around making sure that they have enough funding to operate. And what Ampla is really intended to do is to actually change that paradigm, make the hard things go away, and actually really focus on providing brands and suppliers and manufacturers with the tools they need to thrive. The funding. They need to grow the access to insights and to data, to better kind of manage the reality of cash flow variability and make better decisions around how to grow and scale their companies and really just kind of get super deep into CPG problems, where we know one of the unique things Amplit does is we work on an omnichannel basis.

And so a lot of other players in the space, including my former, where I was at Shopify before, they work within one channel. So Shopify is primarily D to C with their online platform. Amazon obviously has a big marketplace, but they're primarily online. Ampla provides an omnichannel solution, like I mentioned earlier, which really allows us to see the full view of everything that a brand does and then solve problems related to all the challenges that come with the reality that you have to operate your business at an omnichannel level, that's the future of commerce is really omnichannel. It's not just online. It's not just offline. It's not just via Instagram or TikTok. It is this omnichannel approach.

And that's really what Ampla specializes in.

And that's another thing I wanted to talk about, too, is the fact that you said one of the big problems is Omnichannel and the fact that before all these brands were just going D to C, exclusively existing on d to C and now it seems like we're going through a massive shift where even emerging brands are going after wholesale, going after Omnichannel even earlier. So, yeah, I'd love to just kind of talk about what some of those problems are for, maybe whether it's a first time brand owner or someone who's back at it again as an operator. What are some of the challenges in going Omnichannel that you guys have found? What are some of the problems that the majority of the brands that you work with are all struggling with when it comes to Omnichannel that you guys are really excited to build around and be able to productize?

Yeah, so there's definitely an element of, I think, demand planning and forecasting that gets really complex. If you're working through one channel and you're just D to C, you can start to understand the patterns and the demand and how much inventory you need to have on hand and how quickly you need to produce that. Inventory to have it available for potentially seasonal, upcoming seasons or end of year any of the sort of big peaks that you may face. But when you start to go Omnichannel, and then you start to potentially throw in a wholesale, the complexity of demand planning and forecasting becomes very challenging to get a handle of. And so at Ampla, as one example, we recognize that having visibility into all of your various revenue sources and those channels from an account sort of reconciliation and accounts receivable reconciliation perspective is really, really important to keeping a pulse on your cash flow, which ultimately is critical for you to be able to kind of run your business. And so that's like one example. And I'm happy to go into some more, but thought I'd pause in case there's any questions around that.

Yeah, because with DTC, you get the money instantly. You might have different payment terms with different vendors, distributors, et cetera. So I'm curious on the demanding sorry, on the forecasting demand front, which side gets more complicated there because DTC, you can pull some levers, actually things like TikTok and blowing up and being mentioned all of a sudden throws your inventory planning out of the window. Do you see the same in retail or is retail more so just the payment terms that make the cash flow complicated and then demand forecasting is a little bit easier.

How do you see those different yeah, a great question. Kind of diving deeper, I think you're right about the spikes that you can sometimes see and the reality of leveraging influencers and some of these sort of more digital channels like TikTok and Instagram to promote your product and how that can drive like, major spikes. I'd say that similarly, depending on the brand and depending on who their sales channels are and where their products are from, a retail perspective. They also have a set of complexity that exists there, where there might be demand or request or volume or things that they have to keep up with. And then similarly, if they're selling on their own platform, D to C, there are kind of unique challenges that they may face there, I think, where it gets really complex. And this is what Ampla is really working to help solve for brands. And actually, to be honest, not only the brand, but also sort of the downstream supply chain. Because you've got to actually then build the products and you've got to make sure you've got enough planning around how you do.

That that we're looking at this omnichannel view and so we have this sort of view of all of the different channels and bringing those together so that brands and business owners can make better and smarter decisions.

Got it. So whenever you guys have a merchant that is a customer, they might come to Ampla and say, we're looking to go Omnichannel, this is what we're looking at. And so Ampla gets involved and helps them out with those decisions. Things to look out for more than just providing the financing.

