#244 - Benjamin Davis, TryNow: Try Before You Buy for E-Commerce

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Flipping the model, unlocks growth. It also creates a lot of complexity. But in order to validate that, put up two landing pages. We put ads to both landing pages. One was just a normal kind of add to cart buy now CTA. The other was a landing page. That was a try now try before you buy CTA. And the results were incredibly clear, and we had about a 300% increase in conversions on the Trident CTA.

And so I had conviction that this just made a lot of sense, would drive more orders. I called five brands. Four of them said, yes, we'd like to participate in the beta. This is really interesting. And so at that point, I had enough conviction to put in a lot of my own money, pretty much most of my own money, and go down this path.

And what was your background before working on that clothing line that you were working on? Were you always in apparel and ecommerce, or did you have a different sort of background before that?

Yeah, before that I was in investment banking and private equity in both software investing, but also in consumer so I had background in both the consumer space and the software space.

Yeah, no, I'm curious on how a brand looks at, I assume the most questions that brands would have whenever they hear about the try now, buy later method, are some people not qualified and they're just going to get samples of the product? Is a sample of the product that the customer gets? Is it the exact product that they would sell to someone else? Is a separate inventory for that? How does it all work from the brand's perspective, and how is that then implemented? Is that a marketing expense, typically for brands as it gets blended into their customer acquisition costs?

Et. I mean, the general concept for trynow is that we flip the order of payment. We call it it's the psychology around payment. It's very unnatural to depart with your money to try product. And Ramon, let's say, is there a brand that you like, a brand that you like shopping at?

I mean, no, this just reminds you of warby Parker. But now I think I'm getting the drift, which is like, if I like it, I keep it with you. But I remember when I did warby parker, you have to still send it back even if you like it, because it was sort of a sample, ish probably because you also need prescriptions.

So glasses might yeah, prescriptions is a bit of a different use case. But regardless, I'm here at our office on abbot Kenny in Venice, and warby parker is like, five doors down. And so let's say, ramon, you walk into a warby parker, and you want to try on three different glasses, $100 each, and said, hey, Ramon, before you try these on, just give me your credit card. I'll charge you for $300. But if you don't like it, no worries. You can go to the front, get a refund. You would never do that, right? And warby parker would never charge you to try this on in store. So, of course they would never operate their brick and mortar stores that way.

They also recognize that they should not operate their online store that way, and they are one of few brands that recognize that very early on. And so we flip the model so that your online store mirrors that same sort of behavior of your brick and mortar store.

Yeah, I think what's really cool there is you're giving merchants an option, and what your job is, is to provide the whole infrastructure. So if a customer wants to be able to try out a product, rather than having to part with their money, they can add a bunch of stuff to their cart. They can click try now. And then, rather than them having to upfront get charged for what they're buying, you guys are able to facilitate them trying out the product. And then if they like everything great, they can keep it because they've tried it, and they liked it, and then they'll settle at that moment, and if they don't, they'll send back what they didn't need and they'll keep what they want. So effectively, it is a pretty similar process to what goes on now. It's just like you guys are basically providing that psychological unlock and the infrastructural unlock for customers to be able to tap into that psychological advantage of purchasing.

Are there industries that you guys know? You mentioned you were in fashion. Are you guys specifically focused in fashion, or do you guys go into other verticals as well?

We work across verticals. So we have brands and apparel, handbags bedding fragrances, candles, footwear, sunglasses, accessories, you name it. We work across verticals. Our vision is that try before you buy is the new free shipping and easy returns. And in the next five years, it's going to be as ubiquitous as free shipping and easy returns. So anything that is discretionary, meaning like anything that discretionary should be tried before it's bought. Any product that's hard to experience through a browser window should be tried before it's bought. Paper towels, toilet paper, you could buy those before you try.

But with the exception of products like that, it's universally applicable.

Yeah, makes sense. I was going to ask, you mentioned you put your own capital, you worked with those five brands. Where do you take it next? What was the next step? You validated it with those five brands. What was your vision for the next milestone that you wanted to take the business to?

