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Welcome everyone to the uh the dark house. Really excited to be here with the free view today uh to talk about something that no one has ever spoken about before and that is AI and e-commerce. [Music] But uh in all seriousness, I think that there's there's a lot of talk and a lot of hype right now in the world today and a lot of just slapping on AI to various companies and products. Don't get me up that fast. So the goal of this this panel today is just to actually understand what's real in the world,

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where the buck is heading and and kind of hearing each of your visions for for the future with of commerce. So quicker myself, I'm Max, founder of Unveiled. Um let's go down the line here. start with you and give a quick intro on yourself. I'm Rishab. I'm one of the founders of a company called Forat. We help brands build unique websites for every piece of content they deploy online. Hey, I'm Robert uh founder of Reach Faster. We're a product understanding platform. First

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product is in the Google shopping ad space focusing on helping large catalog retailers deliver high performance across that entire catalog. Hey guys, I'm Josh. I'm one of the founders of Sto and Real Brands, uh, retail brands, CPG brands, uh, message better. Awesome. All right. Excited to have have the three of you here today. I think a lot to dig into. Um, we only have a half an hour, so I think we'll get some spicy takes in and and uh maybe start at a high level and get more tactical in a bit. So,

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first first question is um, this be a jump ball. Whoever wants to answer first, go ahead. Looking at you, Robert. What are are brands today that you work with and you when you look at your customer base, what are they getting most wrong in the customer journey uh in light of all these recent developments um with cost of content generation going to zero? What are they getting most wrong? Huh? Well, I think people think about the cost of content dropping down into zero, right? But what they're not

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thinking about is that they're still working with these large platforms and they're almost fully trusting their business to these large platforms. The problem here, I mean, I specialize in my Google space, so I'll speak to Google, right? There's at least two of them. The first is that Google's incentive is to maximize revenue per eyeball. The easiest way to do that is to serve your content to the wellness buyers, right? The least incremental buyers. And I mean, this reached the head its head

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with these brands trying to scale and then they come to us later saying that we've never been able to push Google, right? Google just doesn't work. It doesn't bring a new customer to the door. We're all bringing meta. I mean, this is sful, right? when you actually feed higher quality signals to Google where you tell Google, hey, instead of going after the easiest customer that looks good on paper, go after high intent searches, right? This is just walking it back to the basics, forcing

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them to focus on the basics. That actually leads to major impact, right? Instead of just taking the word for it, we'll handle targeting on your behalf. The second issue I would say is they don't understand what else you're doing on all these other channels, right? All these systems are built to optimize for that one axis and the reality is all these brands they're running on multiple channels otherwise you know they wouldn't be where they are right so when they when they rely on

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these platforms that can only see what's going on there they're optimizing towards datadriven results that are only on that platform um I mean it just prevents this this notion of scale right I think like one of the things at least that we see often that people get get wrong or over I would say uh over prioritize is the look and feel of their brand online. And the reason I think that they're overinvesting in that area is because more and more of the purchase intent is going to places where you

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don't control the look and feel anyway. M so it's going to the AI engine answers it's going to the retail storefronts into which you sell through and there other things are governing uh how your product shows up and so in fact the notion of brand is the experience that you give the consumer once they actually have the product with them and I think that overrotating on like how the website shows up versus what is the product experience and the lifetime journey that they have is is one of the

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bigger mistakes that we see people making. Huh. Interesting. And and I'd say this, I think it's very evident. Every brand, the top 20% of their customers make up 80% of the spend. So, we're all focused on retaining these customers, providing the richest experience, driving advocacy, LTV. We all focus on LTV. And brands just aren't capable of doing that on a daily basis from a marketing standpoint. It's almost impossible for I think that's changing. Double click on that. Why? Why

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is it changing? I think to build relationships, you have to add genuine value. And so I'll speak candidly just from an SMS standpoint. We've all signed up for a brand to get a coupon or discount and then unsubscribed and maybe signed up again for a coupon or discount. And that's the only value we've gotten. And so if I'm a brand, I have certain tenants of my brand that I'm trying to represent. And uh that experience does represent that and that doesn't drive any advocacy that only

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drives this promotionality. It's this merrygoround of bad behavior. And so I think with the changes and I hate to just keep using this word, but I think with intelligence and AI, I think you can start doing things at a scale that even though we had the data and we had the teams before just wasn't possible, right? You don't have the hands to coordinate it. You don't have the knowithall to stay on top of it. you have a something spiking on this channel over here and I just think staying on

