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What's up, DTC Pod? Today we're joined by Pontus Carlson, who is the co founder and CEO of Offscript. So, Pontus, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and what you guys are up to at Offscript?

Yeah, of course. Hey, everyone. So my name is Pontus. I'm the cofounder and CEO of a company called Offscript. We are an ecommerce solution that helps creators, communities and curators to build their own curated marketplaces. You can think of it as a platform with two parts. On one end, it's a drag and drop ecommerce builder that lets you set up a multi brand marketplace, and on the other side, it's a marketplace connector that allows for brands on most of the main ecommerce platforms to connect in just a few minutes. We've been building this company, depending on how you look at it, for between one to three years. And we have our first kind of institutional funding now, this last spring. So we are pretty early stage company. We have a few hundred brands signed up on a platform today that creators and curators can sell from and working very tight with our users right now to develop our product. Yeah.

And what is the reason? One of the reasons we're super excited to be able to have you on the show is just to because you've had the experience of A, working with all these different brands, and B, working with all these different creators. So you guys really find yourself at this intersection of creators and commerce. And I think you guys have a really unique take on it. So, at a high level, I just love to kind of get into what some of those learnings have been. What kind of your thesis is as you've been building, like, what you're seeing as more and more creators want to interact with more brands? How do they sell products through you guys? What's your general thesis on where creators meet commerce and how are you guys building to support that with Offscript?

That's a great question. So I would say creator commerce is rapidly growing. We see kind of different types of players in the space you have enablers of starting your own brands, which is super exciting. Probably most successful companies the last few years have been like Petra and CA La, many of these kind of companies that helps you start your own brands and I think that's amazing and many creators should be doing that. Then of course you have kind of the marketplace builders and enablers. I think companies such as Poosh and Goop has kind of paved the way for what it means to have a strong audience and being able to curate products and build community centric ecommerce destination. And our premise is that that will happen. More and more creators will want to basically allow their audiences to have that type of experience where they can buy and shop their recommendations when it comes to more about kind of how I think the landscape will develop in relationship to say social and the ecommerce platforms and the end customer behavior. So I think that's really hard. I have a few different takes. I think it will be decentralized to some extent. So I think that the end customer will want to be able to shop where they are. So the moment of, say, inspiration to the moment of transaction will decrease. So I might be on Instagram, I might see a product, I want to buy it, I might be on TikTok, I see a product, I want to buy it, I might be on YouTube. So I think it's going to be much more, say, native and kind of shortened conversion funnels, let's say. I think that's one of the takes. I also think that it will be more social moving forward. I think that ecommerce has still some innovation to tap into, especially in the west. If you compare to how the behaviors look in east, in the Asia and so on, it's much more catered around kind of individuals curation and trusting other peoples and recommendations and so on. So I think it will be more decentralized, it will be more social. And then I personally am super excited about kind of more say curated future where I'll be able to find brands that I relate to or that are maybe value led or purpose led or have certain traits that aren't necessarily only colors or fabrics or whatever kind of trades that historically have been, say, the way that we filtered and sorted through the product. So I think hopefully more transparency, more decentralization to some extent. And obviously we are building for a future where what we refer to as kind of internally, not when we speak to customers, but where the demand generators will receive more of, say, the actual outcome also like more financial rewards and so on. So there is obviously a big disconnect in how I find products and how I get inspirations to how I actually check out. Yeah.

And one reason when I saw your guys product, I was really excited for the conversation is I think this concept of being able to put together kind of like whether anyone whether you're an influencer or even just a person and be able to basically curate a list of products that really resonate with you. And then you be the affiliate layer for anyone else to find and discover those products and make those purchases. I think that's something that's really compelling. And I mean, even going back like a decade ago, I envisioned a future where that was possible. But obviously there's a lot of infrastructure and building blocks that need to be done to be able to support something like that. But I do find that more compelling in terms of the future as opposed to what we're seeing in the short term is maybe like singular affiliate solutions which work right, but people are dynamic, they're complex, they like a lot of different things. And it seems like a lot of the solutions have been built out to date to just kind of satisfy one thing. It's like, oh, click my affiliate link for this product and you create a bunch of content around one thing, you link to that product, and then it kind of like disappears. And that's it. As opposed to everyone being able to almost be their own storefront.

Right.