Yeah, we took a very Iterative approach towards building the business. And we've done that with everything. We do take an Iterative approach to every component of our business from how do we go to market, how we build product. Had an MVP. It was with my own dollars at that point, engaged two engineers and we built out an MVP. Very scrapply, just to validate that this would work, that this is buildable. And the intention wasn't to build a platform that we would then scale. It was, can we actually charge a card at the right amount? Do we have the underlying infrastructure and technology? Because no one's done it before in a fully automated end to end way that's truly scalable without relying on some form of spreadsheets or some sort of manual steps and processes.

So we validated that it worked at that point. We had a very lean team. The product got pulled into the marketing incredibly quickly, much more quickly than I anticipated. And with that traction, we raised additional funding on the back of that. So we raised a small amount of funding at that point. I think we raised about a million dollars in funding. We brought on some additional engineers to build up the platform. And we've since raised another kind of 23 or so million in funding.

We brought on execs from a firm, from Stitch Fix and from Amazon to build out the product, to build Out The Team. But along the way, it was very much iterative, with a relentless focus on driving value for our merchants and for our shoppers. That's our North Star, I think. The unique part of our business. We have two stakeholders. And ultimately, if we drive value for merchants and shoppers, that's all we care about. We kind of just iterate our way towards that.

The one question that I had is when you're raising for a business like this, like you said, it's part SaaS, it's part fintech. There's a bunch of different components that go into something like this. So when you guys are raising the capital, is that all operational capital? Is it capital that's used to finance inventory? How do you guys approach the financing component of your business?

Yeah. So our equity capital is solely for building the Trinom business. So it's largely payroll and other expenses for any financing that we do to finance the float. So we pay most of our merchants up front. They collect all that cash up front shopper cars for free. That pool of capital is done through outside investors. So it's a separate pool of capital that we pay a fee on.

Awesome. And that is the essential service that you're providing. You're providing an actual service that a merchant is going to be able to deploy onto their website. You're deploying this service that a customer is going to be able to benefit by trying the product. And you're also providing that service of sourcing the capital and providing it to those merchants to be able to provide that experience without them having to assume the risk on building their own Try Now program.

That's Right. And things that are simple tend to be quite complex. And so what we've tried to do is obfuscate away all of these things so that we could just provide the most simple thing to the shopper, which they immediately understand and communicated in one line text underneath the CTA, which is try a home for seven days. Makes Sense. I would love to try a home for seven days. Well, underneath the hood, there's fraud. There's working capital float. There's tracking the package to make sure it's delivered, handling failed deliveries and all the edge cases that come with that integration with return flow to know what was kept, what was returned.

And in Ecommerce, 80% of orders go down the happy path. Really easy to manage. 20% of orders have an infinite number of variations. And so we kind of manage around that in addition to the working capital, the fraud and more.

Yeah, and, I mean, I think that's a really important part of when you're building any business. Like you said, it sounds really simple when you do it. But then when you actually think about and start to peel back the layers, there's all sorts of corner cases you need to be able to solve for and things you need to be able to do. And if you don't solve for all of those different things, well, the merchant is going to be like, oh, well, this just doesn't work. Right? So there's a lot of these different edge cases and a lot of business use cases that you need to solve for before your product becomes fully viable, to just be as easy as, oh, try before you buy. And it works for everyone. So why don't you talk us through as you were building out the platform, what were some of the big challenges you faced and how you guys built to solve for those corner cases and those use cases to satisfy merchants and customers?

Yeah, so, I mean, fraud was a challenge, right? And how do we manage around fraud? And we assume that risk. We're also lending against that. So how do we make sure that we mitigate that? And so we have solved that. That was like kind of one big chunk. I think the other piece is really around the complexity of an Ecommerce transaction, because when you operate very quickly, when you're in Ecommerce, you operate at scale. Because for most software companies, they have one merchant. Well, for us, one merchant probably means a million shoppers. And so when we onboard one sizable merchant with a million shoppers, you expose every possible outcome.