Yeah, we try to provide the analytics and the insights so that they can make better decisions about return on investment from one channel versus another and potentially any trends. And this is an area that we're going to be doing more and more on because we know it's a real pain point. You touched on funding, so to jump there too is a good segue. One of the other things that I think is challenging for brands and for CPG companies is the nature of the CPG business, obviously, is very cash heavy, cash intensive. You need a lot of upfront funding to actually build the product, ship the product and then sell the product. And there's a long Leeway there as well. So not only is it cash intensive and capital intensive in terms of building the product and inventorying the product, but then there's long Leeways as well. And so Ampla is a transition from this Omnichannel conversation because we look and understand the brand's full view of their operations, not just one slice of operations.

We look at wholesale, we look at retail, we look at kind of the full picture of their operations. We're in a position and because we know brands and the sort of CPG space at a depth, we are able to use this power of the data that we have to provide them with the funding that they actually need and more funding than what your typical potential capital or financing or lending option would be able to provide. Because we, one, know the space, we two, have an amazing amount of data and three, related to the data, we're looking at the whole picture of the channels that they work in.

No, I think that's a really good point too, in terms of how you're able to build a comprehensive product around this problem that at surface value it sounds similar, every brand is trying to go omnichannel, but then that looks a little bit different at every single brand and actually their implementation of it. One thing that I'd love to kind of go into before we kind of talk a little bit more about some of these problems and some of the ways you're productizing them and the offering, I'd love to also go back a little bit further in your career and talk about Shopify. Right. I think Shopify is like a preeminent player in the landscape. Pretty much every brand that we have on the podcast, the vast majority are built on top of Shopify while integrating some other different tools. Why don't you just talk to us a little bit about what your role was at Shopify, what you were working on there and kind of the evolution of Shopify as a player in the ecosystem. But then I'd also love to kind of unpack some of the other things that they've productized and maybe what you're working on. Right.

I know Shopify Capital, for example, that's something that people are pretty familiar with and I'd love to kind of if you could just provide more context on that side of the financing landscape as well.

Yeah, totally. So Shopify is amazing product and company and I'm a huge fan. Shopify is broad in terms of what they do and has an amazing product for spa, entrepreneurs and merchants. It doesn't bring the depth of understanding a specific industry at the level that an amplitude is. We are hyper focused on going very deep to some very unique CPG challenges that are unique. And so I can kind of translate this back to what I did at Shopify. So my role at Shopify was to build and lead the team responsible for changing the paradigm from you run your Shop on Shopify, do you run your whole business on Shopify? And so we launched a money management banking foundation. We launched scaled capital from one country to four countries and really kind of changed.

Not only could they just sell products on Shopify, but they now could log into Shopify to run their full business, which is amazing and great and great products. But again, like I was saying earlier, shopify, one only sees a portion of what a brand is doing. They see what sales and revenue are coming through their platform. And so that directly impacts their ability, for example, in capital, to be able to offer a loan or a capital offer that is comprehensive and large enough to support what the operations are of that specific brand. Because it's a great product, don't get me wrong, but they are looking at one slice of that revenue that's coming in, whereas Ampla is looking at the full picture of all of the sources of revenue and is therefore in a position to be able to sort of offer a capital offer that is much more in alignment with what the brand actually needs to operate. The other things too. And I think this just comes with the nature of the scale of when you've got millions of merchants, you are working to solve problems for the many and that's great. And that's good what we are doing.

So there's a lot of trade offs just being there that we had to make right of like, okay, well, there's this really crazy problem over here and we'd love to solve it and it's like, oh, but that's just a niche and that's a vertical and so we can't really go deep there. So we can't we're just solving for the many. Amplin, I think, is really unique in that we're going really deep into the CPG space. And so we understand the complexities of the fees that are assessed, the brokers that get involved in negotiating deals and getting you into retail locations, the reality and challenges of the demand planning and forecasting that goes when you're working Omnichannel across so many different sort of distribution channels. And those are the problems that I'm excited to go deep on it at Ampla and solve.

