Better Product LAUNCH: Malomo

Episode Transcription

Christian Beck:

Welcome to this episode of Better Product launch, where we're sitting down with a founder to give you an inside look into their new product launch.

Anna Eaglin:

Today we're talking to Yaw Aning, founder and CEO of Malomo. Malomo helps e-commerce brands generate more revenue and loyalty by turning their shipment tracking experience into a marketing channel. Yaw, it's so awesome to have you on the show today.

Yaw Aning:

Yeah. Hey, thanks for having me. I've been waiting for the invite, so I'm glad I could make an appearance. Thanks a ton.

Anna Eaglin:

I'm so glad that we get to meet because we are huge fans of yours.

Yaw Aning:

Likewise, likewise. I feel like even back in the day, we have to talk about that, we've done so much work with you and the Innovatemap team. This is a cool new experience for me.

Christian Beck:

So Yaw, let's start with my first question, because I actually don't know the answer to this one, but Malomo, what's behind the name?

Yaw Aning:

Yeah. I love that question. Thank you for asking. So it's a little bit of a sad story, but it's very meaningful to me. So before I turned 30, I lost both my mother and father. My mom battled cancer for about five years and she developed a pretty rare form of it. It kind of attacked her central nervous system. So she had to stop moving and worked home. She's pretty entrepreneurial herself, loves just making things. So she really got into like cleansing and using different things to make sure that you're staying pure. She got really into soap making as a result. When she's going through treatments, anybody who'd come to visit her, she'd hand them a bar soap that she made from her recent batch. Then they'd launch these great stories just to reminisce. You can just see her spirit light up around that. She'd take the bars of soap to farmer's markets. She'd kind of sell them anywhere she could.

During that period, I just saw how much the impact of just spending time in a relationship and sharing stories with people mattered. She named that soap company Malomo. So when she passed, we kind of wanted to honor her name, and a lot of the vision for our product is really helping brands and consumers connect and build relationships. Shipment tracking is kind of the means of doing that because consumers are paying attention to their order, but it's a way for the brand with that attention to tell their story and connect with their audience in a deeper, more meaningful way. That's where the name kind of comes from.

Christian Beck:

Wow, that's a great story. It's interesting because you're naming it off of something that she named. So now I have to ask, where did she come up with the name Malomo for the soap? I want to get to the real source here.

Yaw Aning:

No, I know ... So, the funny thing is we asked her and she's like, "It just popped into my head one day." She had no rhyme or reason for why that name was what inspired her but that was it. So just a immaculate conception.

Christian Beck:

Looking at this industry that the shipping [inaudible 00:03:16] there's a bunch of different angles people are taking on it. The shipment tracking seems very specific, at least from my perspective, never would have thought of something like that. What was the inspiration behind that for you?

Yaw Aning:

So, funny enough, it was my cofounder Anthony Smith, who really inspired the early vision of the idea. I ran a consulting agency and we were working building a lot of early stage tech products and we worked a lot in the e-comm space. A lot of our customers would come to us and ask us like, "Hey, we want to launch this commerce concept. How should we do it?"

We had one customer who, or client who ... They had an awesome business, they did high-end children's dress rentals. You know, when you rent something, you typically need it on a specific date. So when it doesn't arrive, it creates all these customer support and customer experience problems. The platform that we built, it helped the company manage their inventory. It's a very different problem with rentals. You have to look at where each individual item is and what the rental calendar is on that item to predict its availability. Knowing where it is in circulation, if it's moving to a customer back from a shipment and making sure that it is available for the next customer is super important. We saw that our client would, they'd spend all this time and attention getting the customer to get a rental, and then they'd hand off the item to a third party UPS or FedEx. It was that third party who would mess up and that customer would then ... They'd be super, super upset. They would complain on social, they'd cancel their order. They'd tell the brand, they'd never shop with them again. It's emotionally charged.

So we thought, "Well, that's interesting. Why does the brand pay for that problem when the experience wasn't in their control to begin with?" What if we could give brands that control? Maybe they can't guarantee that an order of packages is going to arrive, but they can control how the customer feels about that entire experience so that they buy some empathy with them and they can work through the situation with the customer to turn those problems into unique opportunities to delight that customer, and then try to win them over for life.