Right? Now you take that, multiply it by 100 customers, and you're just in contact with so many shoppers that are using your tool in a bunch of different ways, exposing every single edge case imaginable. And so when you initially now we're mature. But prior to that, like, in the Iterative process, every single day you're learning new things, you're squashing new bugs. You are recognizing that what was clear to you when you built the product wasn't clear to the end user or wasn't clear to the merchant. And so I think that's like the challenging part of Ecommerce also kind of the most kind of beautiful part of Ecommerce, which is that shoppers are never satisfied. They always want more. And so it's like this asymptotal relationship where you can always get closer to a perfect customer experience, but you will never arrive there. And that's why the greatest force for driving enterprise value is just focusing on the customer, customer centricity, but like a relentless focus on customer centricity.

Most companies will say that they care about the customer, but very few actually do that at every single step of their process. And so I think that to us was paramount because as we think about our two stakeholders, merchants and shoppers, merchants are who we interact with the most, right. Day in, day out, we're constantly focused on driving value for merchants. But at the end of the day, shoppers are the most important part to both of our businesses. Without shoppers, we just don't exist. And so we work with merchants on this kind of united front to drive the most incredible shopping experience so that not only do they order more and they keep more, but they also come back more frequently. They love that experience. They generate word of mouth.

And so at the end of the day, the focus on the shopper and creating an indispensable shopping experience is what allows our brands to win.

Yeah, and that's like, one of the things that you're able to unlock for a lot of the commerce brands, because, like, you're saying, one of the biggest pieces of friction in the customer journey is getting past that. Oh, I'm actually going to spend all this money to buy something that I don't know if it fits. I don't know if the material sure, I can see high res pictures of it, but there's nothing like when you're shopping and you're in a store and you feel the quality and you feel it in your hand. You're like, oh, okay, I know what this is. And you can go into the dressing room. You can try it on, be like, oh, that didn't work. I put it back in Ecommerce. You know that decision making moves between you being just that hint of uncertainty, like, I don't know if I'm going to get this decision right.

That may make you not actually end up purchasing something. Whereas if you're able to remove that risk now, you're able to again, reduce that friction from the customer's perspective and provide a solution for the merchant to provide that frictionless checkout experience, right?

I think that's spot on. And I like how you talked about risk and uncertainty because they are two sides of the same coin. And I think all businesses are in the business of derisking their business, derisking elements of their business. No matter what stage you're at, as you grow, you have a new set of risks. And a focus on derisking is, I think, key. It's actually how we manage our annual planning process. So it's very opportune. We just came out of last week, our exact annual planning process using kind of the risk stack as a framework for us.

So I think that same thing can be applied to abandoned carts, right? Like, what are the reason? What's the uncertainty? Therefore, what's the risk in that purchase? Well, there's probably a few different risks. I mean, it's not just price. It's not just the zero dollar cart. We help solve that significantly. But there's probably other things that are going on in the shoppers minds. But we will work with brands, with dr brands all the time. And one question we'll ask is, why are shoppers abandoning carts? Right? It's the biggest problem in Ecommerce. And shoppers fill their cart, a lot of window browsing, but then they abandon why are they abandoning? And there's like, conjecture, like, I think it's the wrong size, or I think the prices price the product.

Is it's an expensive T shirt? Will the product meet the promise? Right? There's all these different kind of hypotheses, but very rarely do brands actually reach out to those shoppers, interview those shoppers, ask them questions and understand what's going on behind their mind in their heads. Right? And so I think there's this tendency to focus on averages, data and averages, but anecdotes, I think, are more important than data. And so internally, I try. Now we talk about finding the anecdotes first, surfacing the anecdotes first and then diving into the data. And I think it helps short circuit some things and also gives you the color and the context to form hypotheses.

I think the same applies to your customer side of the business, too, where you're asking to interrupt the experience that their customers might have when they interact with them. Checkout. It needs to be a flawless experience for the customer. But I love that you provide an additional improvable value besides just a better checkout experience, which is sort of what Bolt or Fast or these other checkout companies have. You are literally just enhancing the experience of the customer while going into having them sort of replace their checkout experience. So how were you able to earn that trust early with those customers who might have a million customers, and here you are as a potential seed stage startup asking, hey, can you let us try this and trust us with this?

Yeah, I think in the early days, trust was hard. Right now it's very different. But we've been beating the try before you buy drum for about three and a half years. And so the market has formed, but it just took time and patience and incredible amount of hard work. In the early days, I think they didn't need to trust us, they needed to trust their product. And I'd say the same is still true today. We work with confident brands. If you are confident in your product, you've got to be using try before you buy.

