Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast, where two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 2 00:00:20 All right. Welcome to episode two 70 of rogue startups. Today. I am flying solo and I have with me here, a friend of mine, Jim Bri of a hub, Jim, say, hello,
Speaker 3 00:00:34 Hey, how y'all doing,
Speaker 2 00:00:36 Jim, can you give a brief intro to, uh, the folks here in the rogue startups audience to give us an idea of what you do and what app hub is all about?
Speaker 3 00:00:44 Yeah. So I am the director of growth here at app hub and app hub is a collection of category leading eCommerce businesses that essentially do their best to try to make merchants more money and save them time. So got a fair amount of apps under our umbrella here, things like the conversion bear suite with honeycomb upsell address, validator viral sweep, rich returns, and a few others. And we mostly focus on, uh, the Shopify platform, but also have some diversity into big commerce, as well as off platform solutions, people that use WordPress or Squarespace or any other type of, you know, web platforms. So lots of solutions on a variety of platforms and having fun doing it.
Speaker 2 00:01:23 Very cool. Yes. Uh, a fellow bird of the feather in the e-commerce space here. Uh, so you and I ended up getting connected because I ran into Matt, uh, tend in house at Microcom. And so he was, uh, you know, still part of AUB and then he introduced me to you and we had these conversations. So tell me a little bit about where the idea for app hub came from and how you guys started executing and you know, where let's talk about the origin story here, right?
Speaker 3 00:01:52 Yeah. So, you know, app hub started off with, uh, a couple of guys, uh, that a Chris and Wilson, they, uh, Chris and Wilson know each other from prior projects and they were starting to see an opportunity in the SAS space specifically for the Shopify ecosystem. Wilson ran a dress validator was tapping Chris on the shoulder saying, Hey, there's some, you know, good opportunities here. And so they said, well, let's consider doing a roll up here with different apps. Cause what you're seeing in the SAS space for Shopify or even any other kind of sass is that, you know, these people are builders. They are not everything they're entrepreneurs. They have to do everything, but they don't want to have to do everything. For example, they develop they're very great product managers, but they don't want to do marketing or finance or taxes or anything that comes along with that.
Speaker 3 00:02:37 So the thesis that app up come came up with in the beginning and it's still a living project, but the initial thesis is, Hey, can we bring a bunch of developers and builders together, streamline the back end of that type of business. Again, the marketing, the finance, the operations management customer service, to be able to give a better customer experience at a lower cost for the business business. And then kind of, you know, financially streamline these businesses for, for the like lack of better return than that there. So pretty much buying a bunch of businesses that are excellent in what they do allow those builders to do what they do, and then give them the resources they need to grow or to, you knows, strip down any kind of financial burdens on them and help them grow again.
Speaker 2 00:03:19 Cool. Cool. So classic aggregator model there find, you know, if we're, if we're talking corporate speak, which unfortunately I'm altogether too good at, you know, we're looking for creative synergies where we can take overlapping functions and throw out the things that are duplicative or yeah. As bullshit like that. Yeah. Uh, but I mean, still the aggregator model makes a huge amount of sense, especially in the eCommerce space cuz you're absolutely right. Builders like to build. And there's so much stuff that we are repeating every time we build a SAS or build another shop I app or whatever. Uh, you know, and I, for one can tell you, I do not love taxes. <laugh> somebody could take that off my fucking plate. I would love it 110%. So, you know, that's, that's a big deal. And so like how long have you been doing this here? Like so Wilson and AR kind of came up with this and then, you know, where did it go from there?
Speaker 3 00:04:13 Yeah. Wilson, Argen and Chris, they started in, I think August 20, 21. And then, uh, we raised about 60 million in, I think that was April or March or April of this year. So they've been going at it for about a year now. So not too long. And again, the thesis for it is changing to a certain extent, you know, aggregator was the kind of the first thing, but there are many aggregators out there. So how do you stand out? How do you provide, you know, something better for investors, right? Like this is a financial play, right? People are here to make money. People are here to provide value for the end user. So what can we do aside just from putting a bunch of apps together that don't have any reason to be together other than their e-commerce apps and they're built in the same platform, Shopify.