So Anthony, my cofounder he was like, "There's something in this tracking thing. We should kind of do something with it." I had had an experience buying from a brand called Nomatic. They sell these backpacks. I kind of got on this weird kick of ... I was doing a lot of business travel and I was like, "I would love one backpack that I could take a three or four day trip." So I did all this research online. I found this backpack. Nomatic had had a huge Kickstarter campaign, did really well. I bought the backpack. Then I was still trying to figure out how to use it and pack for trips. I went to YouTube to try to find videos. And I was like, "Oh, I wonder if we could combine these two concepts where you got shipment tracking that is knowing where your order is, but while you're waiting for your order, it's a phenomenal time to engage with the content that I really want and care about." That's why we kind of combined the two concepts into this, more of this post-purchase customer experience platform for e-commerce brands.

Anna Eaglin:

So, it's more than just kind of marketing just like a touch point. It's like building on that anticipation of getting the thing that you've ordered or kind of bringing you more into the experience of ... because that's like the best part, right. Is anticipating the thing. Once you get here, you're like, "Ah," it becomes part of your every day, but it's the anticipation, that's the exciting part.

Yaw Aning:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. I forget what that ... There's some research just like, hey, when are you the most excited of like, when you're going on vacation? It's always the anticipation of it. Right? I kind of get this feeling like whenever I buy from brands, it's kind of like Christmas. I'm really excited for this thing to arrive. I don't want my excitement to be tarnished by the package arriving late for whatever reason or something going wrong with the delivery and I'm freaking out because I just discovered this brand randomly online and hopefully they're a real brand and they're reputable and they took my money and something's going to arrive. It's really how do these brands really start to build a relationship with you when you are super excited and you want to hear from them about where your order is. So you're exactly right, Anna. It's kind of combining those two things together.

Christian Beck:

This makes sense from the end experience. How do you translate this value to the actual business itself? Do you leverage like, "Hey, you've got a brand problem because of this," or is it more on the aspirational side? Like, "Hey, have you looked at this as a potential way to build a stronger relationship?" Which way are you kind of leaning when you go to the businesses?

Yaw Aning:

Yeah. We've taken a different approach where most shipment tracking tools are sold to the logistics team within an e-commerce company. So logistics cares about getting deliveries out of their warehouse quickly, warehouse efficiency, choosing carriers, and kind of optimizing their delivery network. We took a different approach and said, "Hey, we're going to go after the marketing teams because they're the ones in control of how the brand is portrayed to the customer. They should be the ones delivering the messaging around what the warehousing your logistics team is doing with regards to that consumer's order." So typically the marketing leaders will care about three things. The biggest one is brand, right? These e-commerce companies, they've been built off of the perception that they create on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Image is everything, right? Image is reality, so being able to represent their brand at every single touch point they have with their consumer is incredibly important. That first play is like, "Hey, just make the post-purchase experience match your beautiful purchase experience."

Then the second is usually, "Hey, we've been, especially today in COVID delivery problems are occurring on the hour, every hour. Customer support tickets are kind of going through the roof." So one of the things that our platform does is it allows brands to proactively communicate delivery progress to the end consumer by giving estimated delivery dates, by sending emails or texts notifications, and trying to proactively look at where delivery problems might occur and then making it really easy for consumers if they do have a problem to get those things resolved really quickly. So that's typically kind of like, "Hey, this is really a customer experience or support play."

Then the third, and this is kind of the big kicker is it's a marketing channel. We use marketing loosely, but at its most simplest form for an e-commerce market, it's how would I drive more transactions? We tend to show products that consumers might find interesting on the delivery emails or the tracking page itself. Our customers will see about a two to four percent repeat purchase rate, which is huge for these customers especially when you think of like you've got 10,000 orders, that's another two to 300 people buying while they're waiting for their existing order in transit. That's really great margin that they can add into their business and continue to accelerate their growth. But then the other side it's a lot of ...