Yeah, I think that makes a whole bunch of sense in terms of product scope, right? And what Shopify's core competency is, and when they build a capital product, what they're able to build it around versus you guys and taking the Omnichannel approach. So, again, because Shopify doesn't have the wholesale part of the business or the Omnichannel side of the business, those aren't running through, there's many revenue streams that aren't necessarily flowing through the ecommerce checkout. And so what you guys are saying is that Ampla, you're able to look at the whole business, understand it in the lens of Omnichannel commerce and be able to adequately productize and provide capital or other sort of products and data in regards to that. Whereas Shopify's core competency is really being able to stand up the store, manage your customers, manage orders, and then tie in data that helps support that side of the business. So my next question to piggyback off that would be for a brand who is just starting out, right? Like I think we had kind of alluded at the beginning of the episode, but it seems like Omnichannel is the place everyone wants to be, right? But again, it's not the easiest thing to do because you said capital is a constraint. What advice do you have for brand operators? Because you're able to see this across a lot of brand if you're starting out. What is an Omnichannel strategy for a CPG brand that is just starting?

Yeah, great question. It's funny, I've been spending a lot of time talking to customers recently and it varies, I'd say, on your product. Right? So your product is going to drive a little bit of your strategy. In general, I'd say be really intentional about your first channel and then be really intentional about your view of your full Omnichannel approach. Right? So I think the reality is, like, if you are in this to grow and scale, which you are, you need to have a vision for the end state of where you want to go and be really thoughtful about. Sort of the various channels that are going to be required for you to scale and get to that level, but then be incredibly intentional about being calculated with starting small and learning. And iterating sort of like how we build tech products. Same thing goes with building physical products.

You want to ship and get something of value to your customer base, your end customer base, as quickly as possible to learn and assess value. And then you want to then quickly figure out how you're going to scale that. And so you need to be thoughtful not only about your intentional first step and then ultimately your vision of where you want to go. That also means in the world of CPG and brands, you need to be thoughtful about who are the various suppliers, copackers, manufacturers, who do you want to work with making sure that you can be thoughtful about your margins and the lag time required. There's a lot of long term planning that has to happen early so that you set yourself up for success.

The next question I have in regards to that about setting yourself up for success, it seems like a lot of people who do start brands don't start it because they want to be experts in supply chain and managing an Omnichannel strategy. They start it because there's a product they're really passionate about and they start creating it, they start selling it. It's easy enough to spin up a shopify store and people like it so they're able to keep growing. Is this a use case that you kind of run into in Ampla? Is this something that you see? And how do you think about being able to create products for those customers who again are maybe experts in building brand and experts in building something that people really want, but maybe aren't so much experts in supply chain inventory managing and all the other things in a managing their cash conversion cycle.

I know there's so many things you're so right. Like so much overhead to running a business. And you're right, I don't think your average brand owner, business owner who's like, oh, I'm so excited about this product I have is thinking about all of that overhead. But that overhead is so make or break. And what Ampla is setting out to do is make all of that weight that heaviness that burden go away so that brands can focus on what they love and what they want to do, which is build product. They want to build their product and they want to delight their customer and their end customer. And so, if you think about it, what we're trying to do is really power kind of commerce across the CPG ecosystem. So if you kind of like rewind, it used to not be all that easy as a consumer to buy products right from home or depending on the size of the product, let's use the wayfare.