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top of it wasn't capable from a an orchestration standpoint and I think that's that's slowly evolving and you're going to see big changes in that and I think things are getting better in short periods of time. All right, so let's let's actually double click. It sounds I think this is this is great and you say things are changing slowly. You know, this wasn't possible before. Well, you keep on saying this what what is the this that you're referring to that was not possible before that now is now

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actually possible. Yeah. Sending you a text that's unique to you, right? Instead of that same coupon and discount that they send out to hundreds of thousands of people from all the big brands and all the big retail brands spend a lot of money on sending those SMS messages out. They know what you buy. They know your name. They know behaviors about you. They know where you live. They know enough about information about you to click down to a localized personalized message. And I think from a scalability

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standpoint, they can do that today. Okay. And so what exactly are you personalizing now that's didn't used to be personalized? Yeah. I mean text is a great place to start. It's 160 characters. If you can't personalize the minimal basics there, you're not going to be able to do it other places. So name information from a location standpoint, right? We we helped a CPG brand. There are thousands of retailers. We captured zip code basic 101. They didn't have that information before. and

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they started up messaging based on retail partnerships in your area. Again, this isn't rocket science, but for them to be able to do that automatically is something they weren't doing before. Got it. Okay. So, this is I think Rish, we were talking before the the panel about personalization. I think curious to kind of So, it sounds like you're personalizing based off the individual, right? Curious to kind of get your takes on on uh how Vermont thinks about this and how you think about this. I guess we

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we think about personalization in two layers. The first layer is just what is the context that the person is in in this particular moment I was sharing earlier. Like I don't I don't dress like this ever. Okay. I I bought this 3 days ago. I took the tag off this morning before I showed up here. My wife made me iron it. Thank god. And as you pointed out nicely, I got there almost. The shoes didn't quite hit, but that's okay. You know, there's always next year. And and the reason is like if you

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personalize based on me like you would just get it wrong, right? Like you have to know the context. I'm coming to this event. There's a certain type of environment, things like that. And so where you're coming from and what you're trying to accomplish is actually significantly more important. In fact, chat GPT had no context of who sorry did not know anything about you, but is one of the most useful tools that you use because they have context based on the type of question that you're asking,

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right? And so we think that that personalization has to do more with what is the person trying to accomplish and where are they coming from. So to make it specific like you're asking. If you're showing someone an ad where there's a woman wearing clothing, then the website experience should be women's clothing with the type of clothing that they are seeing in the ad. If you're showing men, then it should be the other thing, right? Without exaggeration, there's a company that literally sent me

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a Father's Day email and it was like a workout company. So, it was a piece of workout equipment and so in the email it was images of men using this workout equipment and then I clicked on it and it was all women. Like the whole website was images of women for this piece of equipment and I was like I I just bounced right because of course they had no idea where I was coming from or what's actually happening given that I came from the Z. But I'm I'm going to say something on this. I agree with you

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totally. Yeah. The second thing is though I'm probably the oldest person here. I'm 48. I've shopped at J Crew since college. They don't dude. I've only bought men's clothing. I've shoed there a long time and yet every other text message I get is for something advertising women's wear. That doesn't make any sense. Oh yeah, totally. Yeah, both are true, man. Like this is my point. There are two layers to every situation. Like there's who you are and then there's the context that you're in,

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right? It's like, yes, I only ever buy marine layer clothing and I only ever wear jeans and a marine layer polo and now I have to wear this over here, right? And so like there are two contexts or there are two layers of personalization. I'm just saying that people are not the same in every context. Got it. Okay. Can you maybe walk everyone here a little bit exactly through how FMAT helps unlock helps to unlock personalization based off the conics are coming through? like you you describe as an introduction very

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succinct and and high level but like what does Vermont actually do uh and how do you how do you solve this paradigm? I don't want this to turn into a sales pitch. So like the the quick like 30 secondond version is that email that I described. It would just basically generate a new website where it was all men in all of the images, right? And so all we do is generate the the website based on where the person is coming from and then who the person is. So that that's the TLDDR. My my my more meta