Brands will use this in different ways around like education. So we've got a customer who they use their tracking page as an educational hub to explain how to care for the products that they just bought. Or they've got a celebrity endorser using the product in unique ways. So it kind of inspires some new ways of thought and thinking for the brand to connect with the consumer. So there's kind of those three angles that we try to dive into with a brand. Most of the time, the brand cares about all three, but the marketers are like, "How do I make my brand present? Is the customer experience good enough that if we deliver it, they will make another purchase either now or in the future?"

Christian Beck:

Yeah. We can totally see what you're saying. If we had this conversation a year ago, I don't know. I wasn't really buying many things. Now since we've been home, I bought ... I still don't buy personally a lot of things, but just even reflecting on the last pair of shoes I got, it's like, yeah, I'm anxiously waiting with shipping delays. You're like looking and like, that's like a little bit of happiness. I can totally see that. The education side really makes sense too, because it almost seems too, there's an opportunity for brands to explain how to do it because there's nothing worse than like when you get something and then you don't have the batteries for it, or if you get shoes and you don't have the shoe cleaner or whatever it is or you overlooked a component piece. So that makes sense too. Does that change the profile of the type of people you're looking for? Customers that are already, or brands that are already customer centered or do you find a better fit with ones who are maybe lacking in that area and need some help? What does that do for your sort of go-to-market buyer persona?

Yaw Aning:

So we typically from a business perspective, like it's much easier to go after those customers who already recognize this is a crucial point of their customer journey. So the conversations are much easier. Typically, those are e-commerce merchants who ... They lead with brand, they've got a broad enough catalog where they're looking to kind of cross sell and upsell. Brands, a lot of their goals are to get people to make purchase two, three, and four, right? Because purchase one is highly expensive. They're spending a lot of money on customer acquisition. Getting the customer to buy a second and a third is really important. Those companies that have a broader catalog to kind of do that is really good. Then brands that think in that long-term where it's like, "Hey, we've got maybe a complex product. It's hard to understand. We really need to figure out how do you onboard new customers onto the brand and the product," are the ones that are really good for us.

More of the transactional ... The companies that typically sell on Amazon are not great for us because if you think about this, Amazon is very much a transaction driven, commodity driven business, right? I've got this need. I don't really care about what the product is. I care more about price. Then I go to Amazon and buy it. Most of the companies that we work with are, we are a premium business and you're actually buying from us because you believe in our mission or our brand and the product is basically kind of a souvenir almost. So, it's really important for them to establish that like, "Hey, this is what we believe in. And if you also believe in these things, you should want to buy our products."

Like you look at Casper, right? They're not selling you mattresses. They're selling you sleep. Glossy, they're selling you education around makeup and new ways to use those products. Those are the types of brands that work well with us because they know that this is an opportunity to kind of broaden their mind share within their consumers.

Anna Eaglin:

When you were starting out kind of getting the first customers, was this what you knew about your customers? That these would be the types of brands that would love something like this, or is this something you had to kind of experiment with just starting out?

Yaw Aning:

We had a hunch early on that this was the type of brand. We had spent, this was around 2014, 2015 is when we started building things on Shopify. Shopify was like, it was weird at the time, right? There's like all these independent, small retailers, it seemed like who were like, "I have this thing I'm selling online." I don't think a lot of people really like understood what that was. Or could you really build a meaningful business? I almost look at this as a similarity to the App Store when it just launched. People were like, "Can you really build an app business and make that successful? How do you make money off of a little app on a phone?" Kind of feeling the same way with the Shopify ecosystem.

But one thing that we saw was they would spend an inordinate amount of time crafting these stories and using social to unfold these stories, you know, that's through ad or through community. So we had an early hunch that like, "Hey, those brands who really are leaning into that are probably going to want to use these touch points in unique ways." Luckily for us, it's played out that way. I can't say that we were like, "Yes, this is a hundred percent going to work. These customers, they're absolutely going to buy this because of this reason." It was more of like, "Hey, this is what the behavior that we keep seeing. So if we just match that behavior I think we'll be well positioned to kind of connect with them and our value proposition will resonate with them."

