The subscription market is predicted to grow nearly $500 billion by 2025. Recharge is the leading subscription management solution, helping ecommerce merchants of all sizes launch and scale their subscription offerings. Over 15,000 merchants use subscriptions powered by Recharge to grow their business and their communities by increasing average order value, reducing churn, and providing predictable recurring revenue, turn transactions into long term customer relationships, and experience seamless subscription commerce with Recharge. Check them out at slash dtcpod. What's up, Dtcpod? Today we're joined by Adi Pinar, who is the co founder and CEO of Cogsy. So, Adi, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about your personal background and then what you guys are building with Cogsy.

Totally. Thanks for having me, guys. I really appreciate it. So the short version of my resume and what led me here is I was one of the original co founders of WooCommerce, stepped down as CEO there in 2013. WooCommerce sold to Automatic in 2015. I then moved on, and I founded a company initially called Receiptful rebrands Converger, which was email marketing automation for ecommerce brands. By the time we sold to Campaign Monitor in 2019, we were primarily serving shopify merchants. So that's where I got my start in kind of getting more familiar with the shopify ecosystem.

Spent about a year with Campaign Monitor post acquisition, and then I came back to an idea that I had years ago, which was to build something in the kind of inventory space. So today I'm working on Cogsy, where we do inventory management for brands that sell multi channel and then beyond that I invest in the e commerce space. Like really passionate. I'm very much a one trick pony in that sense. I try to kind of make sure that all my worlds have a significant overlap. And then I have a young family. I've been happily married for twelve years and I've got three kids, eleven years, eight years, two boys. And then we recently added a little princess who is now eight months old and 80.

Where are you based, for those who are listening?

Yeah, so I'm based in Cape Town and I can say kind of born and bred Cape Tonian as well.

So that's really interesting. How did you get into starting WooCommerce and getting into the ecom enablement space from Cape Town all the way back in the day? Why don't you walk us through that? What were some of the problems you're seeing and how did you get the idea to get started?

Yeah, by the way, this is the first time that I've in answering this, you're taking me way back there kind of plane. So the answer is, I think my journey into ecommerce was coincidental. I e not planned right, because what happened before that is I got into the WordPress ecosystem and the kind of the precursor, the catalyst for that was back in, I think this was 2004, 2005. Just as blogging was becoming a kind of a thing, I decided that I needed a blog. So I was at university at the time and I ultimately stumbled onto kind of WordPress figure that this looks like the easiest thing. I knew a little bit of HTML, CSS, taught myself enough PHP to be dangerous, and I built my own blog. And then from there, kind of during varsity, I did some consulting work on top of WordPress, as well as kind of the way I would drive traffic or kind of interest in my consulting services as a designer developer was by releasing free WordPress templates at the time. And then from there, what essentially happened was I prioritized that to extent that I started selling that and that was the kind of the catalyst for Woo themes, which I co founded with Magnus and Mark.

And this was like I built the first product November 2007 to give everyone a timeline. And then from there, what effectively happened is we got into a category with our templates where we were serving other businesses so they would buy our templates for typical kind of your brochure like websites. And they kept asking us, hey guys, how do I add a shopping cart to this? And at the time there were other plugins for WordPress available, but none of them could essentially meet our very high standards for what we would want to do on the design side of things. So we effectively kind of went, I think we went through three different projects to try and build this ourselves, outsourced multiple configurations before we ultimately kind of launched WooCommerce. So this was a two year process for us, and then WooCommerce completely changed our business within a year. So the context there is that we were already doing multiple millions in revenue by the time WooCommerce launched. We were a significant business. I think we were about 15, 1617 people on the team at the time.

And then WooCommerce became 90% of our revenue within a single year thereafter. So that's a long winded answer just to and I hope what everyone hears here is oftentimes the idea or the project or the business that's really successful is not something that was perfectly planned to the nth degree from the start. Me getting into ecommerce and being in ecommerce 15 years kind of later, or from WooCommerce, like 1112 years later. There is definitely part coincidence in there that I can't claim credit for.

No. And I think that's such an important point as an entrepreneur, right? Like, you want to be positioning yourself the right way, and it seems like you were building in the WordPress ecosystem, there was this need within the stuff you were building. You were serving all these different needs. And then all of a sudden, as this ecommerce wave started to emerge, you were able to take what you were building, spin out a specific practice within your business, and all of a sudden, that became 90% of the existing business that you're doing even bigger than your own business. And then you're like, okay, this is obviously my business is here. This is what's generating revenue. This is what to focus on. And I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, it's really important about positioning yourself in different pockets, where you're building, you're experimenting, you're seeing things, you're seeing waves kind of come along, and then you can catch those massive lifts, and they can turn into businesses themselves.

