Castmagic logo
DTC POD #244 - Benjamin Davis, TryNow: Try Before You Buy for E-Commerce
Transcript
Magic Chat
Blaine Bolus 00:00:06 - 00:00:46
Welcome to Dtcpod, where we take you behind the wheel with the best founders and operators of consumer brands. You'll learn the ins and outs of business from setting up shop, hitting your first million, scaling past eight figures, and even navigating an exit. As founders ourselves, our goal is to help you learn from the best as you build. Visit us@dtcpod.com to sign up for our weekly newsletter, join our founder community and find additional resources from every episode. Dtcpod is brought to you by Trend, the creative solution for your brand. Go to trend. IO to access thousands of creators for content needs such as product photography, unboxing videos, or even TikTok and Igorganic Creative. Use the code Dtcpod ten for 10% off your next content purchase.
Blaine Bolus 00:00:51 - 00:00:58
Are you curious how much your business is worth? Get your free no obligation offer from OpenStore at open store.
Ramon Berrios 00:01:02 - 00:01:33
This episode of Dtcpod is also brought to you by Peel Insights, the e commerce analytics platform that supercharges all of your retention efforts every day and with every customer. Go to peelinsights.com. Slash dtcpod to learn how hundreds of e commerce brands use Peel to reveal purposeful insights like LTV, AOV, Repurchase rate Churn, and hundreds of metrics more. See how brands are nurturing deeper customer relationships with easy to use retention tools that hyper target and provide immediate growth.
Blaine Bolus 00:01:36 - 00:02:06
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.
Blaine Bolus 00:02:09 - 00:02:21
What's up, Dtcpod? Today we're joined by Benjamin Davis, who's the founder and CEO of Trynow. So, Benjamin, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself and what you guys are building at Trynow.
Benjamin Davis 00:02:21 - 00:02:45
Yeah. Hey, Bland. Hey, Ramon. Great to be here. So, I'm the founder and CEO of Trynow, and the genesis for Trynow came out of my work. In my last business, I was running direct to consumer apparel brand, and we had this incredibly soft fabric and garments, but it's really hard to convey the product quality through a browser window. Right. Like, one of the challenges in e commerce.
Benjamin Davis 00:02:45 - 00:03:13
So figured if we could allow shoppers to try the product at home before they had to buy the product, we'd increase conversion rates, we'd increase AOV, we increase LTV, and just create a better shopper experience, a fraud, cash flow, working capital queue, reconciliation was all just very complex. So they'll try now to automate that for brands. We've raised about $25 million in funding from some fintech investors to create the try before you buy category. Sweet.
Blaine Bolus 00:03:13 - 00:03:33
So, yeah, why don't you take us a little bit further back to the founding story about how, like, how you had conviction that this was the problem that you wanted to solve and then kind of what your first steps were. Did you go out and raise capital? Did you bootstrap something in MVP and then use that to raise capital? What was the genesis of the company and what did it look like in the early days?
Benjamin Davis 00:03:33 - 00:04:24
Yeah. Well, so I guess we could go all the way back to a photo shoot, and we had this fabric for kids and moms, and it was just really soft loungewear. And we had a photo shoot, and I got a bill from a photographer that was for an incredibly high price tag. And I gave him a call. I said, just, we're paying this bill, but just want to have a sense for why it costs so much. He said, well, it's really hard to convey the product quality through a browser window. And so I figured, well, there's got to be a better way. Kind of brought it down to first principles and said, well, why is this a problem in the first place? Well, when a shopper has to depart with their hard earned money to experience a product, that's a problem.
Benjamin Davis 00:04:24 - 00:04:56
That's like a fundamental flaw in ecommerce. And when the first ecommerce transaction came around in I think it was 1994 or 1995, there was never a chance of allowing shoppers to try before they buy. There would be ramp and fraud. We didn't have the ability to separate an authorization from a capture. We weren't able to track packages, shipping APIs, return management, software solutions. Like, the plumbing just wasn't laid there. So we've just gotten accustomed to buying before trying. And so that was the thesis that I formed, that buying before trying restricts growth.