Speaker 3 00:04:53 So it's more like, all right, can we give a better customer experience through customer service, things of that nature? Can we find maybe, you know, other ways to provide value than just being the app? You know, what can we do for thought leadership? Can we start to affect the ecosystem in a way that leaves a leaves, the culture better than when we found it, essentially, you know, and I know these are kind of like pie in the sky thoughts and, and thoughts around that, but it's really something important. Anybody can go and build something, anybody can go and buy something and streamline it, but you wanna be able to show up every day, like something very special, takes a lot of hard work and it's very boring work. To some extent you have to do the same thing every day for five years, right? Yeah. Until something valuable. If you've got a mine through the cold to get the diamond, and that's kind of like, we're thinking, you know, we're gonna be doing this for a long time. We better enjoy doing it. So other than being an aggregator, what can we do? So hope that answers the question.
Speaker 2 00:05:40 Yeah. I was actually gonna follow up with that and say, you know, what is it that makes you guys different than, than other aggregators? But yeah, the, the, the five years to overnight success, I mean, we see that in sass over and over again. And Shopify apps are honestly no different at, you know, cuz many of them are service based in the first place. So yeah. I mean, recapture has struggled for years in the background doing the hard work, putting in the effort market, this release that mm-hmm, <affirmative> upgrade this, talk to these customers and you know, slowly but surely you're stacking the bricks and, and making it high enough to, to get some success out of it. But it is many, many, many days and nights of grinding before you ever see that aha moment.
Speaker 3 00:06:22 Totally. Yeah. I mean the, you had said the most important thing, it's like five years to have overnight success and everyone sees like the final thing, oh, you sold, or you had this big win, but it's like, man, how much, you know, problems we had to go through or issues we had to solve to get just to like something basic, you know, it's um, and when you bring a lot of personalities together, for example, we have a multi continent team across, you know, however many time zones. There are they're in every time zone, essentially coordinating those kind of resources, aligning everybody towards the same goal. It's a lot of work. It's very rewarding work, but it's not easy work. And I, and you know that as well, you know, it's just, it's not easy work, but you know, this is the life we chose as entrepreneurs and as business builders. And as you know, I don't wanna say visionaries, but like you have to see what the future is like to build for that future. You can't look at what's happening today. Only you have to see what's gonna be like, for example, they just updated that they're gonna be doing new Shopify app descriptions. This is
Speaker 2 00:07:18 Changing. I saw that today.
Speaker 3 00:07:19 Yeah. Yeah. This changing the culture a little bit. It's changing the way that people are coming at growth. For example, now these particular aspects are downplayed and these ones are up played. So it's like, all right, you have to be thoughtful about these things and be nimble. And that's, what's fun about this. These ecosystem is growing and growing and growing. You saw e-comm take off in 20 21, 20 20. Now we're getting a pullback, whether that's the softening of the consumer, the softening of the macro, all these things are playing into it. You've gotta be nimble. And that's, what's fun about this is that it's, you're getting results like in near real time, you know, especially with our data dashboards, you're seeing certain things and it's like, we have to make a change or we are doing something great. Keep doing that triple down on it. Right.
Speaker 2 00:07:57 Right. And the thing that I like about the aggregator model is that you're bringing more resources into a situation where often these app creators are resource constrained. And I speak as an app creator who is resource constrained. Like my MRR basically is my annual budget for the entire staff, the marketing, the sales, janitorial supplies, all of it. Right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so like, that's it when I spend it, I spend it. So, but when you bring in an aggregator there, you can at least say, all right, look, we know this thing is working. We can spend ahead of growth. And these things here to market this and really push this forward, you know, while the iron is hot, because there are definitely advantages of taking advantage of, um, trends that are happening in e-commerce right now, you were talking about there's pullbacks on things, you know, in 2020 and 2021, we saw mass accelerations on things. And if you were spending on app store ads back then, I mean, you were practically tripping over all the users that were flying in into your, uh, your app. And I was budget limited and recaptured to do that. Had I had more money, I could have spent more and gotten more out of that, but yeah. I mean, same kind of thing. So I think that's pretty cool about the aggregator model that helps quite a bit. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:09:10 Yeah. And underpriced attention. Like you bring up like, you know, being able to strike while the iron's hot and when you know, something's good, you have to have the confidence to go into it, deeper using data driven, uh, analysis to drive your choices in that type of stuff. You know, when you brought up like, Hey, waves of trends, for example, one of our apps back in stock was started during this supply chain crunch. And it saw a great wave because that became a search term. That was very important at that time. You're seeing, if you can look at, you know, people, um, watch are listening to this, when you look at how da, um, search terms, look on a graph, it's like, wow, these things pop up because they're timely. Like that will, you may not have that type of window to launch an app that does that specific functionality ever again, or at least in the next decade, you know, I'm sure we're gonna have supply issues, but yeah, certain apps just pop up, you know, and they're just the right thing at the right time.