So why don't you walk me through as that wave started to take off, as you were building into WooCommerce, what are some of the lessons? Why don't you walk us through the journey there? As you uncovered this specific niche for e commerce within the WordPress ecosystem, then what started to happen?

Yeah, so I think probably two things that I think are interesting to call out there, blaine and you touched on part of that just before now is for us, as soon as we released became, I would say our customer support was always a big part of why we succeeded with Woo themes and then WooCommerce. But with WooCommerce, it became even more important. So we really had to dial in how we were learning from customers, right. Because these were actual merchants. We were kind of code monkeys at the time. Right. And I can say that because we were also early 20s. It was monkey business to some extent.

So we really had to kind of dial in how we were kind of listening to customers, learning from them, and how we were prioritizing things. I think that's one part, at least as a founder, that I can acknowledge and kind of call out there. But then the interesting thing in kind of answering the question there, Blaine, is, as we went through that, because we suddenly had kind of WooCommerce on day one was this really big kind of your canvas, but there was no pencils, no markers, no paint, none of the other things that were built to actually kind of create picture. So we soon and what became the ultimate business model was for us to build out what we called extensions or add ons in the shopify world. They would be apps, right? But we had to build out all of those things. And what was fascinating there is to try. You start following businesses and even kind of back then, businesses mostly decide how they want to operate and they want software to adapt kind of to that they don't like for software to dictate. This is how kind of a process should run, especially where there's physical things involved, like physical products that needs to be physically moved, right.

Humans doing the moving, et cetera, those kind of operational things. I don't think businesses like when software dictates what should happen there. So in that journey of WooCommerce, seeing how complex and sophisticated and how brands were and how quickly they ramped that up as soon as the software was there, that was fascinating. Right. And I think the way that I now think about that and how it's played out in the kind of e commerce kind of greater e commerce journey is back in WooCommerce along with shopify, right? Like similar were, and this goes back. Toby is one of the founders for shopify before shopify, most people don't know this. He worked on and I think he was the lead contributor for open source project within the Ruby Rails community called active Merchant, which was a way to accept credit cards. So there's this very much, this first wave of e commerce which was all around just, hey, how do we get access? How do we not have to go through merchant kind of application forms to be able to do credit card processing, how do we have the platforms to have a basic shopping cart? And then we went in that second phase, I think in the last couple of years, which was all around kind of the marketing and sales stuff, like advertising, et cetera, how do we put customers into the top of the funnel and how do we kind of effectively get more money from them? And I think we're now in a phase, for example, where we're back to that original complexity that WooCommerce had to kind of figure out, which is operational matters are again important.

Like everything from kind of how do I manage my warehouse to how do I do inventory management to how do I do better accounting and calculate my actual profit? I think all of those things, like very tricky things, more business specific things are highly prevalent again.

Yeah, and I think another interesting part about what we've seen a bunch from just talking to brands and just as the landscape sort of evolves and why I think the timing is really interesting for the kind of stuff you're building. It's like as all these different waves kind of come along, you have the shopify explosion, you have really cheap marketing on Facebook. People are able to spin up brands, sell a bunch of products. You're in an environment where people are able to sell and they have such a big marketing arbitrage that they're able to just blast out all their products and they're not as focused on the operations. Yes, they have to have operations that work, but that's not where they're focusing to recoup revenue and really make sure that their margins are airtight. Whereas now, as ad costs go up, all the marketers have figured out where to go and there's more and more brands that have popped up selling online. Now the game becomes a little bit tighter and these different areas like inventory management and operations become so much more important to really get right, especially as you scale, because it's an exponential equation. Right.

So why don't you talk a little bit then about moving, I guess into Cogsy and what you guys are building there. What was the first things that you started to say? Like, oh, there's a really big opportunity here to productize in a way that no one else is doing? What were the things that you were hearing from brands that they had problems with that weren't solved by software that convinced you that, okay, it's time to build here and these are the problems areas that we should be focusing on.