So what was kind of the inspiration that kicked off this journey for you? How were you able to focus on going after building out your product and infrastructure the way you're doing? And what were some of the challenges in getting everything set up? Because it's not a small task, that's for sure.

No, exactly. I think one of the big inspirations when we started this, or kind of the insights, was that I read about how Linktree was one of the world's most visited websites, and then I just looked at my own customer. Behavior as like it kind of makes sense because you're directed through all these different places, all these different websites, all these different ecommerce sites, all these different social platforms through platforms such as Linktree. So one of the insights then was like the end customer is kind of struggling to say, find the product that someone has recommended and just as you're on to here, you can obviously use affiliate links and then you're directed away. But then that product gets out of stock or the link dies or the tracking has some issues and whatever it might be, So then the insight was like, why can't I just basically buy this product from the person that has inspired me to buy the product? And then I had been dabbling in dropshipping and different types of ecommerce concepts and always was a bit kind of frustrated by the fact that I could only really sell, to be completely frank, trash. So you sell some bamboo toothbrush from some kind of country where they don't pay the employees very well and now I can make a profit basically just drop shipping that bad product that we don't really need. So why can't I sell products that are actually good? And at the same time, I know that direct to consumer brands are kind of struggling with finding end customers, creating content. And on the third, kind of like third most strong insight was this kind of why now? Moment when I started reading up more and more about how the back end infrastructure of the ecommerce landscape is becoming more and more concentrated. So if you take ten to 20 years ago, obviously you had so many long tail players in the ecommerce enablement space. Now more and more players are and the WooCommerce, the centras in Sweden, and of course the big giant shopify. So the way that you can kind of build out, say, the supply side of this kind of marketplace and also manage post purchase is easier than ever. It's still not easy. There's still a need to build a lot of rails and a lot of technology to enable for that type of commerce, but it's easier than ever. So yeah, to summarize that, I would say one kind of the demand generation was decentralized, more and more social, creature centric. Second was this technology advancement in shopify. And third was kind of drop shipping enablement, which I think could be more catered to say, a modern retail set up versus selling anything that you could find.

I think that's a really cool analogy where you bring in drop shipping, because we all know what drop shipping is and it's great in theory, but like you were saying, a lot of times the products that people are drop shipping are maybe not like the highest quality. They're able to get leads and traffic online and they're selling a fidget spinner or some cheap apparel or something else from this curated store. And at the end of the day, yeah, people are buying it. They're making a bunch of money drop shipping. But the idea of almost applying that a drop shipping infrastructure and connecting that to the world's best brands, so anyone can kind of be drop shipping partners for them. As an analogy, I think that it's a really cool opportunity. It makes a bunch of sense.

Yeah, I think drop shipping is also a word that is, I think also for many good reasons. Like, it doesn't have a great brand, but on the other side of, say, kind of the same to some extent operational, you have marketplaces and marketplaces doesn't really have the same ring to it. Like, that's more positive. Okay, they're cool marketplaces. I can find multiple different brands that I can shop. And I think now you hear more and more kind of the term of like curated marketplaces. So that's also more and more a term that we are using that you can start a curated marketplace for your audience where you can shop brands. And it's quite interesting to go back in history and look at like if you were a high street store 20 years ago, maybe that was the type of entrepreneurship that was more prevalent than so I have footfall traffic. I believe that I have taste. I can buy products, I can put them on a shelf, and I can show them to an end customer, and they will buy that from me. But obviously, the products aren't mine, and I might not even have paid for them before I sold them. So I think that's an interesting analogy as well. And I remember kind of having this I think it was this Ben Thompson guys, great podcast for everyone that is interested in podcast. And he spoke about how eyespace is the new shelf space. So basically how before shelf space was all the hype. So I need to be in front of the customer when they enter the store. Now I need to be in front of the customer when they open their TikTok feed or their Instagram feed and so on. And the people that have those eyes have the ability to shape customer and consumer behaviors and hopefully also to build successful multiband marketplaces.

Yeah, I love that. I think where you're saying drop shipping maybe was a dirty word, but somewhere between drop shipping and marketplace and curated marketplace, you guys kind of exist and are able to enable the people who have the modern day shelf space, call it, and connect them to the inventory and the brands that they need to be able to facilitate those transactions. So just to move backwards a little bit, before you guys started offscript, right, what was your background? What got you into the space? How did you even start thinking that this was a product that you could solve for and that you could find? What's your personal background?

