Ben Sharf - Platter.io

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what's up Dtcpod? Today we've got Ben Sharifan from Platter Co. So Ben, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and what you guys are building at Platter.

Yeah. So Platter is a storefront accelerator for shopify brands. Essentially what we're doing is we're natively building a lot of the most popular third party app functionality into one solution to unify costs, support teams expenses, and your tech stack. Because one of the issues we see is you have these Bloated tech stacks full of a lot of apps that slow down websites and directly impact conversion rate and all your other core key metrics.

Yeah. So one of the reasons we're really excited to have you on is like, immediately when we're chatting kind of about what you guys are building. Obviously, I understand the space. I know how many different apps there are. I know as a shopify store owner, how tricky it is to navigate. And it feels like every day there's a new gimmick that people want to install on their sites to drive conversion. Whether it's a different quiz or different pop up or different banner or cart flow, there's so many different things.

And I think especially not just like, early stage shopify owners, but even later stage, it's like, what do I want to do and how do I add in things that actually drive and increase conversion without A, bankrupting me, and B, confusing the hell out of my customers? So I was really excited to chat with you guys as you guys continue to build and scale, but why don't you take us back to before you guys started building it? What was kind of the inspiration here? What's your background? How do we find ourselves where we are with Platter?

Yeah, so my quick background about myself, I was a Division One hockey player in a past life, and I actually graduated in 2020, which flipped the world upside down. Initially, I thought I was going to play professional hockey. The second piece of that puzzle, I was actually planning to take a corporate job at M and A Consulting, and I didn't end up playing hockey.

And I also actually gave up my corporate job. I told them 12 hours before my first day that I wasn't coming. Ended up joining an early stage COVID testing startup. At the time that scaled to 800 employees and 60 million in revenue in five months, which was a crazy experience just in the startup world. And I ended up meeting one of my now co founders on Platter, which is amazing.

But before I started this company and after the COVID testing company, I spent a year at a company called Gopuff. For those of you who aren't familiar, it's an instant delivery app. So think like Uber Eats, but for convenience store goods. And my last eight months there were spent building out a business unit called Powered By, which was essentially unlocking instant delivery for.com websites. So if you went to a DTC website, let's say liquiddeath.com, and you would take the SKUs in the basket, or the cart, I should say, and if those SKUs were available in the fulfillment center that was geofenced within the delivery address of the consumer, we would offer instant delivery as your delivery method. Which to bring instant delivery to.com is very revolutionary in this world because it's a very hard business to offer to brands, because you need mass scale across the US. To be able to offer this to enough of your customers to make it worth your time. That was my first entry point into the shopify ecosystem.

I spent time talking to hundreds of shopify brands, better understanding their pain points, their operations, and at a certain point I basically had just heard enough about the struggles they face. At which point I left Gopuff and ultimately decided to start what is now Platter. But before it was Platter, we actually started as an agency for brands and our goal was to essentially learn from enough brands about their pain points, understand the trends and themes we were hearing come up over and over and then figure out where we could productize one of those issues. And so we bootstrapped Platter to profitability before we ever ended up taking in any outside capital. But we ultimately decided to because we wanted to go faster than what we were able to given with where we were at. But the business is built around a couple of core theses. So the first one, as I previously mentioned, is that a lot of apps in the ecosystem are features, not products, which presents a set of challenges around adding too many apps to your store, which is too many expenses, too many support teams and a slower website experience. The second thing we realized is that from the brand owner's perspective, there's a huge drop off in diminishing return and utility from a lot of these apps after the core functionality.

And so what I mean by that is you might pay for an app that's called $20 a month and then all of a sudden they tell you that they use AI to do something special and they triple the price. But a lot of these brand owners, they just want to know that the core functionality is there. And so that gave us the confidence to be able to build wide before deep. Which is why we have over 40 app categories of functionality in one solution, which we can get into in a little bit. And then the third piece to the puzzle is that we realize for a brand owner, your options when building a storefront are either you go to an agency and oftentimes they will charge you a lot of money and if you're not technical, you're essentially beholden to that agency. Every single time you want to make a change, you have to go back to them, they're going to charge you for it. Your second option is to go to the app Store like we talked about and download a bunch of apps. And the third option is you have someone technical in house.