Yeah, so I probably did something there, Blaine, that I don't advocate that first time founders do this, right, because I think that there's a lot of risk involved. And to be honest, DBC on whether the risk I took and I'll explain what I mean with that, but the risk I took with Cogsy kind of pays off. But the risk was I did zero customer development before we started building. Right. So from my side, I put my kind of technologist hat on and I said, firstly, I don't believe that there's been a lot of investment and a lot of innovation into anything that looks like kind of your back office, kind of your functions for retail brands. So again, anything from inventory to logistics to kind of your accounting related things, like anything that's your back office probably wasn't as sexy. All the money went into kind of email and SMS marketing and marketing attribution, et cetera. So I figured that ecommerce, like, I'm bullish on kind of your ecommerce and just broadly kind of digital commerce, so what's the opportunity there? And I figured this was blue ocean.

And then I think a big part of the original thesis was that because we started off thinking that we would be a traditional inventory management system. Right. So think trade gecko that went to end to it is a great example and I looked at the space and I was like hey, all the incumbents here, they just don't excite me and I think I can do it better. And part of thinking or believing I could do it better was when I built the first product that became Wu. I was finishing up my honors degree in accounting and I was going to be a chartered accountant. So I'm relatively adept at the financial and accounting side as well. So I just felt that kind of the incumbents weren't there either. But then what I did, and I think part of what we're still kind of trying to do is and to your point, at least there was some learning.

Blaine eventually, which was most of kind of inventory management and planning still happens in spreadsheets. And I don't believe that is the optimal way for any brand to grow in 2022 and beyond. I think that if you're trying to say a spreadsheet is a really flexible user interface to do whatever you want, then perfect, then nothing can beat that. But I just believe that spreadsheets are just limited. So for the Cogs at least is we've spent a lot of time trying to not build a kind of inventory, kind of management and planning tool that looks and functions like spreadsheets, but actually gives the user something that feels like the sexy marketing tools that they're using, even though on the back end we are doing the same sophisticated math that you could do in a spreadsheet.

Got it. And so what are you guys as Cogsy like as you started to productize? Right. I think that is really interesting. When you said we knew there was a problem here, this is the space that we wanted to build. And I think there's always like when you're doing product development, you can either talk to your customers and maybe go all the way down the path and maybe even build the wrong thing because sometimes customers don't actually know what they want. They'll tell you different problems, you'll build exactly what they say and then there isn't a solution. There know what they want or you can anticipate their needs, have that perspective and as a technologist build it for them. So it seems you definitely were able to latch onto that route move fast.

So what were some of those things that you were able to productize that you were saying that are in the back office? Where were those processes being done and what data sources and how were you actually being able to track it to come up with your numbers and generate that into a sexy fun tool that anyone on the team could understand?

Yeah, so I could probably kind of answer the question in sharing the biggest learning that I've had or the biggest change of mind that I've had since kind of from inception of idea to where we're at today. And that's actually around kind of having brands. And most, I think this is true for most, if not all brands is that they have a kind of decentralized and fragmented tech stack, right? So when I went into Cogsy, when we essentially put the idea of a traditional inventory management system in place, we said can we build some intelligence optimization layer? And we start with forecasting, demand forecasting on top of kind of any data source where there is SKU level data already, right? So an IMS or ERP is a perfect place. We would just build direct integrations and we would add value on top of that value and workflows. What's been interesting is in that kind of fragmented tech stack environment we've seen that being much more prevalent versus the brands that have a kind of centralized source of truth in place. So what we're doing, for example, is we become the source of truth, not being the system of record for anything. What I mean with that is we often work with brands that they sell on Shopify Direct, they sell on Amazon, FBA. So both those are sales channels as well as inventory locations.

We integrate for them into their three PL like a shipbub, right? Because ShipBob has better or more accurate inventory levels than what they track in Shopify, for whatever reasons. And then we also integrate with say, kind of anvil, which is a specialized purchasing platform so that we can understand the concept of purchase orders. And then effectively what we do A, we have more elaborate kind of examples where they have more channels and other tools in their tech stack. But effectively what we do is because of SKU is ultimately a unique identifier, right? So we can essentially take all of your product data and we can map all of these different kind of your sources and kind of your objects to that data. So whether it's inventory level, whether it's an order attached to that SKU, whether it's an incoming purchase order, we can connect all of those things together to deliver a higher fidelity kind of your output. So when I say higher fidelity output, at this stage, we mostly try and do two things. One is around visibility. So fully giving you kind of your visibility across kind of everything that touches your inventory, right? That's the one part thereof.

And then secondly, we have a big part of the product is around kind of your forecasting and demand planning and being able to do kind of your proactive replenishments, at least for your best selling SKUs.