If you're not confident in your product, you definitely should not be using try before you buy. I often say we accelerate the growth of a business selling a great product, and we accelerate the demise of a business selling a bad product. I think that's a great place to be in. We want the best products to rise to the top. And so if you have a great product, get your product into more homes. And if you have a great product, they're going to keep it and you're going to acquire Happy Showers.

And I assume for subscriptions, it's a huge value for brands to be able to just offer this to let subscriptions for free trials that they previously probably would have more objections from people just signing straight up for a subscription. Initially they probably just do a one time purchase and then maybe if you were lucky to get them, then they roll into the subscription.

Yeah, that's right.

The one point that you pointed out that I do think is really important is about the idea of the brand needs to have a good product to be able to work with you guys, right? It's kind of like that double edged sword because I guess my question there is, do you guys have a process by which you vet merchants? Because like, you're saying is if a merchant onboards with you guys, they don't have a good product, they're early stage, they haven't reached their product market, fit, call it, and then they just start scaling this up. You're going to have this exponential effect on returns, on people being upset with the product, all this sort of stuff. So do you have a way in which you vet merchants or do you kind of let that just sort itself out, knowing that the best merchants with the best products will rise to the top and the others will be able to make that decision for themselves?

Yeah, that's a great question. Not yet. And we don't have a need to yet because it's self selecting. Brands that reach out to us or we reach out to them are brands that either we admire or they admire their own product. And so we know that if we can get that product into more homes, they're going to drive growth. We don't yet. And it's because of the brands that we work with have a lot of confidence in what they're selling.

What are some of the best examples of brands that maybe you've worked with that you can mention on the show or just product categories in general that have seen the most success with this sort of thing? Right. Obviously there's going to be certain subcategories that totally outperform others. So are there any that have really stood out to you so far through your three and a half years building try now?

Yeah, well, any brand in apparel needs to be using Tribe before you buy. Frankly, of course, I sound completely biased in that, but when we've seen the data time and time again, it's just we convert living rooms into fitting rooms, and that is key for selling apparel online. And so some of these businesses will have higher return rates because people are already doing some of this behavior. But ultimately, like size, fit, style, you need the ability to experience that in your own home, otherwise you're leaving money on the table. Are there other product categories that we work with, like handbags? That the question around durability, quality, look, style. Size is oftentimes hard to understand. So that's another great category for us. I think categories that don't work would be AOVs, that are like 30, 40, $50, become tough, and then items that can't be resold after returns.

We don't work with any brands in that space. But even companies like fragrances or I'm here with I've got a Sniff candle here on my desk, and Sniff sells candles and they sell cologne, perfume as well, and they send samples with a full size product. So if you like the sample, you just keep the full size product and you're charged. But if you don't like the sample, no worries, just send it back and you won't be charged. So even in those categories that rely on sampling, we kind of turn sampling from a two step process to a one step process where the shopper typically has a two step process where they like the sample. Step one, they then have to go back to the website and purchase. Step two, well, there's huge amounts of drop off between liking that sample and going back to repurchase. And so we eliminate that second step so that if they like it, they just keep it.

I think that's a really good point in terms of there's so many layers to trying things out. You've got the traditional product samples that you can weave into these sort of flows as well as the, oh, I want to put a bunch of these products, actual products, in my cart and try those out. Are there any use cases on? I know we talked about higher AOV products. Is there anything in regards to for characteristics about products like product size and weight? Can you guys serve furniture? Does that become harder? Are there any super big or super small things that work well or don't work so well?

Yeah, so we don't work with any furniture mattress companies today, although we will be working with some of them soon. And it's not that it doesn't work in those spaces for mattresses, for instance. It just will work in slightly different ways. And so get a full site wide rollout to 100% of traffic for a mattress company might work. It also might be more challenged. So how do you do it in more targeted ways? So card abandonment, retargeting specific paid campaigns, SMS campaigns that web visitors that come through those channels have the ability to try. And so you're targeting that at different points of the funnels. Maybe it's a mid funnel or a bottom funnel strategy as opposed to just anyone that landed on the site can try.