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point is that whether you use us or however else you do it doesn't actually matter. You should seek to actually meet the person where they're coming from and what they're trying to accomplish. That's actually the point, right? So it doesn't that and and that's the biggest mistake that I see people making. Got it. Okay. Interesting. All right. Maybe uh changing topics here a little bit. One thing that we've I've been spending a lot of time thinking about is the way

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we we shop is beginning to change and it's going to start to change really really quickly. We now have Google's AI search which is actually essentially new LLM. So more and more my philosophy is more and more of the actual uh shopping behavior and search behavior is going to happen in these you know LLMs rather than first seeing an ad on Meta and then going to Google and then actually purchasing on the website. Robert, curious to hear your take since you work specifically with with Google

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optimization, like how do you see this this change in consumer shopping and and how do you place reach faster at the center of that? No, that makes a lot of sense, right? I think the core principles of how a user shops, right? They still need to have their projections like addressed. They need to understand the attributes that are interesting to them, right? So now you're thinking about instead of showing it all the time on the landing page, you're actually surfacing the information that structured information

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to Google. And this doesn't mean, oh, now you have to go through into your ERP and put in 10,000 versions of everything where it's inevitably going to get changed as your marketing team comes up with a new usage for your product. No, this means you need to deeply understand the product, the types of customers that want to buy that product, what are they actually interested, what are their common objections, what are the most important information that they're looking for, and how do you actually

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give that to that LM? And then once you cross that barrier, it's ultimately up to the LLM. If you're on a website, it's up to the landing page provider to actually then surface that to that user, hoping that they get it right and they're actually showing men's clothing to men. Yeah. By the way, I I totally agree with this and I think it's super important to think about how you show information to to these LLM crawlers. I also think, by the way, that like Zuck tells us the future. He says it clearly.

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He says it succinctly, and most of us don't listen. So he's like, "Hey, we're going to have systems that will help you do the media buying. You tell us your objective and then we will we will do the rest." Um, he also said, "We're no longer going to accept uh the transaction directly inside of Meta Properties." Like I I just think it is highly unlikely that the transaction actually happens inside any of these environments because if that was likely then Meta would actually not be

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divesting from that. They would be investing in that. Interesting. Josh cries to get your your thoughts on me. I didn't heard that. Why do you think he's doing that? I I mean I'm not I'm not in his head so I don't know why he's like like I I'm just suggesting that he's a pretty good investor like and his bets have tended to pan out and so the fact that he does not believe that the transaction in the app environment is one worth investing in is very telling. Yeah. No, I totally agree. I wouldn't

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have guessed that because I feel like Google's going the other way and saying let's have it happen here. Yeah. Well, Google I Google the people who are making decisions about how the media buying projects actually work. We're about 10 levels away from the engineers of getting it done. So that's the reality. Are websites changing like with with AI and maybe your take is that transactions will still happen on the brand's owned property. Google has a different philosophy. They're trying to

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essentially eat as much of the transaction as possible. What is like some tactical advice for for brands to actually show up in these new search engines or GEOs, however you want to call it, AI, SEO, like how does this the change in discovering new products um and doing diligence for new products like how can brands what's some tactical advice that you you have for for brands and how to act on this? Yeah, I mean I guess this is our bread and butter, right? I I mean I think it's changing

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but it's also not changing. Fundamentally, the customer is still typing in that search box what they're looking for and they're actually giving you a lot more information, right? We're going from three-word searches to 20word searches to sequences of searches, right? So, there's so much intent there where that's one side, right? The platform is getting information on what is the customer looking for. Now, it's your job as a brand to to then figure out, well, how do I meet that with my

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product? Right? Gone are the days of I mean, I'm not saying that the brand needs to be the one servicing this information. That's where we sit at reach faster. But we need a system for surfacing what is that product? How does it address all these various use cases that we can expect knowing the history of search behavior here? Um, and how do we structure that information so that the LM can then connect those two where there's more targeting information than ever. So, it's it's search buter search.