So my personal background is, where do we start? I come from a really small town in south of Sweden. I always had a dream of kind of having my own brand. Like, you really only have you have three types of jobs, really. Like, you work in the industry, you work in school, or you work in retail. And I wanted to work in retail. I thought it was cool you can work in a store. Then after a while, I was like, maybe I want to have my own brand. Then after a while, I was like, maybe I don't want to have my own brand. It sounds like, hard. And then I went to Milan and studied Business and Business of Fashion. And during that study, I kind of started reading up more and more about ecommerce and got interested in this space. Fast forward a few years. I started working as a management consultant in Stockholm, and that company was quite exposed to retail, which made me go even deeper in kind of the world of, say, ecommerce and marketplaces and how consumer behaviors are changing. And then I had the great fortune of being accepted into basically a start up accelerator incubator called Anther that is now global. But they were kind of one of their first cohorts there I was part of. And the idea then is people that have entrepreneurial ambitions can meet with other people that have entrepreneurial ambitions and then they can get together and basically start a company together. And I came in with the idea of offscript and started with two other people and we did that for a few years and then a lot of change. But it's still kind of similar idea that we're working on right now. So I think it started really young with this kind of interest in retail and then all the way to like more and more kind of technical and then just an opportunity.

I think the one thing I'm interested about here is to build what you're building. Obviously it requires a lot on the technical side and it's a lot of on the sales side. On the go to market side, you're basically to build the infrastructure to support a curated marketplace, you need creators, you need brands, brands become your supply, you need the technology infrastructure to support it. And it's not just an overnight thing. So why don't you walk us through a little bit of the initial MVP of what you were building and how you were able to get to where you guys are at now. Where did you start and how did you get to where you are now?

Yeah, no. So we started really scrappy to kind of validate the concept. We spun up storefronts for kind of long tail influencers here in Sweden and we basically just asked him, what products would you like to sell? And then they gave us a list of products and then we populated this ecommerce. I'm doing quotation marks here in the air, but kind of ecommerce. And then when they bought products from these influencers, what happened in the back was that I took my personal debit card and I just went to the ecommerce of these stores, placed the order, and then they sent the product to the end customer. So it's really scrappy. Like, it's super scrappy. And then after a while, we kind of negotiated like we only did this for a very short period to kind of validate it, but we also negotiated like a discount code. So basically I got a discount code that we didn't show for, say, the end customer, but say, I got 20% off, then I took that 20% off, paid for the and then we made that city spread as a margin. It was obviously just to validate it, but it was an interesting concept to spin up those and to speak to those initial influencers. Then we went on a really ambitious kind of journey and we're kind of still on it, where we decided to build integrations to all the main ecommerce platforms to basically facilitate for these type of order flows on checkouts payment flows, customization sets, in the storefronts and all of course, the marketplace technology. So we started really scrappy and then we started out building integrations to say, shopify, WooCommerce, Central, ABB Cards, Epicerver, Magento, et cetera. And now we can support many of the world's, say, most prominent ecommerce platforms. If you want to sell products from those brands, then to kind of go more on the sales side. So on the sales side, we started kind of brought, we had some idea that we could onboard both brands and creators at the same time with a really small team and realized after a while that that might not really work. So right now we have a much more niche focus where we try to work really closely with creators and communities and basically build the marketplaces for them. So we don't necessarily pitch so much that we have all the brand assortment you can just get started selling because we think that it's much more important that you as an entrepreneur, creator, curator, community, whatever, can sell products that are relevant for your audience. And then we'd rather have the infrastructure and technology that makes it super duper easy for you to onboard brands that are relevant for your audience. And we also noticed that there are already established relationships, for example, and there's also a much higher pull if a creator reaches out to a brown saying, hey, I'm going to launch my own Curate in Marketplace, I'm using Offscript. It takes you five minutes to connect this app. It makes total sense. However, if there is this random Swedish guy that's like, hey, I run a marketplace where I can't really say who is using it or when or why or what, but you should join. I think we found a more interesting go to market than tactical approach there when it comes to acquiring both sides of the marketplace.

