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Episode 185
December 4, 2020

Cooperation, Inspiration and Discovery

We’re joined by Conner Sherline, CEO of co-op commerce, to talk about consumer acquisition, brand partnerships, cross promotion, and how co-op is making it all happen.

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Brand Dependency on Facebook & Instagram

  • Conner spent most of his career at Facebook and Instagram, seeing acquisition costs increasing dramatically. This brought him to want to find a way to bring brands together to partner. 
  • Conner worked on Facebook Dynamic Ads, which are Facebook’s ads that are targeted for consumers based on what they’re interested in—products/brands they have specifically looked for or similar products to those brands.
  • Brands are highly dependent on Facebook and Instagram for their insights accessible through advertising. While working at Affirm with eCommerce brands, Conner wanted to reduce customer acquisition costs and find insight and advertising outlets outside of Instagram and Facebook for those brands. 

co-op Bringing Brands Together

  • co-op is simultaneously a community of brands growing together and a company that builds tech for those brands that are partnering.
  • Their first product is a post-purchase experience for consumers that shows similar and complementary brands to a customer after a conversion. 
  • “I think that is the future: when more brands are fully digital and brands have to understand that they’re going to have to cooperate and not compete to win in digital.” - Conner Sherline
  • Conner wants co-op to build a really compelling recommendation engine. 
  • So far, their algorithm has three parts: a credit for each brand’s placement for each consumer they show co-op to, cart data analysis for pairing and recommending new products from other brands, and retargeting signals based off of consumer profiles. 
  • Brand acquisition has gone well for co-op, already signing on 200 brands. The first priority when speaking to investors when starting co-op was proving that brands were willing to partner. 

Fly by Jing, Cross Promotion, and Quality Check

  • Fly by Jing launched their rebrand recently, which has brought many consumers to new brands via co-op.
  • Brands are constantly being cross promoted through exposure via co-op which is part of the community element that co-op is striving for, believing that collaboration will drive growth. 
  • In collaboration, co-op introduces new brands alongside your own brand’s products and lets the customer decide: “We really believe that with the right model in place, we can do both (drive AOV and driving additional conversions). We can actually end up becoming one of the only upsell tools that also drives net new consumers as well.” - Conner Sherline
  • co-op isn’t an open network like Amazon. They check the quality and reviews of each brand and product so that only quality brands and products are recommended.
  • Upselling data is shared with brands in the network which forges a much better partnership strategy between brands.

co-op’s Future

  • Conner points out that discovery for consumers is a challenge. This challenge is what he’s most interested in building into. 
  • co-op wants to bring brands together, but still own their own storefronts unlike a marketplace.

Links

  • Until the end of 2020, sign up for co-op now and get 10,000 credits to be shown across co-op’s network. Referral code: futurecommerce
  • Sign up for Future Commerce Insiders and see our Vision Report coming in early January!


Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Brian: [00:02:39.38] Hello and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast about next generation commerce. I'm Brian.

Phillip: [00:02:44.60] I'm Phillip and we have Conner Sherline with us here today, CEO at Co-op Commerce. Don't call it Coop. It's Co-op Commerce. Welcome to the show, Conner.

Conner: [00:02:52.79] Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it.

Phillip: [00:02:55.57] I follow you on Twitter and aside from following you on Twitter, I have heard about Co-op via Twitter from people that keep just running into it by chance.

Conner: [00:03:10.81] Right.

Phillip: [00:03:11.59] I understand what it is, but I think it's probably better that you explain what Co-op is and and maybe a little bit about yourself in the process.