Got it? So basically what you're saying is you're able to connect to all these data sources and then you're able to help the brands really understand what their levels are, what it means for them from a financial perspective when to replenish when not to. Because I think one of the things that we had been talking about is if you're doing really well on the demand gen side and if your marketing doesn't line up with your product, you could be burning a whole bunch of money by spending on ads, driving traffic, and then not actually having the product to fulfill or vice versa. You're stocking too much product, you're paying for that. It's taking up your warehousing space. And meanwhile, people want other products. So it's really about helping brands be able to have more knowledge and insight into be able to balance that delicate sort of balance.

Right, exactly. So where we're at today, for example, and then I can share where we're going with this is where we're at today. Let's go back to a simpler configuration for brands where again, they sell Direct on Shopify, they also sell on Amazon FBA. So what Cozy can already do is essentially because we were combining those data sources, we can help you figure out what an optimal kind of purchase plan is for your kind of a whole per catalog, say, for the next twelve months, right? And we can help you plan out the cadence and the sizing of those purchase orders in future. And you can take that whole twelve month plan to your vendors and say, guys, please help me on unit economics and make sure that you've got availability in the factory on your side to meet these kind of units in the next year. So we redo that. But then what we also do now is we help you understand, hey, if shopify is your kind of you have a main warehouse attached to shopify. This is the cadence at which you need to replenish to Amazon to not sell out.

And thesis there is that to optimally sell, you need to ensure that you've got inventory on both those locations. And again, you can't just like no one has all the capital to make sure that you just stock millions of units in every single location. That's not it. Right? So we try and help you figure out that optimal inventory level for every location already. And crucially, where I think this is heading is we're going and maybe this is part of just the evolution of commerce. And to your point earlier about brands having to level up their game and becoming more sophisticated, maybe there's a case to be made that kind of the current worldwide economic climate or sentiment is adding to this. But I think profit is going to become more important. So the next things for us, at least from a product side, is two things I can mention is I think, figuring out in a scarce environment, either in working capital or in inventory, which channel or which product should you prioritize? So two examples that I'll give you there is one, we're very close to rolling out a new integration with Smarter.

The subscription platform and we'll be exclusive to them initially. But effectively what we're doing is we're ingesting their kind of subscription data for their brands and we're able to tell you if you are at risk of stocking out for a product that has subscriptions, this is the reserve level that you need for those subscriptions. Because our thesis here is if you don't have stock to fulfill, I mean, we're talking consumer goods. So if you don't have stock to fulfill a renewal for a subscription, highly likely that that customer churns, right? So again we would rather give you that number and essentially put you in the position proactively to make the decision and prioritize fulfilling your subscriptions and rather running out of kind of your new customers because the LTV or any kind of second know metric that you attach to that decision is higher the simpler connect that's something that's very prevalent. So I get very excited about that. It's also very unique. There's nothing like that in the ecosystem. But broadly, what that means is, again, if you go back to if I can only sell on Shopify or Amazon because I can only get as much stock right now, whether it's my own working capital constraints, whether it's a supplier issue, which of these channels should I prioritize and to which extent.

That's ultimately kind of one of the outcomes that we are kind of driving towards from a product perspective in the next year.

Yeah, and I think that's really important too, because in this current environment where capital is expensive and you have all these different trade offs to make, right. Number one, if you have a subscriptions orders in place, like what you were talking earlier about making sure data is linked and everything, the fact that by tying subscription to inventory, it makes it really easy for you to say, hey, I already have these sales coming, I should be ready for them. Because if I don't fulfill on them, that's going to be a churn. And that's not just a one time churn. The whole unexpected LTV of that customer is gone. So I think being able to solve that is crucial. And then as well as, as you have more and more data, you're able to build in all these different things to help these people understand, oh, which channel is going to be more profitable if I have limited inventory? I don't have unlimited capital to stock up on everything, am I going to be more profitable by selling on my Amazon channel, on my retail channel, on my Direct channel? Where should I prioritize my inventory? So I think that's a really important way for brands to save and make and boost their unit economics for what they're selling. The next question that I have is given all these learnings, right, you guys are clearly serving brands that are starting to move from maybe just etc to multi channel.

They're launching the Amazon store, they're launching the retail. What are some of the learnings that you're seeing from brands as they graduate just from one channel, as they start expanding? What are some of the learnings that they need to have in mind as they go through this growing process? On the inventory and operation side of.

Things, again, one of the most interesting learnings there, Blaine, was that we're definitely seeing kind of your brands trying to sell in multiple channels much sooner, including retail. Right? That's probably one of the bigger surprises. Beyond that fragmented tech stack, I always thought you would need multiple millions of dollars to even think about selling into even nationwide chains retail. Right. So you're not just independent retailers. So that's definitely happening sooner. And I think, again, that's indicative of the times we're at. You made the point earlier in years gone by, you could just juice your Facebook machine and really optimize that and you had your customers on tap.