Christian Beck:

Well, lately we've been talking about brand a lot on this, but I'm going to bring it up again because you keep using the word brands instead of businesses, which I think is a little bit different. You're in the e-commerce space. Actually, let me just ask there, why do you say the word brand when you're talking more than say like businesses? What's behind that?

Yaw Aning:

Yeah, I get caught. People will ask me that a lot. They're like, "When you say brand, what do you mean?" I'm like, "Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry." [inaudible 00:16:48] nomenclature because you think like the aspiration, it's weird. I feel like e-commerce has gone through this weird evolution where brand, well, it didn't matter at all. Brand was nothing. Sorry, consumers, they had this renaissance where it's like, "Hey, I'm paying a bunch of money for Nike mainly because it's got the Nike swoosh on it, and not necessarily because they've got the best products." I mean, they have phenomenal products and they arguably probably do have the best products in the market, but-

Christian Beck:

That was the last pair of shoes I just bought by the way.

Yaw Aning:

Was it Nikes?

Christian Beck:

Yeah, yeah.

Yaw Aning:

It's true. We all unconsciously kind of like ... There's things in our mental mind and model that's like, "Oh yeah, I impart value on this thing because of like what the brand is and what it represents." So I feel like, and maybe this is in part what Amazon did, it's like they stripped brand away. I think a lot of these early kind of e-commerce companies that launched on Shopify would say, "Yeah, you could buy Nike or you could buy a product that's similar product quality. We're going to cut out all the middlemen that mark this thing up and go to you direct. You're going to love us because you're going to get the same quality product at a much more economically valued price."

The market shifted from like, okay, brand doesn't matter so we discover all these products on Instagram, they'd all be great. We buy them. Then what these companies started doing is they said, "Okay, now that I've acquired this customer, I have to get lifetime value out of this customer. I have to now reeducate them on why brand is important, why my brand is important." I use brand because these companies are just mini branding machines. They have nailed to a T what it means to connect with consumers in an instant and really gets you to buy from them because of, again, like what I said before, like the mission, the values, the vision of the company and the product is really important, but it's almost like a secondary factor over the long-term life of the relationship.

Christian Beck:

That makes sense. It sounds like you're sort of ... It's swung back into brands that sort of matter. You're focusing on those that care a lot about brand, which seems like it means the brand of Malomo itself is important. Do you find yourself, like even your website or your other marketing materials and all that, do you find that you almost have to look inward with your own brand to make sure that it's hitting at the right level that you're trying to go after on the customer side?

Yaw Aning:

Yeah, a hundred percent. I feel like the ecosystem is moving more towards ... Every company is building their brand and their marketing and their product is more of a consumer centric view of the world where it's like Tim Kopp, ... I'm sure the indie ecosystem knows who Tim Kopp, is the former CMO of ExactTarget. He used to say, "It's no longer B2B, and it's no longer B2C, it's human to human. And how you have to represent what you're doing has to be on a relationship-driven level." So when we look at our own brand, it's very much like to match the tone, the swagger of our customer base, trying to emulate what they do.

There's a gal who's been really successful from a consulting perspective, like launching really billion dollar brands. One of the things that she said is like, "The brands that scale have a very strong point of view. They have almost like a point of view that seems just absurd in the market. It's very polarizing, but it resonates so well with their target audience that you wouldn't want to buy any other product if you match that persona." I think a lot more companies have to kind of take that stance of like, "This is what we believe in, our stake in the ground, our value proposition, our vision for the world is this. And we're going to communicate that to you as if the three of us are having a conversation in the living room, drinking beers." So we try to look at our brand and tone and messaging to kind of have that similar vibe of how do we connect with people on a real human level.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah, that definitely makes sense. I mean, we've been hearing a lot about that too. Like even in the B2B world brand is like, I think we heard this specifically in regards to Slack, that brand was their mode. Their functionality wasn't specifically new or revolutionary, but they're bringing things together in a different way. The brand is really how they kept kind of their competitors back. It's interesting that your brand is for these businesses. I want to say brands, [inaudible 00:21:37] saying brand too many times in one sentence ... For these businesses that have strong brands and want to have strong brand touchpoints. So how does the brand present itself in the product? Because I would imagine that you might have a strong brand to get people there, but the brand and the product would be more muted. That would be my assumption.