Speaker 3 00:10:00 And, you know, luck is a part of this. I don't want people to think like, this is all brute force hard work. There is a fair amount of luck when the chips fall in your way or, and they go in your way. It feels really good. And when they don't, it doesn't right. For example, you've brought up like, um, we have the money to do certain things. Yes. But that also exposes us to, like, if you get too overconfident, you, you invest in something. And it's like, these things can sting a lot more too. When you put a lot of gravity behind something, it doesn't do as well. Or it underperforms, it is much more painful to be honest. So,
Speaker 2 00:10:31 Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, the resources can make you, uh, punch drunk or stupid to do things that you think. And, and the confidence was a big thing that you mentioned there, but having those large budgets definitely makes it so that you get a little less scrappy and can be a little more wasteful. Thankfully the cost of that goes down a little bit, like for a bootstrapper to waste resources really, really hurts. Like when I, when I make a bad bet, that's why I make small bets that, you know, it doesn't have a huge consequence, but that means if I make a good bet, I don't get a huge bump out of it. And then I have to go back again. And sometimes those feedback loops are so long. Right. Yeah. And that part really sucks. Cuz you feel like, ah, if I had just spent this back three months ago and I really, really captured all of this, like yeah.
Speaker 2 00:11:21 So I, yeah, it's, it's a different model altogether and uh, it's very cool. I'm glad you did that. So, um, I don't wanna just talk about all app hub stuff today. Let's, let's dig in a little bit and then do some tactics and talk about some things like, uh, like I know you have viral suite and uh, a address validator. That's actually how I kind of connected with Matt over, uh, Microcom this past year mm-hmm <affirmative> is that I had some, uh, interaction with that, but you know, email marketing is definitely near and dear to my heart since, uh, recaps all about email marketing. So let's talk a little bit about that. What are some things that you're finding in viral sweep, uh, or some of your other apps that is working really well right now? Uh, in an almost an uncommonly good way.
Speaker 3 00:12:06 Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the main things I think about when people hear email marketing, it's like, you know, we all have personal experience being the, on the, the side of receiving email marketing. And it's like the most annoying thing when you have to clear 20 emails just to get through like the good stuff for your email box. So I think the one thing that's working for us is segmenting or segmenting the audience and personalizing the message, right? You're not just sending an email, you're creating an experience and you have to think about it in that manner. Right. And how do you segment, how do you personalize your, your email marketing? And that's gonna be pretty much what you ask for what you know about the end user prior to sending that email. So when I, things that are working well for us, it's asking for more information than you think is absolutely necessary.
Speaker 3 00:12:50 For example, not just asking their email and their name, but for viral sweep, uh, gimme, give an example for viral sweep. When you run a sweepstakes, you can have anything on that form and say, you're a D to C uh, clothing company. You can ask people what types of clothes do they like? Men's women's or children's. And then you can send specific emails to them based on that and not just say brand email, like, Hey, look at this new fall collection, it's actually look at this new men's shoe collection that we have for the fall. The message is much more refined. You know, it's going to somebody who cares about that type of, uh, content, because they've told you about that. And it allows you to tailor the message that way. And it also kind of thins your list out. I think that one kind of, you know, misconception is having a big list, right?
Speaker 3 00:13:33 When you go to start buying, uh, ad space in, in certain lists, you ask like how big's the list? You're like, oh, 30,000 people, 150,000 people, but then you ask for engagement metrics and it's like 25% open rate or 15% open rate and 1% click through rate. And it's like, well then what's the point of having all of these emails? So what we've seen is higher conversion rates. And this is an obvious thing too. I don't wanna add, like I'm coming up with something brand new, but it's the segmenting and personalization of those emails helps things land. It gives a good taste in the mouth of the user when they start to interact with your brand. Because especially when they sign up, for example, like recapture, they sign up for it. That welcome email is setting the tone and the trajectory for their onboarding. Are they gonna become a long term customer or not?