Right. And you can scale. I think the best brands now, they will scale by expanding into different kind of your channels. So I think that acknowledgement is already there. The key thing is that the brands that we work with that do this kind of year well is one is totally unrelated to cognitive and one is somewhat related. So the one that's unrelated is ultimately a new channel is always a bit of a gamble. Right. I think as a software founder, I'm always very privileged in that we can relatively easily and with low risk run a test and test our hypothesis for brands, you're talking about physical goods, you're probably talking minimum order quantities selling into a channel, properly testing something.

And again, if I commit 10,000 units into a channel and I can't get it back and I run out of stock for my direct channel, that's a challenge. So the brands that do channel expansion well, they are really disciplined about that process and about kind of both what the kind of assessing the downside there? If this goes south or something else happens, how do we mitigate against that? Right? So really being thoughtful about that and acknowledging that the first kind of your order or first sale into a new channel, the first steps into a channel, they are risky and you need to kind of prove out hypothesis there and learn. So I think that's the one part of it. And then the second part is, again, the brands that do better, there are the brands that have the, I would say broadly, say the tech stack in place before they do those things. Right. So many of these things, getting insights from your data is not something that you should try and do when your house is already on fire. When your house is on fire. These are hard things to do.

Right. You have to build trust in whatever reporting platform you have. You have to build the vocabulary oftentimes if you're not familiar. So it's not. Just a case of then house on fire, let's implement reporting suite and it will solve all of our problems. So, a key thing that I mentioned, how Cogsy builds that visibility, for example, that's a key example there is how can we help you understand before you go into that channel, A, how do you should think about your existing channels, how much inventory you need. But then also as you go into that channel, as soon as something changes, even if it feels like a bit of a butterfly effect, right? I E it looks tiny here, but somewhere else in the world, the butterfly wings has caused a hurricane. That's where a machine is really helpful, right? So that's probably as part of it is just that human process and discipline.

And the other part is having visibility into all your channels before you even start adding new channels.

I think it's really good timing as well, because back in the day, well, when brands had more leverage over just doing Facebook ads, they didn't want to affect their brand, know, and then they didn't want to sell on Amazon. They were worried of their brand perception or specific retail channels. But now you just see every single brand just listing on Amazon because the Facebook world has just become so hard. And in reality, then they say, well look, it's not the end of the world. Actually. Like our brand hasn't really been damaged by being on Amazon. And that's because your shoppers are there and everyone has sort of come to realize that in the DVC world now.

Totally. And I think two thoughts there, Ramon. One is I think we are finally getting to a point where Omnichannel is like it is now omnichannel I E the initial premise of Omnichannel was always like, can I connect with my prospective customer or customer in whatever channel that they are already in? And can I keep that consistent across my whole business? Right? I finally think we are at a point where even practically for large brands, you can buy from them in multiple different ways, from their own flagship stores, to kind of a reseller of theirs, to an online kind of medium, whether their own store or some kind of social channel. So I think we're finally with Omnichannel, I'll have maybe slightly more provocative kind of a thought that I will share there. Just before we were recording this, I was chatting to a fellow founder of mine and both of us said the same thing and fellow software founder, and both of us were saying the same thing about how we are acquiring customers. Where the phenomena is that 80% of our customers into our companies at this stage are coming from, quote unquote, dark social. I E very hard to kind of attribute where they came from, where we kind of as a brand interactive with them. And I would kind of proffer that generally what we see because we're talking about kind of your software founders.

If we say that they are generally early adopters and trends emerge there kind of sooner, I suspect the same is going to be true for consumer brands in the next couple of years, that the reason for why a customer purchased from you will be less known. I don't think attribution will matter as much being everywhere or in as many places as possible will matter more than what direct attribution will matter.

And ad. The other question that I'd have on the back of that, right, is I think one of the perspectives that you have as a software founder that works with a lot of brands, works with connecting a bunch of data, is that you have an insight into what some of the better brands are doing. When you guys get in there, you see what a good tech stack looks like versus a bad tech stack and you understand the importance of connecting all these data sources. So from your guys'experience working across some of your different brands, what are some of the tools in the tech stacks that the most successful brands are using and maybe what are some that you think are maybe a little antiquated that have opportunity to be replaced, disrupted, that sort of thing?