Yaw Aning:

Yes, you'd be right. Yeah. I mean, I reference Shopify a lot because I think they're doing some amazing things. They power so much commerce on the internet today that like, it's kind of staggering to really realize how much you're buying from that company, like how much they're powering commerce. Most people would never have an idea or clue that Shopify's doing it, but within the community of people who use their platform, they're loved. I hate this word because I just don't like the connotation of it, but they've created this cult-like following of just evangelists.

When you think about like how from a B2B perspective, our product is very similar where it's like, we want to give our customers complete control to create the customer experience that they want, because traditionally the tools on the market have not done that, right. UPS has wanted to own this part of the customer experience. Shopify to extent has not allowed their customers to completely brand and communicate and message and market post-purchase in the ways that these companies want to do. So we've kind of said, you know, yeah, we're going to really like put the brand first and foremost because it's their relationship with their consumer and we're just enabling that to happen. Then if we can build more of a cult-like community among our customers where they're sharing Malomo to others, that's where we're going to try to differentiate our brand if you will, to build the business.

Christian Beck:

I love that. So now I want to shift to a couple of more specific questions on the type of company you're building with Malomo and acknowledge that we have Yaw's time in 2020. If we had you like in 2025, we probably wouldn't be able to get you on the show at that point. You'd barely remember what it was like in 2020. So I want to, for our listeners, because you're an early stage company, you're closing or have closed on a seed round of funding, but you're having a lot of success. One of the reasons we wanted to have you on the show now was to get a point in time, like benchmark of a product that has a strong brand, strong design, strong go-to-market strategy and just see where you're at right now, because it's one thing for us to have the Pinterests and the Buffers on this show that people look up to. I want to get you early on to talk about that. So with that in mind, just kind of want to wrap this with just a little bit of understanding, like what type of company you're growing now and what's next for you?

Yaw Aning:

We've got 11 people on the team today. We've got, I'll probably get this math wrong, we've got three engineers, a head of design and product. We've got a head of customer success, four on the sales team and one in operations. I'm still doing a lot of selling. So even though we've got five sales people on the team, it's important to me as a founder to have a very strong pulse of what the market is saying in this space. I don't know if this is the same in other spaces, but e-commerce marketers are exacting. It works or it doesn't, right. They live and die by the transaction. They are acutely aware of like the tools that they use and how they want those things to work. I very much spend a lot of time still talking with customers and doing selling so that I can hear those things firsthand and try to disseminate that into the rest of the company.

We have just more recently started doing some things to make sure that the rest of the team has a really strong pulse around that. We're recording sales calls, we're transcribing them and we're tagging different product features. We're using tools to make sure that we have the voice of the customer kind of called out. We can go and say, "Hey, we're going to build this feature," and we know we should build this feature because 14 customers that I talked to last week said that this was a pain point for them. That's been really important for me to do. As a founder, your time is spread very thin. So the 80% of my time I'm probably spending in sales. The other 80% of my time is spent hiring, setting vision, communicating vision, communicating vision, communicating vision. I have realized how easy it is for the whole team to not be in sync with where I want the business to go and where the market is and how the product needs to reflect those two things.

Then a lot of time is spent with just partnerships, like what are the levers with partners that we can work with that can help open up new opportunities for us as a company or that we can kind of help solidify their relationships with their customers as well. Then I'm always fundraising, always. Always having conversations with funds. One to ... As we build a product and we want to pressure test those things, right, and make sure that we can get buy-in from the venture community of where they see the opportunities because they're spending a lot more time right in the upper echelon of the market. They have a lot more data points as to what other companies in the space are doing and where the white spaces. So that's good to kind of talk with funds and get those perspectives, but also obviously build relationships for the next rounds of financing.

Christian Beck:

Yeah. You said 80% and 80%, but after listening all those, it does sound like you have somehow 160% of the time of all of us. It's amazing. What's next? You get this next round of investment, you have 11 people, you've made it this far. Sounds like you've found pretty good success so far with your offering to the market. What is next for Malomo? How do you view where you spend the investment that you have now over the next 18 months?