But number one, that's very expensive and the majority of brands can't afford to do that. And number two, even for the middle to upper tier of brands who have in house teams, they're still looking for tools to increase their own internal efficiencies. And so what we did was we built the theme and app combination with all this functionality that work in conjunction with each other. And every quarter we release new features and new updates that you get access to free of charge. Because our whole belief is that this world is constantly evolving. And so as a brand, you shouldn't have to rebuild your store every time you hit a new revenue threshold. Our belief is that you should make incremental improvements to your store all the time. And we always say we're not brand builders, we're conversion nerds and ecom nerds.

So you focus on building your brand and we'll tell you all the things you should be testing and changing on your store to make sure that you stay ahead of the curve on best practices to give your store the best chance to succeed.

Yeah, that's amazing. And I'd love to dig deeper on a whole bunch of these topics, but why don't we start with just from a store owner's perspective, right? Let's think, if we're starting out a brand, what are some of the widgets and the essentials to get right? Like you were saying, you guys have built over 40 of these apps in what's important, what works, what converts, and maybe obviously, I think the answer will probably depend a little bit also on what brand you are, what you're selling. So it's not going to be just cookie cutter use this, but why don't we just talk through some of the key sort of apps as you would see it in the ecosystem? And maybe when you guys were building out Smart Theme, what were you like, okay, these are the ones that you've got to have and we got to nail, we got to build them, right?

Yeah, it's platter now, smart Theme is the old brand, but yeah. So I think the best way to break this down would be talking about core functionality, because to your point, there's a little bit of nuance in terms of a couple of key components that can affect the answer. What's the price point of your SKUs? Our recommendations for brands that sell low ticket items versus very high ticket will definitely change. The second one is vertical, so there are certain functionalities that work better than others. But I think if we want to just break down, like, really high level, what are the core things you should be thinking about? The first one that is like the lowest hanging fruit that I would start with, even though it's at the bottom of the conversion funnel, is the cart experience. So you should always have a cart drawer. You should never have a page load for your cart experience. The way that we try to describe this to brand owners is every click that you add into the customer journey is going to result in a decrease in conversion because you're just adding an additional layer of friction for the consumer to check out and buy the thing that they wanted to buy.

And so for those of you who aren't familiar, a cart drawer is basically a slide out cart. So when you add a product to the cart or you want to go check out instead of a page load, it's basically just a component that takes up part of the page and then the second piece to the cart experience is optimizing it in and of itself, right? So you have the opportunity to add upsells to the cart, which a lot of people don't do, which can have a material impact on your average order value. You can gamify the experience by adding an incentive bar within the cart experience. So for example, add 15 more dollars to the cart and get a free gift as an example. And then another thing is gift with purchase, right? So those are like three examples of features you can add just in the cart alone. One more nuance that I'll add into the cart. If you add upsells in the cart, make sure that the way that you do it doesn't take the consumer backwards in the conversion funnel. Oftentimes I see people add upsells to the cart, but what they do is they essentially just add a hyperlink to the product page.

When they want to add another product which is just taking you backwards, you should make it into a quick view modal. So it's not taking you backwards to a different page, it's just a pop up on top of the cart drawer. So again, it's very nuanced. But these are the little things that if you make these incremental improvements across every aspect of your store, you're going to see really high results. If I talk about a couple of other core sections of the website, the first one when you come to the front of the website is your menu experience. We recommend a majority of our brands to use a mega menu within the MegaMenu. It gives you the opportunity to display strong ad creative. If there's certain promotions or collections or specific products that you want to promote above other parts of your catalog, it's a really easy way to guide the customer's experience through your store and kind of take them where you want them to go.