If it's like a couch or furniture, that was a big pain and there might have been multiple payments and there was maybe like a paper trail of invoices and there was a whole bunch of overhead and burden that came with that, even on the consumer purchase side. And then fast forward, we got to this world of digital checkouts and being able to sort of sit on my couch and make all these purchases and it changed people's lives for the better. That level of B to B commerce, especially for CPG, is still a massive area of opportunity and a massive area of like, a lot of friction, a lot of manual processes. I was talking to a brand owner the other day, it's like you still have to pick up the phone, you still have to fax things in, you still have paper invoices, you're emailing stuff back and forth. Why? So what we want to do, and yes, of course these are big. When you're building a product and you're looking at shipping thousands of units or millions of units, there's a lot that goes into that. And these are big purchases. But there is a huge opportunity to kind of shrink this AP and AR workflow.

Or kind of like, let's say, bring a consumer review and version of a checkout experience buying and selling order management checkout to the B to B space so that it can be just as simple as sitting on your couch and actually managing the logistics and the purchasing and selling that goes with managing a CPG business. And so that's where I get super excited and I think where Ampla is really leaning in to help brands remove that friction and that burden and that overhead that exists in the world of dealing with the full supply chain and logistics of actually getting your product to the end consumer so they can be happy.

Yeah. And a follow up to that is it seems like we had this like the big blow up, indeed, the big unlock that shopify unlocked was it made all these brand owners who were very creative but had no technical chops to spin up their own web store. They were able to now create stores. So you saw a big boom in D to C and it sounds like what you guys are trying to do is almost bring that same level of unlock to the financial and operations and multichannel side of the business. Where, again, people want to be creative. They want input in sourcing the products, designing the products, building the brand, doing all the consumer facing things, generating the sales, driving the marketing. But again, the back of the house stuff that's like manual and before had to be done and before was a barrier to entry, to be honest. Now you're able to kind of unlock that for the masses.

So I think that's really helpful in terms of just unpacking the value prop of the business. What you guys are actually able to enable. And what I'd love to chat about now is from a product side of things, what are the literal products that you're offering to customers? Right? So tell us about how does it work in terms of getting capital with Ampla or what are the other products that you guys provide?

Yeah, absolutely. And Blaine totally, you nailed it in terms of the problem space that we're really excited about, digging in is like bringing this simple checkout experience to the B to B side that is purpose built for CPG and brands. Yes. And then your question about like today and all the products Ampla offers. So it really starts with the money Management banking platform and foundation. And on top of the money Management banking platform foundation, we have functionality for you to leverage bill payment, but we also have functionality for you to leverage pay later capabilities, which is basically buy now, pay later for CPG and specifically for large purchases, right, where you may not have that cash on hand today. And so you need to extend those terms for 60 days or 90 days because there is a need to purchase something large in the world of trying to stand up a brand or trying to fulfill a massive order that you have to get into a retail location. And we also then, of course, as you know, have our flagship product, which is our growth line of credit product.

And this is the product that offers sort of the large kind of funding for brands so that they can really kind of their working capital for them to be able to really grow and thrive and sort of operate their business. And all these products fit together perfectly too, so that they can actually move money across externally and within a suite of products. And so you can actually use your growth line of credit for a bill payment and pay later. And so all of the products sort of work seamlessly together. And we also have I mentioned earlier this concept of like these reconciliation accounts so that we can actually help facilitate a lot of the accounting integration and the accounting cash view and management and sort of almost the sort of headache and burden, of managing all of the omnichannel sources of where the revenue is coming from and making sure you're accounting for that in a super simple and easy way through these revenue reconciliation accounts that then integrate directly into your accounting system to sort of relieve some of the need there. So that's all in the kind of the brand suite of products and super early days. But we're also working on the the vendor manufacturing copacker side to offer a suite of tools there. And ultimately, our goal and what we're looking at is creating an entire ecosystem around CPG so that we can facilitate sort of commerce and the exchange of value across both of those ecosystems.

Both of those sides of the ecosystem.