Yaw Aning:

Yeah, absolutely. We've kind of proven that the product today is needed and the need for it is accelerating. We're right now building repeatable channels around kind of customer acquisition. Most of the investment is going into team and it's almost split in half to the go-to-market team and the product team. In the e-comm space in particular, a lot of companies are product led because you're going after predominantly SMB customers. It's incredibly important to be capital efficient. You've got to figure out ways in which you can acquire customers through product and invest pretty heavily in product. So for the most part, like on the product side, specifically, like the investments are going into integrations. So there's, really a go-to tech stack in the e-commerce space, just like probably many other tech markets where you want to be able to give your customers the ability to share information and share functionality, or kind of level up your product through integration with others.

So we're spending a lot of our time kind of building integrations with key partners. That would be also great on the kind of the sales and marketing side to bring us new customers. But that's where a big part of our focus is, is shifting the business to on the product side, more of a product led growth motion, where we spent the last kind of 18 months just brute force getting customers any way we could. There's no science to it. It's all kind of art and elbow grease. Then really kind of transitioning the company now towards what's the repeatable ways in which we grow the business and that's through product and through acquisition.

Christian Beck:

Can I get you to commit to your website having no contact for a demo button by next year?

Yaw Aning:

That's great. I'm going to write that down and send it to my product team.

Christian Beck:

I'm just trying to get you to say yes to that question. Then we can have it on there. Anna and I are on a mission to get the try or contact for a demo button gone from all websites.

Yaw Aning:

That's so great. That's such a good mission. I love it.

Christian Beck:

Well, Yaw, thank you so much for sharing your time. We'll have to talk again more over the next months and years, as long as we can get you until you start putting us off to you're like ... I don't even know what. Eventually we'll have to talk to your head of product and then like just one lowly engineer. I don't know. So anyway, thanks for taking the time to spend there. We're happy to have you on the show and talk about Malomo and what you're doing. I do think it's significant in the Midwest to surface I think a product that's focusing on something aside from B2B SaaS. We've got a lot of that, but I appreciate you sharing that too, because I think a lot of our listeners are looking for more inspiration on building a product that has a different focus where maybe they're saying the word brand instead of business or consumer instead of SMB. So appreciate you sharing your wisdom with us.

Yaw Aning:

Thanks so much for having me. You guys, as a pillar in the community, I feel like you are leading the charge with product driven companies and this type of content is invaluable. So thank you guys for doing this for the community. I think it's super important.

Christian Beck:

That was awesome to have Yaw. I know for a lot of our listeners are not in the indie tech scene, but at least in the indie tech scene, he's one of the most well-respected early stage founders and building an amazing product. So I was glad that we got to have him on the show while he's on the upswing, because a lot of the details that he can speak about are fresh in his mind and they won't be forever. But that was great to have him.

So I'll kick it off with the first thing that I picked up on, and I'm sure it'll segue with things that you heard, which is early on in the interview, he was talking about how they sold Malomo to marketing teams rather than logistics teams. That makes a lot of sense when you think that logistics teams are probably focused on efficiency and shipping coordination and all of that. So, their product is it's about brand, it's about customer experience. That's not necessarily something logistics team even necessarily cares about, like he said. So instead they go after the marketing teams, which are tasked with that. While that seems pretty obvious the way he said it, I did pick up on it because we do talk to startups a lot that have really great ideas, and sometimes they spend a lot of effort trying to get the ideas to resonate with their buyer, and sometimes it's just going after the wrong buyer. They had this great idea and they thought about logistics, they think about marketing and realize actually it's going to work a lot better with that. So I think making that decision of pairing the idea with the right person inside the org is a really important decision that they made early on.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah. It seems like one of those classic disruptor techniques that you could learn about when you're learning about new innovations, is that idea that you take a similar product, like the product is for tracking shipping. I mean, that is what it comes down to is it's a product that exists. But it's like, they put in a lot more functionality, focus it on marketing and they sell it to the marketing team. So it really is shifting the functionality and shifting the buyer. That's category creating for them.