So you can leverage try now. And the tool to augment whatever your existing strategy is.

Got it. And Benjamin. The next thing I wanted to kind of touch on and I know we were chatting a little bit about this offline, and we had definitely covered the whole idea of how important being customer centric is is how do you think about and how for brands, do you think about navigating customer centricity in a time of potential economic recession, where companies are thinking about where they can save costs, cut corners, lay off staff, these sort of things, how do you put the customer first? And what's your philosophy for that in the upcoming economic environment?

Yeah, I think it's a great topic because there's a tension point between oftentimes it appears that there's a tension point between what's best for the shopper and what's best for the. Merchant. And before I kind of go into that, I will caveat this with saying the number one thing that's best for the shopper, if you sell a great product, the thing that's best for the shopper is to always stay in business. So capital efficiency is key. So that's like the filter for all of this. So the business needs to stay in business. You need to have a healthy business, healthy margins, and able to support the business to continue to deliver on products that your shoppers love. Let's assume that you have that health.

In that case, there is no separation between what's best for the shopper and what's best for the merchant in the long run, in the very long run. And we could kind of debate that topic, but ultimately, customer centricity is how you win. And there is a natural inclination when markets soften, which they are, demand is softening, brands are feeling it to find ways to cut cost. And I think there's numerous different ways to do it, but I think one way that is very easy for shopper, for merchants to do, is to charge, for instance, a restocking fee. So you return that item, we're going to charge you $10. And brands will do that and they'll a b test it and they'll say, well, it doesn't impact conversion rates. We threw $10 didn't impact conversion rates. So it's effectively generating an extra $10 times the return rates.

Let's say you have a 20% return rate, 20% times that $10 restocking fee generating an extra $2 per order, which is helpful for their margins. Now, what that doesn't take into account is the impact on LTV. It doesn't take into account CSAT and NPS. It doesn't take into account repurchase frequency. It doesn't take into account the dampening effect that that has on word of mouth. I've seen a few kind of articles about brands that are thinking about introducing restocking fees. I think it's probably one of the most short sighted decisions a brand can make in this time because if you take that example of $10 restocking fee times a 20% return rate, that's $2 per order. Well, there's a lot of other ways that you can generate an extra $2 per order without creating a bad customer experience.

So you can raise your prices by a dollar per order. You can find creative ways to bring down your cap by $2 per transaction. You can renegotiate terms with your shippers, you can renegotiate terms with your suppliers, you can renegotiate terms with your working capital lenders. There's plenty of other ways to uncover those dollars that doesn't create a bad customer experience. It's just that those other ways are more challenging. I think that's kind of an interesting kind of debate that we'll have, and I'm happy to always have this debate. And if Blaine Ramon, you have a different perspective, I'd love to hear it, but I think it's a fun topic to rip.

Yeah, the reason I love thinking about things in this lens is like, you're starting with the customer and you're working backwards, right? So yes, the brand can recover margin by adding $3 or a $5 restocking fee or whatever it is. But I think to your point, until the data is very unclear about how that decision impacts all these different parts of the business, right? Like when they're running their analytics, if they're using, they're running your different bi tools. And the way you're querying it, that query becomes so complex and hard to solve. And also you need time to be able to prove it out. But in the short term, it's really easy to say, oh, we recovered this margin. But in the long term, it's really hard to say because if someone doesn't return something, they're like, I'm not going to pay another $5 to return and restock it. The product obviously doesn't fit them. It's sitting on their shelf.

So you've got waste in that regard. And then they're going to be like, why would I shop from that online store again if I was just burned on this shopping transaction where I spent a bunch of money and now I'm call it $80 in the hole. I don't want to spend another $10 to ship this back and restock it with them or whatever. So I'm just going to leave it. And I've actually seen this, right? I've seen products around my house where I just don't have the time or energy to be like, oh, I'm going to go return that for that 40 or $50 refund. So it just sits there being wasted and ultimately becomes a bad customer experience. And my first reaction isn't like, oh, nice, let me go buy online from this brand again because I just got burned, right?