So that's a very important one, I think. Another one that we oftentimes recommend for hero products on homepages, especially for brands that have low SKU counts, you need to give the consumer the ability to transact from the home page. So adding a buy now button or the ability for an add to cart modal, you don't want to force your high intent shoppers to have to go through a conversion funnel with more clicks than what is required, right? So that's another example. If you get to the PDP page, I would say that our product is strongest in the product detail page. There's a whole number of recommendations that I would make, but a couple high level make sure you have something about reviews on there, whether it's a quantity count on the main PDP frame or reviews at the bottom of the page. The second one is there's different bells and whistles you can add, like including scarcity bars, making sure you have enough assets in your carousel or grid of images. We even have the ability to offer MP4 videos if you want to show a product being used. Another feature would be a sticky CTA.

So when you're scrolling down the page, looking at different content sections, allow the consumer to always hit Buy or Add to Cart no matter where they are on the page. Because if they get to the bottom of the page and they decide, oh, I want this product again, by forcing them to have to go all the way back to the top of the page to click Add to Cart, you're just adding friction to the funnel that doesn't need to exist.

I love that. I think all of those frameworks are super important to think through and when you've operated a store or a brand or anything where you're able to see conversion, you know how important the card experience is. Checkouts having CTAs where people can click and all of this. So I think I really like how you guys laid out the sort of frameworks for thinking through and starting with the card and almost like working backwards. My next question would be for people who are a little bit further along with their brand, right? Maybe they do have a site, maybe they are set up and they've got a system in place. How do you guys think about it? What's your strategy in terms of bringing on brands that maybe are like, you know what sounds really cool? What you guys are building. But look, my sites are already on shopify, already pay for a couple of these widgets and yeah, it's kind of a pain, but what are we supposed to do? Are you guys going after them now? Are you guys letting them know you're there and that there is an easy way to transition over? Are you guys just targeting new and upcoming brands who have low switching costs?

Yeah. So the majority of our brands are actually brands that are operating and doing substantial revenue. I would say most of our brands are doing 5 million plus. But our product is like I would say that the entry point into using platter varies depending on where you're at in your lifecycle as a brand. So the way that I would describe it is for brands that I would say are on the earlier side of their lifecycle, maybe it's a scrappy founder. They're attracted to our product because it's a cost savings, because they have a lot of functionality built into one solution. Our full product is leveraged within the drag and drop editor so nontechnical people can make contributions to the storefront. Nontechnical founders can make contributions to the storefront.

And then as you start to go more upmarket, like I said, there's different components that become more valuable. So if you're looking in what I would say, like the middle tier call like five to 20 million, you're now talking to ecom directors or teams who are looking for incremental ways to increase their core. KPIs so it's talking to someone about, how can I increase the page speed? What are the opportunities on my storefront where I'm maybe leaving dollars on the table because I'm missing widgets around increasing average order value or conversion rate? And then as you go more upmarket, you talk to teams that have cross functional teams who are looking for operational efficiencies, right? So we have developer tools, documentation, the ability to add different features and test things out. And so the reason the name of the business is Platter is because we give you the optionality to use everything or none of it within the product, and you pick and choose what you want to use and how you want to craft your experience. But the thing I'll say is that I always have told my co founders that if we're successful with this business, it's because we've debunked this myth within the ecosystem that building a new storefront costs a lot of money, takes a lot of time, and has really high switching costs. We've had eight figure brands that have launched an entirely new storefront with us in under 60 days, some in under 30 days. And most people would hear that and be like, I don't understand how it seems like there's so many elements to it. It's because we've been able to productize a lot of the mundane tasks that a lot of other people out there who build websites don't productize, so they have to rebuild it every single time.

So if I can get you 80% of the way there out of the box with Platter, we can layer in those extra bespoke customizations you're looking for afterwards, but it's way less than what the average store needs without using our solution.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And the next question I have kind of goes along the lines of where do you see, I guess, Shopify?