That's a good question. I mean, anything that leads to a spreadsheet I would say is antiquated at this stage, right? If a spreadsheet is part of part of any tool's kind of workflow still before or after you use the tool in that kind of workflow sequentially, I would call that out. I don't think though, that the tools are that antiquated kind of. I can tell you that I think NetSuite is antiquated. Right. I can tell you that when I pitch investors, I tell them Cogsy is the NetSuite killer and we will build the modern lightweight kind of ERP for retail brands. And we will do that by integrating wherever your SKU level data is. Right.

And we won't require all these things that NetSuite makes you do. Because ultimately NetSuite is a great, I think, financial tool. It's not a great operational tool. It was not built for kind of operations as much as it was built for accounting. Right. So I could call that out. But I think antiquated tools in tech stack is mood. I think the biggest opportunity for brands is actually getting tools in there, right.

And this is not just a pitch for Cogsy, right? Like Cogsy is not a perfect fit for every single brand, but actually getting a tool in there to automate some things, to kind of really optimize for things that machines do well. I e it's always connected, never kind of miscalculates anything, assuming there's no bugs in the code, et cetera. Those tools I think, are important. I would look at those things right, in the same way that the brands have been thinking about marketing. And then crucially, I think more directly answering your question about what we see with the brands that are winning. The brands that are winning truly understands their data. And what I mean truly understand is they understand where the data is coming from. They understand how those kind of the systems in place maybe transforms or interprets the data, and they ultimately kind of have a higher understanding of what any kind of derivative insight is.

So, again, like for Cogsy, as I mentioned, we're not the system of record for any data source except for the derivatives that we create, like, say, for example, on demand planning or a forecast side. For the rest of it, if the brand does not understand how the systems were connected, how they're piping sales information into an ERP, for example, I would argue that that's moot. Right. So really getting that clarity on how data kind of flows and what it actually means throughout their tech stack, again, that's a key differentiator between the brands that kind of you win and doesn't win. And saying that. By the way, one of the kind of recent episodes, at least of the podcast that I listened to was with Chelsea Schultz, I think, from Attitude. Right. And she speaks about kind of exactly that right.

She speaks about data overload, which is something that I agree with her on, but then she speaks about that clarity around kind of data right. And the systems involved. And if you can't get to that and you can't sanitize data, everything you do subsequently, again, is probably not as valuable.

Yeah. And it's so important to get right from the onset. And I think one of the things you pointed out, you called out earlier in the episode, was the fact that this is something that's foundational. So the earlier you can get it right and the earlier you can actually have the right strategy in place. Because now we know if you're launching a brand, it's a question of time before you go multichannel. It's a question of time before you have different data sources in different places. So rather than just stumble through it, it's something that you should really give a lot of time and thought to for your specific brand as you set up and give yourself a good foundation to scale once you ultimately get there.

Exactly.

Cool. So as we kind of wrap up here, I just want to know what are some of the things that you're most excited to build with Cogsy in the next year? What does the roadmap look like? Who are some of the brands that you're working with that you're really excited to solve more problems for? And what are some of those problems and opportunities that you're going after really hard in terms of productizing in the new year?

Yeah. So I can always call out Caraway. They're a significant brand. One of our early customers, they've been working very closely with Mark Riskovitz there, who is the VP of operations now. And what's fascinating, by the way, is I've learned Mark is such a fascinating character in the way that he's managed to and again, I've got some benefit of hindsight here, but he managed to if I look at their systems at least and how they architected it, he implemented many things within their business way before. They actually kind of you truly needed it. And I highly doubt that they would have been able to scale as they would have if they didn't do that. Right? So I can always call that out.

And my segue from there would always be that. I think for us, we've built the data layer and the reporting and all those things. But what we really want to get to is how do you actually take action with that data? Right? So, in the simplest way, and one of the things we built with Caraway very early on and pioneered this is around back orders. So Cogy today has a function where if your product is out of stock, we will calculate a dynamic and kind of automatically updated next available shipping date for that product and then display it on the PDP. And that converts at a significantly higher rate than anything kind of else. So I e kind of you go on a waitlist, you sell on pre order, etc. Having that transparency works. So I'm fascinated by the things that the actions that we can drive, either on a merchandising side like that.