That's exactly right. And you have like, when you have a return, the concept of restocking fee makes the assumption that a return means that shopper is not going to come back again. Kind of just wrote that shopper off. That is completely false. If you look at the data of shoppers that return, big portion of them come back and repurchase as long as you have a good product. If they came and they just thought the product quality didn't meet their bar, it's a different story. Let's assume that you have a great product, then maybe they didn't find the right size. Maybe they didn't find the right style.

Maybe the color that was navy blue was actually a light blue and they don't like light blue. Right? There's like a bunch of different reasons. But if we look at the data around what we call buy zeros, shoppers that ordered and returned everything, a big portion of them do come back and repurchase from that brand, but they don't if you charge them a restocking fee.

Well, yeah, because in that example, imagine you've never bought something with a brand before. You are literally, I mean, in the Try Now sense you as the shopper, are paying to try out their product and you're going to be like, wait a minute, I just got hosed for $20 and I don't have anything to even show for it. And not only that, it took my time and I stood in line at the post office for 30 minutes to get this thing returned. Also, I could pay this brand $20. Like totally shit experience.

Exactly. And you talked about looking at the data and saying, well, what's the LTV impact and the reality? It takes time for that LTV impact to really play out, to really have a lot of conviction there, you need a solid six months, but probably a little bit more to have full conviction. And that's why internally at Try Now, we talk about anecdotes first, averages second. Because if you were focused on finding the anecdotes around, how are restocking fees resonating with your shoppers? You would then talk to your customer support team and I guarantee you that if you have a restocking fee, you're getting inquiries from shoppers complaining about that restocking fee. And brands will basically grease the squeakiest wheel. And so if a shopper is complaining they'll waive the restocking fee. Well, that's just not the right way to do business and it's also not fair to all of your shoppers. And so before even looking at the data, if you just heard the anecdotes and you just read the emails into customer support, you would know that this isn't customer centric and you would know that this is not going to help your business in the long run.

That's why we talk about anecdotes first, averages second, I think is particularly relevant here.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the other thing to touch on there is how important it is to actually just understand what the service is that you're providing as a merchant to these customers, what the end experience is, and then working backwards from there. And I think it's really easy to, like you were saying, jump into saying, let's charge restock and freeze. Let's recoup our margin there. And my one takeaway so far from this podcast and a lot of the other ones that we've been having as well, is like, if you're a merchant, if you're an operator in Ecommerce, you have to be super thoughtful about not only the product that it is you're making. So you start with good quality, but then every different part of the business you want to be auditing your supply chain, your sourcing, making sure you're being able to pick up margin. There all the different costs associated, all the different costs that go into your unit. Economics of your service, you need to consider all of that.

And then use a tool like trynow to be able to leverage that turn on the gas and scale up. Right?

Yeah, go for it. Which you mentioned. A lot of the success probably depends too on the brand having a good product, right? Like if they have a good product, most of these issues go away. I'm curious, how do you define a good product at trynow? Do you guys look at certain data benchmarks? Do you guys help the customer understand whether they're in a position to do something like this? Whether what are the KPIs or benchmarks? They need to improve to know that they're headed towards the right direction for this service to be of more benefit to them. I assume it's not subjective that Benjamin decides, benjamin needs to try it first and decide if it's a good product or not.

Try all the products. I think the number one stat most correlated to call product quality would be product quality might be a little too precise. I think we call it product market fit. Frankly, is the brand selling a product that fits with the market they're selling it into and that would be success rate. So it's the percent of orders in which shopper ordered something and they kept something. So if a shopper ordered two items, kept one, return one, that would be a successful order. If they ordered two and they returned two, that would be an unsuccessful order. And so forget about return rates, right? Because if a shopper ordered four items, they keep two, they return to they just kept two items.

That's a big AOV. That's a big AOV. But a brand would look at that one order and they say 50% return rate. That's bad. It's not bad, it's great, right? So we kind of bifurcate return rate. I think it's an unnuanced metric. Instead we focus on success rates and we focus on net AOV and so success rate is a great metric for that. I think a good example would be good life.