Christian Beck:

Yeah. If I reflect to your point, all the attempts at this now I don't really want to diss ... I don't know all the companies behind these other ones, but it's like when shipping tracking came out, I think we were all like, "Oh, this is amazing. You can track it." But when you look at shipping tracking now, it's like, I don't really care that it was like, "Oh, it left the distribution warehouse and it's on a truck and it's headed to some other city I've never heard of." You're looking a map like, "Is it getting closer? Is it getting farther away?" So to your point, it's almost like that's been the approach. He's disrupting it by saying, what if you actually rethought what that space was for. Then there's great opportunity there, but then that leads, I think, to the next big point, which is really is focused on brand. What did you take away? I mean, of all the things he talked about brand, what was the main thing that you took away from it?

Anna Eaglin:

I love to talk about cycles and things coming and going. That's like one of my favorite, I don't know, ways to talk about the world or see those macro trends where things come and go. When people tie what they're doing to that, I just love that. When he mentioned the idea that originally we were buying from brands, like we're buying Nike. You're buying something and maybe it's not the best quality, but it's the brand. People really started to kind of turn against that and fight against that and really were going to more looking for quality or looking for something totally different. So then people just wanted to buy and they wanted to buy something. So then you have more of the Amazon experience where the brand is completely stripped away and you're just buying the thing, and what you're really comparing is which is the cheapest gadget that I need. Then talking about how their Instagram and how these like smaller brands come up, these brands that mean something and stand for something.

Personally, a brand that I really, really love is WILDFANG. WILDFANG specifically targets queer women. That's who they are, that's who they target. That's who's in all of their ... That they're showing who's modeling their clothes, like people who are very androgynous, gender non binary, but I buy clothes from them like I buy clothes from Target, but it feels so different when I buy their clothes because they stand for something that I stand for. So focusing on those people now, so it's almost like, like he said, brand is back, but it's almost back in a different way. Those being his buyers, it make sense that you are joining into the brand experience when you buy the product beyond just buying the product.

Christian Beck:

Yeah. I don't want to speculate too much on these macro trends, but you mentioned it. And he even quoted, and I don't want to do like a shots fired sort of thing, but he said, "Amazon stripped the brand away." Which, I mean, really I think you don't think anybody would disagree. Amazon has their own line of things like Amazon Basics, which is basically just brandless things that are there which is okay. But I was thinking, as you were talking too, because I'm thinking about our audience and how they build products for all different types of markets, it's almost the impact of what these pervasive platforms can create in any market.

I mean, Amazon debranded everything because they just got so monolithic, they became all about efficiency, which then created this growing counter demand for brand and customer experience that wasn't rebelling against Amazon. But it was just like, well, where do the rest of us go that actually do care about that? That's what Malomo's kind of riding on. I wonder if those opportunities will spring up in other areas where like these massive platforms take over. Maybe even the way that say Slack takes over chat. Maybe as that becomes more monolithic in things that there will create more custom form fitted ... I always say even like Discord as a competitor to Slack. It's got this like, say niche community, but this community of like gamers and people working in alternative industries really love discord not necessarily as a reaction to Slack, but almost just like it serves that really niche market. I wonder if we'll see other Slack competitors that also spring up too that are really more brand focused.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah. Again, this is probably a trend or a book that someone told me about secondhand. I can't remember the book or the idea or where it came from, but the idea like there's times of bundling and times of unbundling and that maybe right now we're in a time of unbundling where brands are kind of splitting apart, but eventually things will bundle back together and then it'll split again.

Christian Beck:

Well, hopefully we figure out who wrote that book by the time this goes live. Otherwise, you'll get quoted, which is totally fine too on the internet. When in doubt just don't cite it, and it's your words.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative). You heard that here.

Christian Beck:

Who said that? I said that. That's right, that was a quote by me.

Anna Eaglin:

Abraham Lincoln.

Christian Beck:

Abraham Lincoln, 1972.

Anna Eaglin:

Thanks for listening to the show this week. If you're looking for more resources on how to design, build market and sell better products, then head over to betterproduct.community to join, well, the community. And as always, we're curious, what does Better Product mean to you? Shoot us an email at podcasts@innovatemap.com.