Got it. I'd love to now dig into and maybe we can nerd out a little bit on product stuff, right? I'd love to learn a little bit more about your framework for building products, how you think about it. When you first came to Ampla, where was the company then? What were some of the major initiatives that you've led? What are some of the problem areas that you've been excited to dig into and then how did you product ties that? So first, let's start with all that kind of stuff, talking about you product and Ampla. And then I want to take the frameworks there and explore those a little bit more in the context of brands. But first, let's start with AMPL and how you guys think about building product.

Yeah, totally love it. So, like, stuff that I totally geek out on. So it all starts like I think I mentioned this earlier with the customer problem space and having a deep level of curiosity and empathy and really making sure that we truly understand the customer problems and that we build products that are very kind of connected to the CPG space and to brands and to the problems that they face. There are a ton of providers out there that offer sort of more of a generic suite of financial tools or a generic suite of commerce tools. That is not what Ampla is doing. Ampla is going very deep to really make sure that the things we build are purpose built for brands and for the CPG space. So that's where it all starts. It starts with the customer, starts with empathy and curiosity for the customer in terms of things that are important to the way we look at it.

At Ampla, we have a set of product principles, right, that we really make sure we kind of use as guardrails to check to make sure that we're doing things the right way and that we're being true to who we are. And so the first one starts with trust, right? Whenever you're working and you're building financial products, the optimizing for trust and making sure that you're looking at customer trust and transparency is key. So that's one of our really core product principles, number one. Number two, it's all about partnership, right? And that customer partnership. And that we're all about driving customer success in everything that we do and making sure that we're really obsessed about the customer and the partnership with the customer. They're looking to us as a partner for their growth, their scale, and their survival. And we take that seriously. And so that partnership is really critical to us.

Third, it's really like, we want to make sure we're building simple and easy to use and financial products that are easy to understand because in the world of financial products, there are so many out there that are overly complicated or just overly complicated and not really built in a way that sort of simplifies their intention. And we want to almost remove that burden and remove that layer of complexity that comes with most financial products and make it incredibly simple and easy to understand. And then last, we want to work fast ship, right? We want to move fast. We want to ship, we want to learn, we want to iterate, and we want to innovate. And that's really important to us, too, and that we're bringing value to market really quickly. And so those are the set of four product principles that we use to kind of guide everything we do. But it all starts, number one, with customer empathy and really going deep and understanding the problem spaces that we are intending to solve.

I love how you started out with mentioning understanding the customer problem over customer requests or demands, because those are very different things. And so understanding what the problem is, that's where you really can just shopify the solution to getting to the core of the issues, rather than just having a product team focus on requests and prioritizing roadmap, on urgency of demand and size of customer. That's where you end with the clunky solution that is everything for nobody.

Yeah, for anybody else who's out there that are like product geeks. And I think some of this applies to building CPG products, too. It's just like through a tech lens. Escaping the Build Trap is a great, great book. Another great book is called Inspired, which is, like, Building Products. Customers love those two books. Yes, they're built, they're intended for tech, but the principles and the things you can take from them apply to building a product as well. And yes, it's not like by verbatim listening to kind of the sort of surface level request.

It's by going deep into the problem space. And that's where you actually find innovation. And that's the stuff that, of course, excites me and where Ampla will win and where we will differentiate, because we're going to go super deep into that space.

Chui in regards to that, I'd love to now talk about, now that we understand the principles, how you think about building a great product, how have you guys been able to do that at Ampla? Right? So, like, when you came on board, where was Ampla? What were putting your product hat on? What were some of the key opportunities that you saw that you were like, what were your first steps? Right? You joined Ampla, you're coming from shopify. You have a different lens about building product, and you're like, okay, time to do some things. What were some of those things and initiatives that you were excited to kick off.