Speaker 3 00:14:17 This is very important. So sending the right message to the right people is very, very important, I think. And that's what we've been seeing. A lot of success taking the base stuff that these entrepreneurs have made their basic onboarding process and like, Hey, exhaust them. What are you using this app for? Okay. They there's three answers. And that means there's three different flows and it's maybe the same content in, you know, for 80% of it, but maybe the introduction and the closing of the email is based on that particular reason for using this app. And I think that's, uh, a very powerful thing that we've been seeing better click through rates, better open rates, things of that nature through segmentation and personalization.
Speaker 2 00:14:53 Yeah. You know, it sounds like it should be super obvious. And you know, there's probably people in our audience right now that are rolling their eyes like, oh God, Dave, that's so banal. And we've heard that a hundred times and we know we're supposed to be segmenting, but the reality is my observation of merchants on recapture is that they're not segmenting. They're not. And I talk to SAS users, SAS owners, excuse me. And they're not segmenting either just blasting crap out to the entire list. It's like, you know, it's true, but you're not doing it. And I have evidence that you're not doing it. And so when somebody comes and says, yeah, segmenting is working really well and you get these really high engagement metrics, it's like, yes you do. Because these are things that make a big difference on landing. The right message. So what you're talking about is something that helps avoid a syndrome that I like to call email fatigue.
Speaker 2 00:15:47 Mm. Where you're just sending the same. You're sending the message out to the whole list over and over. And what you're really doing is you're sending out the list for a men's sale and you're sending out the list for the women's sale. And you're sending out a list for the kids' sale and then a site-wide sale that should have been like two emails to each of those segments. Instead it's four to everybody. And after a while they stopped listing to your message. They stopped reading what it is you had to say, and they just tune you out. And that's exactly the, the opposite of what you want. So if you have something that's focused on what they want, yes. They will open that email. And you can say, that's a, that's a very obvious technique, but the truth is so few people are doing it. I would say you are in the top 5% of all email marketers. If you are doing that right now, a hundred percent because my, my data says otherwise on thousands of merchants and talking to other SAS owners, they're just not doing this. They're just not doing it. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3 00:16:43 And like a very easy segment to do is like, just grab the people that have used a coupon. Those people are the ones that are interested in discounts and deals. So don't send the deals and discounts to everybody that's on that list. Just do it to the people that have already shown interest in doing deals and discounts. You have that data, you're just sometimes more likely too lazy to do it. Or you're too lazy to write three different email sequences, you know, like how can you template things out and make it easy on yourself? We're not like having to rewrite everything fully to totally out. There's a small little cues that again, creating experience, don't send an email and if I have a bad experience, I'm never going back to that restaurant or to that business again. And you have to think about that because word of mouth really happens.
Speaker 3 00:17:22 Cuz sometimes people forward emails like, look how bad this was. This is called. Look how bad this was not targeted to me. It's like about something I have, I have no interest in it, in this part of the site. So I mean, Amazon does a great job at, at their segmentation. They have great recommendation engines, lots of great econ businesses do this, you know, chubby does it really well. There's a lot of good stuff out there. And I think sure recapture does it in certain ways, such that like, you know, the, the easiest, I think segmentation one is like if they asked they added a particular product to the cart email only about that product in that particular division of the business, you know, and that's a very obvious one, but, and that's, I'm sure what recapture helps out with, you know, those type of very valuable emails.
Speaker 2 00:18:01 Yeah. And I've seen huge lifts in our own email metrics when I'm sending things out through our ESP on drip, uh, in order to just talk to our customers. So if I like segment here are paid users, here are paid. Users are using certain features. Here are users that have installed us, but never gone all the way to paid, but they were engaged for a while. Like I have all of these different metrics, uh, segments. And when I'm targeting them for a specific message, like if I send something to just the paid customers, I will see at least 50% higher engagement metrics on both open click and, uh, conversion rates on all of those things. Just because I've targeted the message to the right people. So yeah, this works, it's, it's, it's obvious, but yet, so few people are doing it. And if you think, oh, this is not a big deal, it's a huge big deal. It really is.