I would pull that in merchandising, maybe getting into bundles on the front end or on the back end. I mentioned kind of the integration we're doing with Smarter and playing into subscriptions because that part of the product probably looks more like kind of a marketing tool or that kind of overlap with marketing. Right? Because part of our pitch for that feature set is that it should drive subscription retention over time. So the question that I would kind of ask my team is, are there other kind of marketing data sources that we should kind of ingest to kind of overlay with the operational data that we already have to drive some of those actions? So ultimately, again, I think Chelsea had mentioned that as well. I personally believe that brands have more than enough data. Data is not the problem. Right. Deriving insights from data is a problem.

And then contextualizing the insight and getting as close as possible to an action that you can take based on that, that's even harder. And I think for Cogs, once we get to a point where we can ingest the data, deliver some insights, and connect you directly connect you with some actions, I will be a very chuffed founder.

So I have a question for you on that, which is you've mentioned it's getting help with ingesting the data. You mentioned there are certain things you do that nobody else in the space is doing. As a listener, I'm like, oh my god, this is probably going to cost like ten grand plus. But you actually are a self serve, really affordable business model. So what was the logic behind that? And then how do you plan to actually help the brands at scale be able to actually ingest that data if you're know, hands on enterprise, white glove type of business model?

Yeah, so I love the question, by the way, Ramon. And I think this goes counter to what many investors and founders and the broader software space would kind of generally believe, which is always like go up market, charge more, raise prices, that kind of thing. I think for a big part of me at least, there's a lot of the WordPress and the open source DNA that's just with me as an entrepreneur. Back then, I learned a lot from Matt Mullenweg, one of the original founders of WordPress, now the CEO, founder of Automatic. And how do you balance the commercial aspects of the business versus open source, which is more of a philosophical kind of your model? Right? So when I think about kind of pricing, I've always had a huge passion for democratizing, really sophisticated kind of functionality and outcomes and do it in a way that's scalable to a bigger audience. So I would rather us at this stage figure out that part thereof than try and work with every single 100 million dollar brand that we can get and charge them 50 or one hundred K a year for that. I can also be honest, that probably one of my biggest learnings as an individual, not even just as an Entrepreneur is there's more than one way of living life and you ultimately need to find the ways that kind of energizes you, right? Yes, there are some probably some absolute rights and wrongs like don't murder someone. Right.

But for the rest of the things in life, it is a choose your own adventure. And I think I know that I have no appetite to sell into the enterprise. I don't want 100K project or a contract a year. Maybe cocky does that eventually. Ramon, like to your question, when I am not in the business anymore. Right. Maybe that changes in the future, but that would be a stark change or pivot away from the DNA in the company, like both for myself as well as Stefano, my co founder. So it's all about democratizing.

Great tools.

Yeah, for sure. I totally agree. I mean, there's many ways to build a business and you can make it if you want to sell into 100 grand. It's a totally different lifestyle and business and DNA of the business, a business I've been looking a lot recently is like Monday. How they've achieved such scale. You could look at sort of shopify, compare it to BigCommerce. There's many ways to make it, but I think this is a perfect segue into your Book Life Profitability, which I want to dive into because clearly, this is sort of what drove you to writing this book. And I want to ask a question related to an Instagram post I saw about Life Profitability, which is a quote from Andrew Wilkinson that says, I just want to wake up every day and not feel that I have to do anything that I don't want to do.

And we really try to create an environment where employees have that same level of freedom. So can you talk to me more about that? And what is the DNA of life profitability? What drove you to writing this book? And what's the main message?

Yeah, so the precursor to Life Profitability, at least Ramon, was. So with covergio. My previous company, my team and I, we got to a point where when we were talking about our culture and how we think we would say we were a life and family first company. And what we meant, the little blurb was always that said we want to do fun, stimulating, profitable work. But the most meaningful experiences that we can have is probably outside of work with people that are not our colleagues. And there was just this acknowledgment. I really dislike this idea of your colleagues are like families. No, I've got a real family.

Right. These things are different. I can be very close with my colleagues, but the one is not the same. Right. Again, I have a dislike for that. The other thing that I have a dislike for in that kind of realm is this idea of work life balance, right? Which is we propose that work and life are two different things, opposite ends of kind of the weighing scale. And if the one kind of your tips, the other needs to lift, et cetera. And I just think that work is just part of life, right? And there's other things that's important.

So ultimately, kind of where the short version of where I got to kind of with life profitability is really the evolution of that thinking. And the idea there is, how can I structure my life in such a way that the things that I do is also profitable to the rest of my life? And I don't mean profitable. My wife will tell you, I find even when there's no mention of anything financial in a conversation, I will use a financial term in there. That's just the way kind of my brain works. But the idea there was like, how can I structure my life so that it creates energy, it creates things that I can reinvest into kind of other things, right? So the way I now talk about that is I think about a life portfolio in the same way that you think about a stock portfolio and in the same way that you balance kind of investments in different stocks to get to whatever outcome you want. That's what you should be doing for life. And for me, for example, my life portfolio definitely includes my work. Right.