It's so funny how starting a marketplace works. I see so many parallels between this and starting seated when we started, which was a restaurant marketplace, because literally the way we validated it in the early days was like, we put restaurant reservations up and we're like, oh, are people going to book these? And then they started booking them. And the first 100 or couple of hundred, I would be like calling in, there'd be a couple of restaurant reservations that would come through where maybe the restaurant requires a credit card. And I'm like, okay, shed, let me put this on my credit card. And it was like the same thing, right? And then as you grow and you grow the marketplace, then you build out more tech to support it, and then all the different integrations. You can integrate with everyone. And ultimately you get to the point. Like, as you were saying where in the early days it was like me on the me and my cofounders on the street hitting up brands and being these restaurants. And being these random guys hitting up these restaurants. And then now it's evolved to whether it's creators or diners that are frequenters of these places, they're able to go in and be like, hey, why don't you get unseated? Or whatever it is. So it's just interesting to see the parallels in terms of, like, bootstrapping and setting up a marketplace, how it's, like, really hard in the beginning, how you have to be really scrappy, and then as you grow and as you build tech. And as the Marketplace starts to carry itself, then you start to grow out to the point where, as you were saying, it looks a lot better when one of your customers is working as your sales team, helping onboard new supply to the Marketplace.

Yeah, exactly. To some extent, you can say that, I think also, to another point, it's much easier to use, say, offscript than another solution to build your own marketplace. But just as you're saying as a marketplace builder, I think there is a very interesting idea of, like, okay, if you can say, decentralized user acquisition so that the next time someone using your technology can leverage that, there is an existing integration to underlying supply side or brands. You can have really interesting network effects or kind of modes where you can imagine that in a future state, there is one platform where most of the brands within maybe a certain vertical already exists. So it doesn't really make sense for me to choose another platform because then I need to do that work. So I think my script is quite unique in the sense that we are like a single platform where you can do all of it, where many other solutions are like a marketplace connector, maybe that you connect to a storefront, like Shopify or similar. But we have both the storefront and marketplace technology, which at least our thesis is that that could allow for, say, a different degree of virality. If you could kind of start yeah, you get expired, and then you start your own ecommerce, basically.

And that's something that I want to get into. Right there is that distinction. Right. So why don't you walk me through, like or walk our audience of what is a marketplace connector versus you guys and being able to not only have the brands, but also own the checkout and the first party data and everything like that. So why don't you break down the existing solutions as marketplace connector? And if you're using a marketplace connector, what you have to do on your end? And who sort of uses these things versus what offscript enables?

Yeah, that's a great question, and it's something we talk quite a lot about. So you can say that on one end you have marketplace connector. A marketplace connector easily explained this. It's a connector that connects to a brand ecommerce. So say I am a shopify brand. Then I can connect to a marketplace connector. And then this marketplace connector distributes my products into another ecommerce. So you see also sometimes people refer to this as kind of collaborative commerce, where you can sell my products and maybe also I can sell your products. So those are marketplace connectors and you have from say, enterprise players. The oldest ones are like Miracle, I think is one of the biggest ones. They would serve huge companies, so they would serve, I don't know this, but think of the Walmarts or the Best Buys of the world. So I'm a brand, I want to connect to them and then they are like an enabler in the middle. Then you have say, marketplace connectors that are more modern, that are maybe built around the shopify ecosystem, such as Coral or similar. So there you can basically have a shopify storefront and then you can connect that to caro in this case. And then you can basically populate your shopify storefront with products from Carl. So you need these two different solutions. What we have bet or are betting on is like, we can have one platform where you basically can build your ecommerce and you have an underlying inventory of brands that you can both onboard yourself, you can onboard new brands. And there we are, off platform agnostic. So you can onboard brands from multiple different ecommerce platforms, not only shopify in this case, but also that you can manage everything in one platform having also your say checkout. This checkout is powered by Stripe today. But yeah, it's your store, it's your customers. And then our technology allows for these orders to be forwarded into the brands, and then the brands ship the product to the end customer. So it's similar to many of these other solutions, but it's much easier and it's a single platform and it's kind of built for this specific purpose versus kind of gluing together different existing solutions out there.