Speaker 3 00:18:50 I'll tie this up real quick is that it's a big deal upfront, but, and once it's done and those, those drips are set, it, it works forever. You get that benefit, not just in the first email, but in every subsequent email you send, you have those audiences, you have those segments, especially if you're a SAS owner listening to this, you know, implement some analytics to get exactly what Davis is talking about, who are your high use users who are users that are using a specific feature that when you launch the next feature that is adjacent to that, you can get it to the right people and not just roll it out to the whole audience, roll it out to a few people that are, you know, that want to use that feature. That would be the highest, you know, ability to use that. Again, it's a lot of work in the beginning, but subsequently from there, it's not much work just a little bit of massage here and then on messaging.
Speaker 2 00:19:33 Yep. So I wanna riff a little bit on the first party data collection that you were talking about earlier in, uh, viral sweep there. So that's like a great tactic and I know other, like there's a whole, uh, startup called right. Message that does this. Yeah. And you know, they've been doing it for SAS specifically, but viral sweep in e-com and that tactic is really great. So tell me about some other creative email collection or capture tactics that you're finding that are working really well right now, because one of the things that I think, I mean, in general, whether you're talking about SAS or e-commerce, there's this, I don't wanna annoy anybody. I don't wanna put anything out there, but at the same time I wanna build my email list and I wanna be able to talk to my customers. And so like, there's this tension between these two things here and how are you guys addressing that in viral sweep right now?
Speaker 3 00:20:22 Yeah. So I'll say a few things, you know, first, you know, let's talk about the e-commerce side, like the use case for viral sweep and yeah, this is a little bit of a plug, but let me just kind of talk about, in a sense of when you're trying to capture emails, you need to have some bait. And typically you see people, you do like guides, lead magnets, courses, videos, access to our membership area, things of that nature. But a lot of e-com businesses are sitting on, you know, dusty inventory. That's not moving. So a very easy way instead of doing these, um, how would you call them like, uh, lead magnets is to give away a bundle of your product, right? Put together something that's worth like 150, 200 bucks on retail value, which costs you half that if you're doing the proper markup and then put this into a sweepstakes, it does two things.
Speaker 3 00:21:10 It does first. It's such that people will self-select into that particular product cuz they care to give up something very valuable, their name, their email, potentially their phone number and their IP address to get access to this potential item. I'm not gonna give that up for something I don't really care about or I don't really want, so this is a very easy way to capture this first party data without having to really put any additional effort other than just signing up for the platform. Now, once you capture that data, yeah. You're not making the sale right away, but you know, there's a thank you page. You start to get some social viral lift in that, in that is what's helps to really draw the ROI from running a sweepstake. So, you know, having that late in inventory as your bait is very, very powerful. Now another way that we're bringing emails in, I know it sounds like basic, but having email captures on all the different parts of your website, like in blogs, like make sure you have a place to capture these emails.
Speaker 3 00:22:05 You can never get emails if you don't ask for it. So you need to find to put these like captured, uh, devices or these little widgets in places that people will trip over them naturally. And um, you know, it's just adding in products that help you out on your stack, your tech stack to capture these emails. And it could be like using social proof, right? A little thing on the bottom right corner that says, Hey, join 31,000 other people that use viral sweep. Right. Boom. Now they're like, well there's some social proof. There must be something here. That's kind of the thought process around using something like viral sweep to capture emails is you don't have to go out and do anything different other than what you're doing, but just make a quote unquote product page that is asleep stakes. And it generates a lot of ROI.
Speaker 3 00:22:45 Um, you know, people come in there again, they're getting self-select into that product or that, you know, prize, we call it, then it, it just kind of, it kind of grows and grows and grows. You send that sweep six out to the initial list, right? You already have a list. So get it out there. Then they start to invite their friends, word of mouth marketing. And that starts to grow your list, grow your list. And then you can drip email more to these, uh, new people. That's kind of the one tactic I like to talk about with viral sleep. It's um, it's, it's very easy to do, but a lot of people it's like kind of shy away from it, cuz like, well I don't have a cool prize to give you already have the prize in your pocket. It's already on your inventory. It's just not moving, you know, bundle it, prize it, you know, cash in on it.