Right?

Because in a perfect world, you're building your website on Shopify. They've got this app ecosystem, but at the end of the day, when you talk to merchants, they're like, yeah, that's great, but that's literally where my problem is, right. So how do you see things sort of playing out in the long term for you guys? How are you thinking about growing with your brands? And how do you stay competitive? Not competitive, but how do you stay complementary? And how do you fill a void that Shopify just can't based on what they're doing and what their strategy is?

So it's a really good question, and it's probably the one thing that we had to spend the most amount of time on researching before we had enough conviction to go all in on building this idea. And my answer to you is a couple things. So the first one is that the Shopify app ecosystem exists because Shopify simply can't do everything, right? So you'll see Shopify's invested in certain businesses that are in their own ecosystem. They've acquired certain businesses, but there's also instances, candidly where they've cannibalized them and they've built certain things, right? So for us, it's so important to make sure that our business is a product and not just a feature, right? And so you have to make sure that you're not just replaceable with a click of a button overnight. And so because of that, we've started our business by going very wide in terms of the different functionality that we've built. And our product roadmap has very much been dictated by two things. The first one is customer feedback and the second one is Shopify's roadmap. Right? There are certain categories that we won't touch, that I'd never want to touch because it's saturated.

There's either a clear market winner already or it's just a matter of time before I believe Shopify is going to go in and cannibalize it. Right? So I'll give you one example, is subscription. I can name five different subscription companies off the bat, and I'm not saying that some of them aren't innovating, but Shopify released a subscriptions tool. You have five to ten of those serious players in the space. It's just a waste of resourcing for us to go after that market because to be honest, you can layer in any other third party apps on top of flatter. So in the markets where we don't feel like it's worth our time or energy, we'd rather just partner with someone. That's what we'll do. But our initial plan was go wide, figure out what our customers care about and decide where we're going to double down.

And then as the market evolves, we'll figure out is there an opportunity to build outside of Shopify? Should we just go super deep on certain features within Shopify? And a lot of that, honestly, is just real time feedback and conversations I'm having with people at Shopify, with people who know the ecosystem very well to make sure that we don't put our business in a place where we can get cannibalized overnight.

Yeah, that makes a bunch of sense. And I really like that point about knowing what's being built and where it makes sense for you guys to allocate your dev resources, right, because it's smart for you guys to do, but then you're also going to be delivering maximum value to customers who are using it. The next question that I have goes into it's along the lines of what we were talking about earlier in the conversation about the different tools and widgets and how they work. But I'd love to kind of talk about what some of these kind of app experiences are that are within the ecosystem that you guys support. And I'd love to talk about what they do and why you should be using them. Right, so as a store owner, whether it's in Platter or directly in the App Store, I'd love to talk about things like shoppable videos and quizzes and some of these different things that in theory look like just random widgets or like why would I install that and why would I do it? But strategically, from a conversion standpoint, why don't you talk about some of your favorite tools that you guys have built, but what's the point of them? Why should a store owner be using them and what purpose do they solve for shoppers?

Yeah, so I'll touch on some of the most popular ones in terms of, I would say, utilization within our portfolio. I always preface this in saying you have to make sure that you understand your own customer and your own brand, because there are certain features that I'll mention that aren't relevant to everyone. But broadly speaking, a lot of what we build, all of what we build is within the marketing and conversion vertical within shopify. Because everything we do, we want to have direct attribution to increasing your average order value or your conversion rate. And so a couple of high level examples. The first one is Tiered incentive bundle builder. So there are a lot of bundle builders out there. You can find some on the App Store.