Well, and I think a really important distinction here is if you're a creator and you're leaning what your real job is, is creating content, making sure your audience is happy, growing your audience and being able to do that, you're a content creator, right? And to set up your own storefront on shopify, if this isn't the world that you come from, find a marketplace connector, start curating a product catalog, and then set everything up. It's just a lot of it's tricky. It's not like an easy thing to do, whereas so what you're saying is basically offscript for a creator, all of that stuff is handled. And you're an option where because like you were saying in the start of our episode, there's different ways to work with commerce as a creator, right? You could start your own brand, start your own shopify storefront, and run all your operations in house. That's one option, right? Another option is you could work and collaborate with brands, dress and be the creator in the face of it, work for an endorsement and move on. But what you guys enable is it's almost like a blending of the two where you're able to curate products from all these different companies who are on your platform, own your own storefront, but you don't have to deal. With the operations and you don't have to deal with even setting up the storefront and connecting the tech to a marketplace connector or anything like that. So you're good to go. And then on the back end of it, you're able to capture all the first party data. So it's just like you're running your own storefront where you're building up your email list, you have your customer list, you know what they purchased, and you're able to make margin on all the purchases, right?

Yeah, exactly. And I think one important distinction there is also like, when you have your store up, it's customizable and it's on your own domain, but it's also connected to your social channels. So when you have your store up, if you compare this to all the link tree players or affiliate players out there, we connect into your Facebook business suite so that you can tag products in your content and you can actually leverage your existing audience versus driving all the traffic away. So I think that's also another thing and the fact that you can really easily onboard new browsers, that if I'm a brand and I see that you have a store and I want to join, that I can do that within minutes versus, say, connecting to other types of solutions in between. But obviously, it's not a blue ocean. There are multiple players in the space and I'm super excited for the creator's sake because there's a lot of interesting technology being built for them.

Yeah, I think there's a lot to talk about here. So, one, let's talk about the landscape, right? Like, who else is in it, and let's talk about the players who are more similar to you in terms of hybrid between curated marketplace and storefront. And then we can kind of go into the next part. So, yeah, let's talk about the landscape for a second.

Yeah, no, I think you have the enablers. Many of them are building around shopify right now. There you have, as mentioned, you have caro, you have convictional, I think they're called. You have basically technology companies that are going quite deep in enabling for you to set up a marketplace kind of backyard and connecting it to your shopify front end. And then on the other side, you have more, say, the influencer kind of distributed salesforce, call it whatever you want set up. So you can say that on one end you have like a creator community centered product, and there we are. And these kind of marketplace connectors are and then you have more, say, a brand centered approach where you can allow for you as a brand can allow for multiple creators, ambassadors, whatever, to sell your products. And there you have you had them on a. Few episodes ago, like super, what's called super affiliates, right? Yeah, exactly. So there you have those players that are also quite an interesting space that is some kind of almost like network marketing. Is that what it's called in English? But that you can sell through multiple different ambassadors, basically. And then as a third category you have companies such as Disco Network, I think it's called. I think Coro and Canal are also in that where you basically you are a towel brand. I sell soap. You can sell my soap and I can sell your towels. And we connect each other stores using, for example, Disco or Canal. So we are kind of in this intersection between say, distributed sales as a brand that can connect and sell through multiple different creators and communities, a marketplace kind of builder enabler and this collaborative Converse. But we are right now only focused on really this kind of marketplace builder.

Well, yeah, and I think the interesting thing about just commerce and tack and as it involves is like I think they're going to definitely be winners, but I don't think it's necessarily all zero sum. Right. There are use cases for brands that might want to work with a creator who's running a sort of custom PDP campaign on super affiliate, while also that creator could have a whole storefront of products that are curated by you guys.

Right.

So I don't think it necessarily needs to be zero sum in the way that consumers are going to find products, where they're going to shop for products, how they're going to check out, just like in traditional retail brick and mortar shopping. You've got boutiques, you've got outlets, you've got wholesale, there's so many different channels to shop. Right, and then when you go online, it just makes her even more yeah.

No, I agree with that. I think one thing that is quite interesting, though, with our positioning, is that you see creators having like an offscript store connected to their instagram, but then they might be using some other link in their link tree, which means that the offscript kind of infrastructure allows for you to have, like, a Native esque kind of curation within your social feed so you don't have to drive traffic away, as mentioned. So I hope that that is something that would allow for us to kind of have a more consistent existence in these creators worlds and hopefully also allow for them to monetize more Native in their social channels. Because I do believe that the end customer experience of having all these different links is not great. And I also know that most creators will and hopefully or potentially should make most of their money right now on basically brand deals and say more attention, like as a media company, basically, but obviously more and more and awareness. Yeah, exactly, brand awareness. But then you have creators that have more, say, niche or higher engagement audiences and they I think should start their own brands and start their own businesses and use platforms such as Soft Script.