Speaker 2 00:23:25 Yeah. Uh, so the thing that you just talked about about, uh, putting the email capture all over the site, I recently had an experience where I was trying to sign up for a service and I wanted to be on their damn newsletter and I couldn't find the place to do that. And I kept clicking around on the site. I went to their about page. I went to the contact page. I went to the blog. I went to, uh, just everywhere. I was looking in the headers and the footers. Like I, you know, as a SAS developer, I know where I should be looking for all of these things. And I couldn't find the damn thing. And you know, I've heard Joanna Weeb of Copyhackers say the same thing. Like you should make this so obvious that it's just literally everywhere because your customers, aren't gonna hunt that hard to get on your email list.
Speaker 2 00:24:09 So you should make it easy. You should make it prominent and you know, you should make it so that it isn't this complicated three step submission, double opt in like just one and done. You gotta make it so that they can sign up super easy. Otherwise you're losing out on tons and tons of leads. And I see the same thing going on with stores. Yeah. Like one of the things with recapture that is in order for recapture to work really well, we have to capture emails while we see carts going on in the store. And so we give you a couple of tools to do that. We have a popup generator so that you can do triggered popups timed, popups, page views, coupon reveals, scroll percent, all that kind of stuff. And those are fine. But people had this reluctance to do popups and we're like, fine.
Speaker 2 00:24:55 You don't need our popup, our email capture technology. We'll pick it up anywhere on the site, but you have to have something like you can't just say, oh well we're just gonna magically materialize email addresses at thin air. That never works. That does <laugh> if you think that's your strategy, I'm sorry, your strategy's wrong. But for recapture, we added this other one for the add to cart. So when they click on the add to cart button, we basically throw in, uh, an HTML interceptor. So we can just grab the event outta there and then pop up a little popup right there over the button that says, please enter your email address to add this to your cart. And we found that this boosted, the capture rates a huge, huge amount. So we, this guy, uh, asked for this feature and I think he was already getting like 23% recovery on his store. When we added this, it jumped him all the way up to 36% recovery. Wow. So that was like, you know, almost a 50% increase in his overall capture rates. Just on that one change to be able to capture that many more emails, to get that many more carts where you're sending that much more email, like little things like that, make a huge difference. So I don't care if you're putting it on header bar, a footer, a toaster widget, a side bar, a popup, God sakes, give people a way to enter your email address.
Speaker 3 00:26:10 Yeah. It's a numbers game. And I know it's like, oh, we're product managers. We want this beautiful sexy site. But look some of the gimmicks and I don't even like calling 'em the gimmicks they're tools they work. And if you don't wanna use 'em, then you're gonna get blown out by your competition. They're going to go past you. It's just what it is. Yeah. I just, I AMLO, I know people like just don't want to add 'em cause they don't wanna bother people. If you don't bother them, they'll never give you, they don't even know to give you their email address. But what you said when you're trying to search for it, that is incredibly frustrating. Cuz you gotta think like people people's time. They are maybe doing this in line at Starbucks and they're waiting and they only have one and a half minutes. And once that person says, Hey, what can I get started for you today? You're out of their mind. They're not gonna think about you ever again, unless you have like a remarketing pixel that you can send an ad to. And hopefully they see that ad in the noise of social, social media or retargeting display ads, you know, it's tough. So I would say, just ask don't don't be fancy about it. Just get it done, you know? Cause if you don't have the first party data you're getting smoked out there.
Speaker 2 00:27:05 Yeah. Uh, and I will say there's one thing about popups that a personal pet peeve of mine for the love of eighties, please do not put a popup on your damn homepage. Three seconds after I show up there like that is the app that everybody does this and those of you that do it. I, there is a special place in hell. Yes. That is going to be throwing up, pop up ads that have like the classic GeoCities blinking stuff. And you'll be subjected to that for all eternity. But I mean, in reality, it's the wrong time. You can't do it. Then you, you gotta understand well enough to figure out when is that intent high enough that I can ask for an email. So usually it's they viewed a certain number of pages. If you're on a SAS or a certain number of products or they've hovered around on a page or they're scrolling almost 80% of the page or 50% of the page or something like that, like be smart about it. Don't don't just throw popups up in everybody's face cuz you know, this can backfire in you, <laugh> at you and don't do that. So
Speaker 3 00:28:10 Yeah. And people are saying like, you know, what do I, what do I do? Well then just test, don't make it complicated. Just make a hypothesis. Say I want to do when it instantly pops up. And then AB test one that comes up in 15 seconds or at 50% scroll and see which one gets better capture and that's it. And then iterate and then keep going and keep trying. Right? You gotta, you can test your trigger, you can test your design, you can test how many fields you ask for it's all an experiment and people that get lazy. Sometimes you see them just install it and then just go and they just never look at it again. As long as the API connection is there, you're missing out to be honest, you know?