We have one native with our product and it's something that performs so well for our customers. And the idea behind that, in tandem with a lot of other features in our product, is all around gamifying the shopping experience. So by gamifying it, you're pushing the customer to see what value they're going to get or what outcome they can get by just doing a little bit more. And so what I mean by that in our tiered Bundle builder, you can set three incentive thresholds and that can be based on quantity, price, discount. And so the idea there is like, oh, if you add eleven more dollars to your car, you can unlock a 15% discount. Doing that not only increases your AOV, but it increases your conversion rate as well, because shoppers are incentivized to want to add more to the experience. Right? So that's number one. Another example, which is something that not enough brands are doing, we always recommend putting in, I shouldn't say always.

Again, the caveat is type of brand. But adding an upsell in the mainframe of your PDP is one of the strongest performing AOV boosters I've seen out of any feature in our portfolio. And that works really well for brands that have accessories or complementary products where you supplement the main item on the product page with a lower ticket upsell. So, like an example for you I can give we work with a supplements brand called Caged, and they sell a protein powder, for example, they'll put like a shaker bottle as an upsell product. In the mainframe, it's something that's complementary to the main product and it's a very low ticket item. So the psychology there is a consumer is like, oh, I might as well just add that too, because it's here and it's convenient. So that's a second example. A third one that you alluded to is shoppable videos.

So we use shoppable videos as a means to add social proof to products and brands. So if you have influencers or strong video testimonials or customer reviews, you can put videos on specific product pages, you can put it on homepages. But Cage is actually a brand that utilizes this in a super cool way. On product specific pages, they'll put videos of consumers talking about that particular flavor and that particular product, about why they like it, why it works. Adding that social proof is just another reason for the consumer to have confidence that it is the right product for them. So that's another example. Another one that I want to touch on is pre purchase upsells. So once the consumer has gone through the card experience and they're getting ready to pay, I shouldn't say the last place in the funnel because you can do post purchase, but it's one of the last places in the conversion experience where you can add another upsell opportunity.

So right before they enter in their cart information, they might see a couple of products that, again, low ticket items and they're like, oh, why not? Let's just add that to the cart, right? So as I mentioned, a lot of these features are around gamifying the experience and just finding different ways to increase AOV and conversion. Because our whole methodology is that if you can make incremental improvements at every touch point through a conversion funnel, those little improvements will add up to give you substantial increases in your core metrics.

We are really excited to announce that Dtcpod is officially part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. The HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals. And we're really excited about being part of the network because we're going to be able to keep growing the show, bringing you guys amazing guests and obviously helping you guys learn from the best founders, marketers, and builders of the most successful consumer brands. So anyway, keep listening to DTC, Pod, and more shows like us on the HubSpot Podcast Network. At podcastnetwork. One thing I want to kind of double click on, Ben, I know you mentioned it in terms of like when we're talking about videos and the importance of social proof. I know you host ben hosts an amazing podcast as well called Going Pro with Adrian. And Adrian is like the king of social proof and case studies and all that for SaaS companies.

So I know you spend a lot of time jamming with Adrian on. This sort of stuff. So I'd love just your perspective on the importance of, again, any business.

Right?

But how do you think about building social proof into your product experience? And let's take all the learnings that you have and let's apply it to ecom just from a principle.

Yeah. Adrian, who's the co host of Turning Pro with me, he is definitely the king of social proof. But I think that what's interesting about social proof is that, number one, it can be done in a lot of different mediums, right? Like you have long form editorial, you have short form, you have video, you have quantifying it. And so we recommend adding social proof in so many points in the customer journey, everything from the shoppable videos that I alluded to integrating in horizontal scrollables of customer testimonials, another piece to it as well. On our product pages, we always recommend having more depth in terms of number of content sections because in my opinion, the more content the better, as long as the content is relevant because you're just basically going to answer any concern a consumer might have before they bounce from the page to go answer that. Right? So we have like text over image sections. I always recommend adding FAQs on product pages, which it's not exactly social proof, but it's relevant because you're answering questions and curiosities they might have. But in terms of specifically social proof, as mentioned, adding the number of stars with the quantity of reviews on the top of a product page, adding customer testimonials at the bottom of the page, adding shoppable videos of people talking about it, having case studies.