Yeah, it's really neat. It's like taking creators from being able to really drive performance marketing, and not only drive performance, it's like they're making a big they're making bigger affiliate commission through you guys than they would through other affiliate programs. Is that right? You want to talk a little bit about how you guys structure deals on the brand side and the creator side so that everyone's happy?

Yeah. So our revenue model is transaction based revenue model. So basically what happens is a creator decides that he or she wants to start a marketplace, and what happens then is that they we collaborate on onboarding brands for that certain creator. It's, of course, up to the creator to kind of define what terms that they would be fine with, but you can say that we do what we can in ensuring that they get those terms. And if you look at all these marketplace connectors, it's anywhere from 15% to 40% commission rates, and we take a few percentage points off of that. So it's a pretty straightforward model. And as a brand, they look at this oftentimes as a marketplace that they connect to.

Yeah, it's a marketplace. It's an incremental sale, and the brand is able to get their products in front of more eyeballs in a position that's able to really convert. It seems like definitely a strong proposition for a lot of brands. And then why don't you walk me through on the brand side? What's the process? Right, so the creator, it seems pretty clear it's sign up to offscript, go through the platform, figure out, browse through hundreds and hundreds of brands, see what products you like, be able to stitch them up into your storefront, and then all your audience, when they're browsing through your content, your offscript storefront, they can literally check out. And it's like as if the creator is running their own storefront. And now for the brand side, what does the engagement look like from you guys? How do they sign up? How do they connect? How do they get their product catalog into the offscript marketplace? What does that look like?

Yeah, I like to add on to the first comment there. One is that we both have creators that say sign up and curate from existing inventory. But what we really are keen on is to ensure that you, as a creator, when you sign up, we collect what kind of brands that you want to sell, and then we onboard those brands because obviously it needs to be relevant product for you. And obviously, as we scale our supply side, the overlap between our existing inventory and your interest will be more and more. But we also work really closely with creators right now to ensure that their marketplace or their curated marketplace is relevant for their audience. But when they then or we together reach out to a brand, the process for them is very straightforward. So it's an app for most of these platforms. So it's a shopify app or a WooCommerce app or similar, which allows for us to basically get access to their inventory and also place orders. So whenever a sale is made, we get the order into our shopify, for example, and then we send that product to the end of the customer. So when I say it's a few minutes, it's like literally a few minutes for you to connect to the store. And then once you're connected, you have this specific creator that you want to sell through, or you can collect or you can basically decide to sell through multiple creators also using Square.

Oh, got it. So if you're a brand and say there's a specific creator you want to sell to and not all of them, you can do that or you can open it up to the whole network.

Yeah, exactly. The default right now is that you open it up for the network, but you have shareholder who can sell default.

Got it. And then maybe getting into the weeds, but I'm just curious.

Who takes care.

Of the fulfillment is just an order that gets placed directly to the brand and they handle it just like any of their other orders coming in or like, what is the experience of, like, for the end customer who's checking out?

Yeah, so the experience for the end customer right now is like that of, say, a marketplace. So I'm buying the product, get an order confirmation, and then the product is selling from the brand. We don't do anything right now in the world of atoms or in the world of bits only right now. So that means that order confirmation, packaging, et cetera, they're all kind of from the brand. So from the brand, it's really straightforward. It's just an additional sales channel.

Oh, that's awesome. So if they plug into you guys and your creators publish it through their networks, they start converting sales and the orders just get pushed back to the brand and the brand fulfill just like it's any other order.

Yeah, exactly. So the idea is quite jokingly, but we say the only person on the browser side that should get more work is the people packing the orders. So we really want it to be really straightforward, like install this app. It's a low risk, high reward sales channel where you also get brand awareness from these creators.