Yeah, totally. So to me, it's all about aligning around what is our purpose, what is our vision, what is our mission? Right? It's critical that we have alignment around the mission, purpose and vision of ampla, right? That's like, number one. And so we actually spent some time as a leadership team, like really healthy debates and discussions, like, are we building a set of accounting tools? Are we building a banking platform? And it's like, this is where as we work through that, we're like, no, no, we're actually building a product that is going to power commerce across the CPG ecosystem. And so it all starts number one with like, alignment around that vision, mission, et cetera. The next step is to really make sure that you as a product team are working through your product vision, your product strategy. I like to use a vision board. It's a simple kind of one pager to get everybody aligned on, like, okay, what are the customer problems? And spending a lot of time with customers, but really making sure we understand one, who we serve, right? What's our tam and who do we serve? What are the real customer problems that are in the space that we feel we are well positioned to solve? And then what are the problem spaces that we think there's a real opportunity for us to help with? So the Vision Board kind of puts that all in a nice kind of view for you to kind of get your head around. You also want to make sure you're thinking thoughtfully early on.

How are you going to measure success, what are your KPIs? And how are you going to make sure you kind of measure progress? I'm also a big believer, kind of in, like, I'd say, a parallel step to the Vision Board and making sure you've got sort of amazon does a great job at this, but like, your long form product strategy, right? Like, get it on paper, get all the thoughts and ideas out there. And this is sort of the vision for the product strategy and how you connect the dots across all the pieces to make sure that you have a powerful platform and a powerful solution for the market. And that is something that should live and be true for a period of several years. And then comes the things that people talk about all the time in product, which are like, oh, now we are in a position where we're actually ready to build a roadmap. And now we can start talking about what comes first, what comes second, what comes third. But you have to start with and this is why Escaping the Build Trap is such a good book. You first have to start with what is our purpose as a company and our vision and our mission, and everything cascades from there. And so that's work that my team is doing, right, we're still doing actually I like to think of roadmaps more as like an evergreen document, sort of a green path, really.

It is a view of the problem areas and hypotheses we have that we want to go and test. And we're going to work with customers to validate prototypes and put things in front of them to see if we actually got it right or wrong and work through a prototyping phase to make sure that we're really solving the right problems in the right way. And so I'm a huge believer in bringing customers, prospects and the market into how you build product, and it's actually a ton of fun for the individuals that are participating in that.

Yeah. And actually what I love about what you just said was these are all frameworks that really do apply to brands of all types, whether you're building software or you're building physical products. I think one thing that was jumping out at me when you were talking about your different frameworks was the fact that you need to have a strategy and you need to build things intentionally around the product problem and where they fit into the strategy, and not just building for the sake of building things. I think a good example for brands might be like, oh, all these other brands are making these cool hoodies. Maybe we should make a hoodie. Right? And maybe they're a CPG brand that has nothing to do with hoodies, but if it fits within their product strategy, and they're like, we're going to make hoodies because it fits within our strategy of being a distribution thing for our community, okay, great, make the hoodies. But I think when you start thinking about random things and copycatting and just building things just for the sake of them, that's where, again, you're not only burning capital, you're burning time, but you're not solving problems. So I think that message of having a solid product strategy in place, whatever you're building, it's a super crucial pillar to think about.

I love that you mentioned, too, that you're still doing it because it's almost a daily reminder. It's so easy. We consume so much on Twitter, on LinkedIn, and all the new product innovations, especially with AI and all this sort of stuff. And it's really a daily reminder to say no to most things and stick to that vision and then maybe at some point then do a higher level meeting of revisiting that vision and see if anything's changed. Is that something that you suggest that maybe we should revisit from a high level, executive level division, make sure we're still on track?

Yeah, no, absolutely. It's like a balance to your point. You don't want to be I think Blaine said it, you don't want to constantly be looking at the new shiny object of the day and the new kind of distraction. Then that becomes noise, and you have to get really good at saying no and having a strong product strategy and vision and kind of a roadmap that people feel good about is really important. The same time, to Ramon's point, you also in the spirit of innovation, in the spirit of keeping up with how fast the world of tech works, in the spirit of, like, we may have gotten things wrong and why. When I say we have one, it's a green path, it's evergreen because we have hypotheses around problem spaces that we want to solve, and we will do testing with prototyping and with the customer base we serve. And we may find out that either there isn't a problem or an opportunity there and there's no value perceived in it, or we may find out that things have changed in the market and there's new technology that we need to bring into kind of as part of a funnel, and we need to evaluate that. So, in terms of time frame, I would say you should look at your roadmap on every six month to every year basis, but always be open to the fact that there may be new innovations and new things coming and that you need to have a process for evaluating those and deciding if they fit into your overarching strategy.