Case studies is like the number one version of social proof. And that's like Adrian's bread and butter is like how to articulate from a customer for a software company, what are the things you need to say and how do you highlight that? When a customer is going to buy something, whether it's a software tool or product, they want to know that other people have tried it and other people have success stories from using it. And so I don't think a brand should ever underestimate the value of social proof, regardless of the format in which you use it, because all that is doing is reassuring the customer that this is the right product and it has a direct correlation to conversion rate.

Yeah, I think that's so important, especially because a lot of people, when they're creating their website, they're thinking about their product, oh, this is just something people are going to want to buy. But again, when you're looking at it the other side, you've got new cold traffic coming in, maybe they haven't heard of you, maybe they've just seen an ad and it's your job to lead them down the funnel. And obviously you want to do the things like you're talking about in terms of giving them options to buy, giving them options to put things into the cart. But if they don't have that social proof and that reason to convert, the conversion is not going to be the same. So I think that's just so important, especially when you're driving a lot of cold traffic to your site, like having different parts that are answering those questions, showing the social proof, showing the benefits, and doing all those things. So that when you're able to implement tools like you've talked about in Platter and you have your quizzes and your cart drawers and all this sort of stuff, you're able to capture that and then end up converting it. Ben, my next question was going to be around where do you go from? Right? Like, you guys have obviously built out a massive platform. It's a massive undertaking in terms of building out this stack of tools for everyone.

So what's the strategy now? Is it more tools? Is it more scalability? Where are you guys focused?

Yeah, so right now our product roadmap is going much deeper on very particular features within our already existing toolkit because there's a lot of edge cases and corner cases and variations of how certain things can be presented. And so that's number one. And then the second piece is we're really focusing on the operational component to migrating stores because my goal with this offering is to make it something that you just can't say no to when we talk to you and present it to you. We have an offering today for lower tier brands where they can actually start using Platter for zero upfront cost in just the monthly subscription. Because one of the biggest points of contention we get is around switching costs. And the fear. People have made this idea of switching your website to be extremely daunting and scary because that's the thing that makes you money. And we're really trying to debunk that, that it's not that scary.

And so a lot of our process now and our product is how do we make that process easier for brands. So it's investing in customer dashboards, ticket requests, billing requests, all the things that can add friction to that first 60 days of getting them live. Because what we see with our product is like that first month or two is the part where we have the most communication with our customer and then once their new store is live, it's very minimal. Right. So we're trying to reduce as much friction as possible in that onboarding process so that when we talk to new brands, they just can't say no to the offering that we're putting in front of them.

And I'd love to talk about that specifically the onboarding process, right. Because that's going to be in the mind of a bunch of brands who are thinking about using a platform like this. Obviously great that you've got all these tools. It's all in one place. Awesome. If I have customizations that I need to stack on top of this I'm going to be able to do it. But literally, what does it look like getting set up? What is that transition process? Like, if I've got a store, I'm doing 10 million a year in revenue, I'm like, shit, I'm making a bunch of money. So if I'm down for a day, that's messing up my whole thing.

So what is that transition process? What does it look like launching a new site on smart theme? Just walking me through that.

Yeah. So there's two different engagements with brands. The first thing I want to note is that there's no downtime. So the way that we build this is you literally will hit a toggle. It's all built as a backup theme, and it's kind of just like a magic trick where it switches to the new one and no one knows that it changed. But fundamentally, the way that our onboarding process works is like this. Step one, sign a contract, fill out the onboarding. The onboarding, we take in all your assets, your inspiration, and your requirements.

Right. Certain brands have certain features that are non negotiables for them. And so with that, we need to have that in mind for lower tier brands. And by lower tier, I define that as those who maybe don't have a budget. Those are brands who intuitively are like, I know my store needs improvement. I don't have a large budget to do it, but I want to make changes. The way that our process works with them is they fill out the onboarding. We take in that onboarding and we actually produce new design wireframes and develop it as a backup theme and give it back to you.