I don't know if either of you are familiar with GoodLife apparel. They're an exceptional business, an exceptional product. For a long time their product was premium high end tees and it was the vast majority of their business. They've since launched new categories and they've used try now to get shoppers to not just convert on teas but then expand into some of their more fashion pieces. But if you look at their success rate, it is top decile, top probably 5% of all of our programs just because their product is so incredible. And I highly encourage you to get a T, it'll be money well spent and you'll look fantastic in it. But it's just really good product. If we go back to anecdotes first average is second.

I got the t shirt and I said well, and I'm like a bit of a T shirt. Connoisseur and Blaine Ramona, I see you're both wearing t shirts, so maybe you are as well. And I knew that when they launched their program, it's going to work because it's just a great product and you see it in the data.

Another thing that I think is going to be really exciting for you guys. I don't know if you've built this stuff out yet, but it seems like every time someone's ordering, there's a lesson to be learned, especially if they're using try now. Right? If there's something coming back, it's like, oh, okay, you're almost running this mini A B test between the two products that that customer ordered, and then teams can use those insights to seeing what's coming back. How are we structuring our communication about these products? Why are people selecting these different bundles? So I think what's really exciting about it is not only are you providing a good customer experience as you're able to provide more bandwidth for these brands to get their products in the hands of more excited customers, but you're also providing learning lessons. Every single time that a customer is taking an action, whether, like, you're saying they're keeping the product, it's a fully, fully successful try now, or they're returning one of the products, keeping one which is also successful, you can pull something out. Or if it's an unsuccessful, okay, what are the nuggets and what can we learn from that? Is there something we can iterate into our website, the way we frame the sizing, the way we did the description, all that kind of stuff.

That is a great point, and it's something that we haven't done yet. We've done a little bit here and there. We do some surveys, but we haven't fully productized that. But we will, because turning kind of a bad thing into an opportunity, right? Like a return that where some shopper didn't order keep anything. Well, how do you turn that into an opportunity? You do that by understanding why they returned. And I think a good example of this when we talked about kind of product market fit, it's like you could sell a great product, but maybe it's great for just some people. Let's take apparel. Maybe it's great if you're six foot or taller and it's just a great T shirt, but maybe if you're five foot seven, like myself, maybe it's just too long and to maybe the products exceptional.

It's just the grading for the sizes, for the size small or size medium are just a little off compared to the large or the extra large. So it's not necessarily always product quality. It could be grading. It could be a bunch of different topics. So that's some data and some information we'd love to surface back to our merchants.

Awesome. And then, Benjamin, as we kind of come up on time here, what are some of the like, clearly you guys have a really exciting roadmap. You guys will be able to provide all this data and create leverage out of that as well for the brands. But in the more immediate term, what are you guys focused on as we look at the close out of 2022 and moving into 2023, what are the core areas that you guys are focused in right now.

Yeah. So we continue to build deeper and deeper into Shopify, and so continuing to build upon our partnership with Shopify is key. So we're native within the checkout, but continue to build into other capabilities that Shopify offers and other integrations within the Shopify ecosystem to make the product as seamless as possible for the Shopper and for the constituents of the merchants and stakeholders of the merchants that use our product. The other piece would be building out a Shopper portal that allows the Shopper to have full transparency and visibility into their trial. Right now, we've been heavily into kind of communications, but ultimately having a place that they can self serve questions about their trial. They can extend a trial if they're out on vacation themselves without reaching out to customer support. They can initiate the return of their trial within this portal. So we're building that out and that will launch next year.

Awesome. And for anyone who's listening, merchant operator, whomever that might want to get in touch or reach out, where's the best place to connect with you and try on are you on, you know, what's the best place to find you?

Where can they try? Try now.

They can try try now. It would be hypocritical if they couldn't. So they could try us before they buy us. And follow us on LinkedIn. We post quite a bit around content around the ecommerce industry more broadly, and try now. And try before you buy more specifically. And then go to our website at trynow. IO for more information.

If you want to reach out directly to me, feel free to drop me a note. It's ben at trynow IO.

Sweet. Well, thanks so much for coming on DTC Pod with us. Loved hearing about what you guys are building. Think the space is really exciting. There's all these different use cases that are opening up. And we're really excited to see you guys as you continue to grow and see how you can take on this whole e commerce market and help get some more products in the hands of Shoppers.

Yeah. Thanks, guys.

Really fun conversation.