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Yeah, I think an interesting data point, I don't know if you're already seeing this, but at least with our customers, is that the consumers who come from LLM search to the website to then purchase have a conversion rate that's like roughly 2x higher than uh like standard SEO. And it's probably because they're doing a lot more of the work ahead of actually arriving at the website to then actually make the purchase. And so then also time spent on on site is much lower for those customers because they've

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already gotten a lot of the information. So they're doing confirmatory work on the website as opposed to exploratory work because all of the exploration actually happened inside of the LLM. And so the the structure of the site experience by definition needs to be different when you're doing confirmatory information sharing as opposed to exploratory information sharing. Uh because on the other hand, you need to give the LLM the information for the exploration. And so you have to start thinking about your information

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dispersion in in different ways based on what the consumer is doing in the different places. Josh, I'm I'm curious ultimately I think if if I were to describe so your ability is to have every single customer have their own sales associate speaking to them oneonone, but you're able to unlock this with with AI. Is the entry source to a website something that you're thinking about personalizing on or like what what are the different actually source or yeah pieces of data that you you

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personalize this this content to? Is that something you're thinking about? Yeah, I think it can be reactive and proactive. The reactive piece is kind of what we discussed. You know, we pull in data that's already existing to know something about the customer if they've already taken an action around that brand. But then, and again, this is where the customer habit change is occurring slowly, but hasn't gotten there yet. We've talked about conversational marketing forever. It's

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not there because we just don't do it, right? you text your your mom, you text your family, you text your friends, you text your co-workers, and you go back and forth. But in a brand, it's not like, "Hey, can I have this?" Right? Like, we just don't do that. And so, I think once you start figuring out how to facilitate them in small ways, right? And can be a sales associate instead of sending an email saying, "Hey, it was great seeing you. By the way, we have that same shirt

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in this size, but not in this other color. You want it, right? That would be really easy to facilitate that purchase." Or, you know, "Tell me where you're going the summer." And from that information that comes in a proactive sense, we can we can learn more about you, right? And I think that's where intelligence is amazing because it can infer what you're asking. It can understand sentiment. It can scrape out data and all this can be apprented on that profile for a better experience in

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the future. So, we'll get there. We're not there yet. Where where are you seeing most adoption of of the product today? Because I think there's personalization. It's such a it's such a big word. Like what you just described to me is is a dream to end state. I think that's what or maybe a different question. It's like, okay, that's that's where you think we're going. What are the steps to get there? I think it's been very clear to us. We've had a lot

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of conversations and we'll get, "Yeah, your product is way better and this is amazing and this is cool." And then we don't hear from them again and we're like, "Huh, why why is that? They have this shitty experience over here. We can make it 50% better on day four. Why wouldn't they make a decision?" And first off, there's the well, there's ties into things. They're integrated into a system. They're in a long-term contract. and then they just don't have the

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bandwidth to do these things. And so I think some of that that orchestration and that bandwidth and that the facilitation from a resource standpoint, but doing it with intelligence, I think is that's going to help. And then I think what I learned from my last company as a loyalty company, don't ever go sell loyalty software. That's the most difficult sale known to mankind. But once you're there, you're sticky. You sell everything in the kitchen sink and they use 20% of it. And so that's

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the same thing here. And I think it's about, you know, as we go up market, right? We started with smaller companies. That's what you do in your small company. And then we're going to go minmark in an enterprise. I think that's where you land, you expand, you get sticky, you add value, and you can make some money. You got to be a strategic consultative sale. You got to understand their pain points. And you got to realize they're not going to use soup to nuts for this product. We're

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going to help them with this need and this problem. And maybe that's only 10% of our platform, but if that solves their problem, great. And I think at the beginning in a sales cycle, I'd be rambling and this and that and so everything. And I' I'd miss the mark. Yeah. Right. Because I wouldn't be listening to them and saying, "Okay, they just want this. That's great. That isn't the most intelligent feature we have. That isn't the sexiest feature that we have, but that's going to help

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them. Let's do that." Risha, um, same same question. You just raised a a massive series B. So, congratulations on that. Kind of curious to hear your take. What is what is the future of of Vermont in your mind? Like, what are you what are you building towards? If you think you've you've created a category, pay me a 3 years from now. What does what does Fremont look like and what new experiences do you unlock? Yeah, I I think um in my opinion I think like the the the surface of the internet is

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changing. ChatGBT is already doing that for us. Everybody who interacts with chat GBT has a different experience when they interact with chat GBT. So it's like when I interact, I get different responses. I get different outcomes. When you interact, you get different responses. You get different outcomes. Uh and yet when we go to the website, we get the same outcome. And so that that doesn't make any sense at all. like um like your feed and my feed on YouTube shorts or Tik Tok or whatever you watch