So the thing you don't get in that process is the ability to go through like a tedious design review because you don't have the budget that warrants the ability to do that. You're basically trusting in our ability to give you something that is better than what you have based on all of our knowledge and experience in the space with working in different verticals, et cetera. And then for brands that are a little bit more upmarket, who have budget same starting process, where you fill out the onboarding, you provide us with your assets, your requirements. We'll produce a set of wireframes, send those wireframes back to you, and you go through a design feedback loop where you get multiple rounds of revisions. And then once you sign off on that, we'll actually implement into a backup theme for you. And then from there, if there are customizations involved. So if you want certain design components that aren't possible out of the box with platter, we have a set number of hours baked into the sow. So if your store is delivered without exceeding those hours, you basically have free hours to add customizations.

But if you have more customizations that you want to add on top, we can still do that for you. We'll just basically treat that like an agency, but not traditional agency, where you can't put us on retainer, but we have an hourly rate where we'll just say, hey, you want to add this feature on top? It's going to take this many hours, and then you just sign off on if you want it or not. The reason I call that out is because, like I said, we have brands who opt for the lower tier where they've had a new store ship back to them in under a week. And we have brands on the larger tier who are on average, we're launching them in less than 60 days. But we do have some brands who will come to us and explicitly say, hey, look, there's no urgency on this. We don't need to get this store live. And to be honest with you, budget isn't our biggest concern. We care more about this being pixel perfect.

And so they'll go back and forth and add a ton of customizations that weren't possible out of the box with Platter, but we got the store 80% of the way there with Platter. And so they only had to do customizations on 20% of the store instead of 100% of the store if they went to like a completely custom build with no infrastructure out of the box.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. One part that I think is really important to note is the fact that a lot of these brands, right, like you were saying, to do a transition, it's not just about, okay, great, I'm transitioning. I'm paying for a couple of different widgets and this makes it easier. It's like this is where they're making their money. So if you're going to do it, you want to do it right. So I think you guys also taking the point of view of being able to work with them almost like in a hybrid capacity to make sure that that onboard is slick and they've got everything they need for the time that they're ready to go, I think that's super important to flag. One other thing I'd love to talk about is just kind of I'd love to talk through some of the examples that you've seen in practice from some of the brands that you're working with, right? I know you talked about Cage, the supplements brand, who's using you, but who else is sort of using you and how are they leveraging platter? What are they doing that they couldn't do before? And yeah, just talk to us a little bit about that.

Yeah, so I think one of the big call outs here and one of the great examples, like, if you're listening as a brand and you're unsure if this is something that you're interested in, if you're on a Shopify 1.0 theme, you need to move to a Shopify 2.0 theme immediately. I can't emphasize the number of benefits that you get from a change that is just so required for brands everything from page speed. Like, I'll give you just an example. I met with a brand two days ago and their page speed on mobile was a two out of 100 and I realized they were on 1.0. And so just changing that alone will increase that substantially. And so as an entry point, that is the great first piece of a conversation for us if we have brands who are still on 1.0. But other benefits you get beyond that is, like I said, empowering the nontechnical people on your team. Our product is utilizing the Drag and Drop editor.

So it's not a custom code base where you have to know how to code in order to make changes. And so we have a lot of brand founders. Like a great example is a cookie dough brand we work with called Dope. Their founder is super savvy, she's super proactive, wanted the ability to make all the changes herself but didn't know how to code. And so with Platter she was able to leverage the Drag and Drop editor and now they basically got rid of any outside engineering help because she's like, I can just do everything myself. So that's like a great example. A couple other brands, they utilize us when they're about to hit an inflection point from a growth perspective. So one brand that comes to mind is a brand called House of Academias.