But it also includes my family. It includes my thirst for learning, which is kind of a soft skill. If I'm not learning enough within any time period, I know I'm not happy. Right. It includes exercising. I know if I don't exercise mostly every day, I am probably going to be grumpy. Right. It includes being able to kind of geek out about wine every now and again.

So all of these kind of various different things that's, again, where I believe it's choose your own adventure. I don't believe that there's a blueprint. I believe that this is down to kind of every single person to figure it out. But the idea there is just to start thinking about what creates kind of more value relative to the effort you're putting into it. And the last thought that I'll leave there is not my own, but I'll shape that. Is there's a quote from Henry Thurau that says, the cost of anything we do in life is just life itself. And I think that's often what we kind of neglect when we think about our daily lives, and we maybe don't go through it with some kind of element of mindfulness, but anything we do in life has a cost, even if it's just an opportunity cost. Right.

So if that's the vector, and that's more negative vector than I necessarily like, I'm more gloss kind of half full and gloss half empty, personally. But if that's the case, to Andrew's point, should I take a different job because I'm doing something I love, even though I'm paid less? What does that create? And it obviously costs me financially. It costs me in the sense that I'm sacrificing salary, but what am I gaining? And then you're comparing apples versus pears. This is not easy kind of your math to do. I would just advocate that you at least have that conversation with yourself and you go through that process to create some better clarity and alignment and not just robot kind of your walkthrough through your life.

Yeah, I mean, this reminds me of a conversation. So Pharrell Williams is an investor in our business and I had a conversation with him about this of like, how do you do music, TV stuff, how do you do movies, how do you do, like, have ten different businesses, an investing portfolio? And his answer was, I just work on things that don't feel like work to me that I would do anyways. And I think that's the only way to get through it and then to also implement it into your life, like, work part of your life. The other side of the coin, though, is sometimes things, the journey can be so rough and so hard that you then think that you're supposed to take the route of what is hardest because it can't be that good and that easy. And so personally, that's something I even battle with.

Yeah.

And when I speak about these things, mon. I definitely don't pretend to have perfected in my own life or at any one point in the past, had any measure of perfection. I also just think that going through the exercise and thinking through it and trying to live your best life, be your whole self, like any word you want to use in this moment, is important, I think, especially for any person that has any measure of professional ambition, especially entrepreneurs. We've been trained to believe that there will be short term kind of your pain for long term gain, and I don't disagree with that. Anything that's worthwhile, most things that are worthwhile in life requires an immense amount of kind of effort, perseverance, grit, resilience, et cetera. Like sacrifice. Yes. But I don't think, again, I'm not as singular and I think that's a very risky way of saying I will sacrifice on all these other things in my life for the next X many years to hopefully achieve a certain outcome here.

And that's where you start listening to people that kind of successful people, that will tell you, you know what, yes, it was great. Making all that money didn't make me happy. Right. I'm generalizing there and I'm saying that from a privileged position, but I think the key is that you have to love the journey. And I think that's what kind of, in my words, what Pharrell said, right, as the first point, if you can love the journey, the outcomes still matter, but they matter less. It isn't a binary win or lose, it's less the extent to which kind of the journey you already had, in hindsight, was great.

Yeah, I was just going to say, I think that's super important for any entrepreneur under here, whatever field you're in, not even just entrepreneurs, anyone who's really thinking about their work life and how they approach their life. Right. But coming from someone who's been through it three times I know Ramon and I are like two time founders, but it starts to become more and more clear and every step of the way you go, I don't have my own family yet. You do. And you kind of are able to contextualize things in the broader perspective, which I think is super important. So, anyway, Adi, we want to thank you so much for coming on the pod today, dropping all that knowledge, not just about Cogsy, what you're building, your experiences, but as well as life and how to live a fulfilling life. So that's amazing. And then for our listeners, where can they connect with you, where can they find more about you personally, Cogsy, et cetera? Give a shout out to your socials and where we can find you.

Yeah. Thanks, Vane. So easiest is on Twitter. I'm pretty active on Twitter, where I'm just at 80 80 or my website, if you're more keen on the book, which is adwi me. And then Cogsy is just Cogsy.com fiveletter.com should be easy to find.

Cool. Thanks so much.

Awesome. Thanks, guys.