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are different like the the shape of the internet should actually be different depending on the context and what you're doing and how you're doing it. And so our view is we want to be a participant in that reshaping where different people have different experiences based on where they're coming from and who they are and how they're what they're trying to accomplish. That's that's like the the simplest version of it. And I think that there's going to be different roles

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for different types of companies to play. There's going to be there's going to be an SMS version of how you experience like what the internet basically, right? Delivered through SMS. There's going to be your site experience. There's going to be chat agents. There's going to be uh feeds, right? And and I think that what what I what I love about this moment in time is that for the first time in a very long time, you get to actually participate in this like very big reshaping of the

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internet where it has like for 20 years just been like a site that you like click to somehow. That is certainly not going to be the case in three years. That was good. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. That was good. That was good. All right. I'm looking looking at our time here. We only have a few minutes left. So going to do rapid rapid fire. Robert, we can start with you getting getting tactical in the weeds here. Like what is one actual use case, right? The way that brands use you today that was not possible three years ago, right?

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Something real that's happening that for the the agency owners here in the audience, the brands here in the audience, they can say a real meaningful takeaway that you can help unlock or or a use case adjacent to you that just wasn't possible and and get like actual tactical with it. No, I think 100% right. I think reach faster our whole business would not have been possible two years ago, right? Because what do we take is we take we're not reinventing the wheel. We're basically taking what

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an expert would do if you're selling five products, right? There's all these techniques that work within Google Meta, all these other channels. What we've done is with how powerful AI has gotten, we're scaling those existing techniques, but now we're scaling across a catalog any size. Right? And so now the 10,000 product, the 100,000 products finally gets a level of not personalization on our end, but customization, hyper customization dialed in on what type of customers want to buy that and actually

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how can you actually drive performance on the long scale, right? I think it just has not been possible to make that a focus up until this moment and now people working on it. I'll give a specific example. We work with a lot of skincare companies and a lot of their business was primarily people going to the website. So, not even going to the physical store and now from a conversational, from a survey, from a whatever standpoint, they can they can interact with the brand. They can send pictures of their face. They can say

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they have dry skin from swimming and we can understand that data and help provide better possibilities for future sales. So, in the ability to get them to grow their basket size or purchase more frequently, it's definitely seen seen those results win. Yeah. And I would say an example for us is there's like a supplement brand named Armra that's growing very fast. Uh we started working with them probably like 18 months ago. And I remember waking up one Monday morning to them having built uh 40

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different landing experiences in 40 minutes. You know, that's like the type of thing that was like simply not possible before where you would, you know, wait two weeks for like one landing page to get turned around and instead they built 40 different websites in 40 minutes. And I was like, "Wow, I didn't even I didn't think that people would do this." So, all right, I have one more question. What are you most excited about? Right? Like I personally having a software company, I feel more

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excited now with what's actually possible than I felt in a very very long time. Um, so maybe the the the future's not clear, but like what are you what are you getting most excited about? I think also commerce is changing for the first time in a really meaningful way in in quite some time. Scared, excited, nervous, sweating. I think things are just moving so fast. I think that's exciting. I think uh you know I started I graduated college in 1998. It's a long time ago and went through that first

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kind of curve and things moved super fast and then it's kind of leveling off and I think this is going to be going like this for a while now. I think that's exciting. I mean yeah sweating nervous all the time too, right? I mean it's changing and I only know so much about what's going on but I mean I see a broken system right with commerce where you have 50 different systems at least in the performance marketing side that can't talk to each other that can't even serve you the right landing page based

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off who you are and I see this opportunity to completely you know reshape this landscape where things can actually talk to each other things make sense you can have a creative strategy that can then get applied across everywhere right I think creativity has never been easier so this chance to build something from scratch replacing a broken system. I mean, that's what excites me saying. Yeah. I would I would sort of piggyback on what you said, except I was not working in 99. And so, my go-to my my go-to line has been if I

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were working in 99, I would have made it because the internet was like such a massive wave that you could do something and then you could like make something big out of it. And this is like definitely a bigger opportunity than that. So, like now my excuses have gone and this is like this is it. like you know I I don't know how many other opportun maybe we'll get maybe we'll get another one in 20 30 years who knows but in like a 30-year cycle this is like by far the biggest opportunity to do

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something massive so it's like you better swing as hard as you can swing yeah that's how I feel awesome great thank you guys so much I I appreciate it thank [Applause]