Do they fall into your product principles? Do they drive real value for the market?

No. Tui. I think that's really spot on in terms of not only you want to have a roadmap, but you also want to be aware of what's going on and being able to respond quickly to whether it's the market, whether it's a shift in the market, a new technology, and being prepared as an organization to be able to adapt. And again, that goes for software, that goes for physical products, it goes for really any sort of business. And in the spirit of that, I'd love to know if there's any recent things that have excited you from a technology perspective that you've been excited to incorporate and build out or even there's been just so much going on in capital markets recently, and CPG as well. So are there any current events that have influenced product strategy that you're excited to talk about? And then also I'd love to hear about kind of what's on the forefront of your mind and your product roadmap and where you guys are excited to productize and build for.

Yeah, totally. So I'll share two kind of related to just industry ish events, and I feel like Ampla has such a leg up because we are at our core, a data company, but we have so much valuable data related to brands in the CPG space. And so our team is getting really excited about some insights and some AI and some opportunities to help the entire CPG ecosystem make smarter and better decisions. So that's definitely one area. We still have work to do there, but there's some real opportunity, and we're in a really good position because we have such a depth and wealth of knowledge. The reality is, in order to offer capital products, there is a tremendous amount of insight and data that we have to have to feel comfortable about who we are offering funding to. And that power of that data can be used in so many other super exciting ways that we are experimenting with and exploring. And it's, I think, incredibly powerful.

So that's 1 second is the world of banking and finance and some of the changes that have happened. I think we are trying to be really smart. And again, I mentioned trust being one of our product principles, right? So there's a couple of things. So we are now offering significant interest to deposits that are held in Ampla and being incredibly competitive there. And we want to make sure that brands have that opportunity. 4.58%. And then also just being thoughtful about the reality that because of the financial system, we want to make sure that we've got strong underlying partners across the banking and financial ecosystem so that those deposits are held and safe regardless of the size of them. So those are two things that are one, super exciting and one, super important that we're doing.

And then in terms of what's coming, I think was your third question. So I'm really excited about all of the downstream supply chain manufacturing copacker friction and not excited about the friction, I'm excited about removing the friction. But all of the sort of antiquated opportunities we have to modernize the full CBG supply chain and bring a more digital, modern consumer sort of commerce experience to the B to B side of doing business. That is like a space that we're really excited about and that we're spending quite a lot of time going deep on.

That's awesome. No, I totally agree. I think there's so much opportunity and almost like the consumerization of B, two B making these products feel like the consumer products that brands are building themselves, making just great products. So for anyone who's listening that is looking to connect with you guys, learn more about you personally or Ampla, why don't you shout out your socials? Are you on Twitter? LinkedIn, where can we find you and where can we connect and learn more about you and Ampla?

Yeah. So for me, LinkedIn I'm on Twitter, but I'd say LinkedIn is probably easier. So tui Allen at LinkedIn. And in terms of Ampla, we're on all of the traditional channels that you could expect, or you can go to our website@getampla.com to find out more about Ampla.

Cool. Well, thanks so much for having for joining us on the Pod. We had a great time learning about all the different stuff you're building and all the ways you think about building great products. Can't wait to see what comes of it and what you guys are able to productize. I think it's a really exciting space to be building in, especially as more brands go. Omnichannel. So thanks for joining us on the show today. We had a great time.

Thanks, Blaine. Thanks, Vermont. It was great. I appreciate it. It was super fun conversation.

Thank you.

Curry.

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