Yeah, it seems like a real no brainer, especially for brands that are maybe internet native, just starting up, trying to get more eyeballs and get their products in front of more people. A lot of the challenge with acquiring first party users and all that is like, you have to go out and you got to get them and you got to scale up. So just in the same way, a lot of brands are thinking like, amazon is part of my strategy. And I've got my first party strategy on shopify. Having marketplaces that you can connect to in a really easy, smart way, where you're getting your product in front of the right eyeballs and the right buyers can definitely be a smart strategy for growth.

Yeah, and I think the quite unique timing component here is both that brands are more like ten years ago when, say, the direct to consumer hype took off for maybe even more years. Like many companies were very stringent with like, we should only sell direct to consumer. This is our only kind of sales channel. Now you see more and more kind of you do an omnichannel approach, basically. So you might have some wholesale, you might have some marketplaces, you might have some other types of sales coming in. So I think that is an interesting timing component with these types of players.

And then on the creator side, what type of creators have you started to see the most early success with it? Is it like typical influencer influencers on Instagram? Is it YouTubers? Is it streamers? What type of creator profile has really been interesting for you guys to work with thus far?

It's been mostly interesting for us to work with creators that have a certain Say niche. So I think one of our biggest and total example, big Say men's skincare blog. So he's already kind of doing a lot of product recommendations, but have done that for quite a lot of time. Built up a huge set of traffic volumes from his say, website and blog. Now he can introduce them to also basically shopping in his own curated marketplace or this marketplace. So what happens then is like, okay, now I have a new male skincare marketplace with I think there's like 25 brands or something that we've onboarded for that marketplace. And now you, as a reader of that blog, can buy and shop and very content led type of ecommerce experience. So I think where we see the most promise is for creators that have a quite a specific field where they curate and recommend products in. And I think that makes sense. If you go to an e commerce and they sell one soap brand and one pair of jeans, it doesn't really make sense. So we are betting on that people trust people or these communities or creators that they want to be in the realms of. And then we build experiences around that. It's like a combination of I think actually another thing is quite interesting is about if you have existing traffic, which isn't only spike, Say driven. So if you do Instagram or TikTok, for example, you post something, you get traffic. If you have a blog or some other YouTube, et cetera, then you have consistent traffic. And I think if you have consistent traffic, it makes a lot of sense for you to basically have almost like you can imagine as a lead collector that these leads are converted into revenue for you and you can basically increase the earnings that you would make.

Yeah, I think that's a really fascinating point because like you were saying, as it pertains to first party data, right, you might be able to get more customers into your ecosystem by having the option of having a storefront than even would just sign up if you're just like, oh, drop your email in our footer below. Right. So for these blogs types and affiliate sort of plays, it actually becomes a really compelling option to bring them closer to their end customers.

Yeah, no, exactly. So we do that skincare. We do like, one skateboard. He has like a kind of skateboard store where you can buy stuff. You have another outdoor creator doing outdoor stuff. So I believe in these kind of like, niche marketplaces. But two kind of counterpoint to that is that we're also working with. I think they're the world's largest beauty, basically social channels, and they're mostly excited about the way that we can allow for, say, social commerce functionalities. So they run huge social channels. So we're talking billions of impressions per year. And now we can introduce basically the ability for their audience to shop products kind of native in their content. So I would say we kind of have two parts right now in the offer. Obviously, when you are in that big media players channels and you go to the store and the products, you are still checking out their curated marketplace that is run on off script. We are kind of exploring right now where the biggest opportunity is obviously working with the world's largest channels here will give us a lot of insight and data on how to act.

Well, that's amazing. It sounds like you guys have made a ton of progress so far. Really cool space to be building in. And as we wrap up here, where can people connect with you as a brand or as a creator? When you shout out your socials, where can we find you on the Internet? Where can we connect with Offscript?

Yeah, great. So I think most brands will probably connect with me either on my LinkedIn, which is my name, Pontus Carlson, Offscript, or on Twitter. And there my name is also Pontus Carlson, but my Nick is Kiwlastic CATAM, which means the coolest cat. And he could change that because I've had it since I was a kid. But otherwise you can just go to our website and you'll find information there. If you want to email us about any inquirers questions, partnership opportunities, it's my name, Pontus at offscript IO where you can go and check us out. But yeah, I'd love to connect with any founders or people interested in building, say, curated marketplaces. Amazing.

Well, thanks for joining us on the Pod today and can't wait to see where you guys take this in the next year.

Thank you. So much, babe. It says.

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