It's a Macadamia Nub brand. They were basically in the process of leaning heavily into growth know, they were on Joe Rogan and Mr. Beast's YouTube channel and a lot of these massive place like massive channels. And so they wanted to make sure that their conversion funnel was optimized because they did not want to leave any money on the table. Once they started to press go on these things, they saw over 100% increase in conversion. I don't remember the exact number, but it was over 100% from the time when we benchmark what their store did before we're using us and after. And that was very important to them. They knew that their store needed help and they weren't willing to invest dollars until they had the confidence.

And so one of the things I'll also say to brands is don't think increasing your ad spend is going to be the solution to improving your metrics. Increasing your ad spend is just a short term fixed if there's a fundamental problem in the conversion funnel on your storefront. And so there's different use cases that we have around brands who use us or why. One more I'll touch on is that our product is extremely valuable to holding companies like the Open Stores of the world. If you have more than one brand, the reason for that is that we're giving you a solution that can scale right? So it's a clean infrastructure that you can rinse and repeat with different brands. And so the operational efficiencies you get there where you don't have fragmented code bases out of the gate with different brands and different infrastructures. It allows your team to work cross functionally because they understand how the code base works on one brand, which means they'll be able to do it on the others. And so the more brands you get, the more cost savings you get and the more benefits you get from using a product like this.

Yeah, I love that. Especially like you're saying, just imagining a couple of these different widgets that you would build. Imagine a site, you're running ten different apps and then you're running that across a portfolio. That could be crazy. So Ben, as we kind of wrap.

Up here, I'd love to know what are some of the challenges that you.

Guys have dealt with in getting things live and what are the things you're most excited to tackle in the next couple of months?

Yeah, so I mean, one of the challenges that we faced is brands all have very particular bespoke needs. Right. Scaling top notch customer success and customer experience is a very challenging thing, especially when you have the undertaking of committing to that brand that you're going to help them operate the base infrastructure of their storefront that is driving them so much revenue. I think the second piece to it in terms of challenges is it's really figuring out how to prioritize because all of our brands every day are telling us, I want this, I want this. Because we do let our brands give us input on our feature roadmap. So distilling that information and making sure we're staying focused while also making sure we're prioritizing what the market wants most is definitely a challenge for us as we think about what do the next six months look like or the next twelve months and beyond look like for us as a business. And then in terms of what I'm most excited about, we've actually been in stealth for almost two years. The Platter brand itself went live like at the end of October and we migrated over to the new domain and the new website without posting about it in light of just what's been happening on a global scale in the world.

So I'm just most excited to share with the world that we've been working on. We have a full marketing plan that we haven't rolled out yet. We have a ton of amazing partners and advisors and investors who have been so helpful. And I think that we have a lot of traction early on without many people knowing about us, which has been intentional because we wanted to make sure the product was far enough along and valuable enough before sharing with the world. But like, Q One and Q Two are definitely going to be the most exciting times we've had since I had this crazy idea with my co founders a couple of years ago.

Yeah, I think just understanding the scope of the product is pretty crazy. I remember the first time we were chatting about it, I was like, damn. I was like, damn. That is really ambitious because I've talked to a bunch of people who are building like one widget, and you've got like 40 and a whole theme building platform. So anyway, really excited about your guys'launch coming up with platter, really excited to see how you're scaling and even excited to try it out with some brands that I'm cooking up myself. So anyway, Ben, why don't you shout out your socials like we talked about earlier in the pod? You've got a great pod as well, but where can our audience connect with you? Where can we find you?

Yeah, so my personal social is Ben Sharf across platforms twitter, LinkedIn, instagram, and then platter is at get platter across every platform. And then the other thing too is if you want to go, you can go to the website platter co, and you can actually request a free feature audit. So we'll actually give you a breakdown of your storefront for free upfront. At the very least, you can walk away with some recommendations, and at the very most, we can work together. And yeah, those are the main places that you can find me and my business, platter.

Sweet. Well, thanks for coming on the pod.

Thanks for having me.