Speaker 2 00:28:47 Yeah, totally. Totally. All right. Well let's uh, let's kind of wrap things up a little bit here. Jim, tell me about something on one of the tools that you have at app hub that is generating some uncommon ROI right now for e-commerce merchants.
Speaker 3 00:29:03 Hmm. You know, there is a, I'll say this one here is address validation. Um, most people don't think about, they think that consumer knows where they live at and they know exactly where the package is gonna get there and everything is fine. But if you're an econ merchant, you know that there are a lot of unlivable packages. It's like not a small percentage. You would hope it to be. And you know, that could be costly 10, 15, $20 to reroute a package. If it gets sent back, it's a, it's a bad customer interaction. They want their money back. You've already spent all this shipping expense. So one of them that we have is called address validator address, validator.com and it works on Shopify and BigCommerce. And it essentially, it will go through as you pipe that email address or type that email address in it'll look, it'll check all the APIs, us PS ups, FedEx, and make sure that it actually is a real address, common things that people forget to their unit number or they get the zip code, wrong, those things.
Speaker 3 00:29:58 And it it's very cheap. It's like three or four, like 4 cents, I think, per click or per per order, but it can save you lots and lots of money and lots of headache, to be honest in negative reviews. Um, that's one of the ones I think drives a big ROI for people. That's just a base set feature and we have huge brands. I don't wanna name the brands on here. If you watch some work demo videos, you'll see the, the, the larger brands that are on there. These brands do 20 to 40,000 transactions a month. Um, you know, even small brands that do a hundred transactions per month. It's nice to have the confidence that, you know, when you put that package in there with your very valuable product that it's going to get to the right person. So that's one that I think that's driving a massive ROI.
Speaker 3 00:30:36 And a second one here is rich returns. If you're doing a fair amount of transactions and you have no way to process returns in an automated way, I think you're missing out on, on something like, you know, rich returns, which creates an automated, you know, return portal for Shopify businesses. I know it's Shopify specific, but, uh, it's a really good platform to do automated shipping labels and to give an experience, you know, buying the experience, the buyer experience doesn't end once they click buy and they submit their credit card information, you know, it's all about post purchase handholding education. And if things go wrong, it's the wrong size that they can get that information back or that they can get that product back to you and maybe exchanged out. So I think those are two that are very underestimated in the value that they can drive for these e-com users and econ merchants.
Speaker 2 00:31:25 Very nice. And if people wanted to learn more about app hub or get in contact with you, how would they do that?
Speaker 3 00:31:31 Yeah. If you learn, want to learn more about app hub, either you have a SA product you'd like to consider being acquired, or if you are, want to look into some of our products that we have visit app hub.com, a P u.com and you know, scroll down, you can read the website, it's got a link to all of the different apps, but the ones that I did name viral sweep.com, address validator.com and rich commerce.co are the three that I just kind of talked about here, but that's how you get in contact with those apps. And if you want to contact me, it's jim@apppub.com. I'm probably gonna regret saying that here, but Hey, reach out to me. If you have some kind of things you wanna talk about, I'm, I'm always open to chat and, um, yeah. That's where you can find me at.
Speaker 2 00:32:11 Awesome. Well thank you for coming on here to rogue startups today. Uh, for everybody out there in our audience, I hope this was valuable. If you have any, uh, questions about app aggregators or e-commerce or whatever, send us an email podcast@roguestartups.com. I'll throw that out there. Just so the spammers have two of them to hit. Yeah. Uh, and if there's, uh, one thing that we ask of everybody it's that if you found us valuable here, please share us with somebody else that you think would get some value out of it too until next time.
Speaker 1 00:32:47 Thanks for listening to another episode of rogue startups. If you haven't already head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show for show notes from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey, head over to rogue startups.com to learn more.