Conner: [00:03:20.17] Yeah, that sounds great. So hi everyone. I'm Conner. I spent most of my career at Facebook and Instagram and while I was there, I saw crazy acquisition costs from 2013 to 2018. Prices going from sub $2 CPMs to well over $75 for the last few weeks during the election. So I decided that there was something else that we could do about that by enabling brands to partner together. So we created Co-op. First and foremost Co-op is a community of like-minded brands that have decided that working together is in their best interest and that they can grow together. And second, Co-op is a technology company that basically builds the technology to support those underlying partnerships. [00:04:06.91] Our first product is a post-purchase experience that allows brands after they've captured a conversion to promote other complementary brands that their customers might like. So to a customer, it feels like a "products you may also like" experience on Amazon, but on the rest of eCommerce. And for brands, it's essentially a partnership mechanism where they can select the different brands that they think their customers would be interested in and use our technology to promote the most relevant product at the time for that consumer. [00:04:37.99]

Brian: [00:04:40.39] Wow, so cool. What an interesting model. I love how you said first and foremost you're a community brand and then you're a technology brand. I feel like that's such an important distinction and a great way to introduce yourself. How did you get into this, Conner? Tell us a little bit about your story.

Conner: [00:05:00.39] Yeah, so I was in a variety of different roles at Facebook. I started there in 2013 in New York City. I was the Chief of Staff. I worked in sales. I worked in product marketing. And I was always fascinated with the idea of recommendations. And specifically over the last five years, Facebook has been the place that people discover new brands. So that idea of discovery and finding new things is always super impressive to me. And if you think about Facebook and Instagram, it's sitting on just a tremendous volume of pixel data across all of these individual brands, which is how it's able to curate those recommendations. So that was always fascinating to me. [00:05:38.43] I worked on a product called Dynamic Ads, which was Facebook's retargeting solution that allows Facebook to essentially know what you're interested in and show you in that moment when you're back on the platform. Either they're something similar to what you were looking at or specifically for the brand that you were expressing interest in. So that tech was always really fascinating to me. But what I realized very quickly is when you look at the individual brands, they are overly reliant on Facebook and Instagram to provide them with that insight. And when a customer lands on their page, Facebook doesn't share that data. So Facebook doesn't give the data that it knows about a customer in aggregate to an individual retailer, which makes personalization on specific sites really, really a challenge. [00:06:23.32] So that problem was in the back of my mind, personalization, discovery. All of those things were top of mind for me. Then I left Facebook in 2018 to go to Affirm, the fintech companies started by Max Levchin. And there I just learned way more about these eCommerce brands in general, their tech stock, how they build their websites, what metrics they care about. And I came up with the idea while I was there talking to a friend that's an ex Facebook-er. We were talking about ways to reduce customer acquisition costs and thinking about what exists out there besides Facebook and Instagram for these brands. And we had the idea of brands partnering together in a very easy turnkey way and promoting each other's products. And that idea stuck with me for a few months. And I spoke to a bunch of different retailers about that. They were like, "Yes, we would love to cross promote. We'd love to work with other brands, but there's no easy solution for that today." So when I dug further into that, I realized that there's not great technology for partnerships today. You're relying on affiliate.

Phillip: [00:07:30.42] Right.

Conner: [00:07:30.42] You have to go under affiliate. You upload your images, you upload your products, you set your deals, you invite your partners, they copy and paste links into emails. And it's very manual and arduous. So I thought, all right, let's figure out a way to make that super easy. And then I asked where brands would be most willing to do this, and they said after capture our conversion. They didn't want things to get in the way of their conversion path. So that was the first product. Last December, I left Affirm. I spent about a month brainstorming, thinking about what we needed to develop. And we kicked off development in late January, on boarded our first ten merchants in March. And now we're up to over two hundred.

Brian: [00:08:09.10] Wow.

Phillip: [00:08:09.40] Wow. There's this... I never had thought about the idea of value added partnerships in a brand until four or five years ago. I went into a Soul Cycle with a friend of mine. And when we were standing in the Soul Cycle, they were basically like, this is why this is the greatest retail presence of all time. And they basically said, you go to the bathroom and Le Labo is in the bathroom. You go out to the lobby. There's Lululemon in the lobby. There's Lord Jones in the lobby. This brand is built on value added partnerships that elevate and anchor what Soul Cycle is, by virtue of who you're standing next to.

Conner: [00:08:56.01] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:08:56.01] It automatically elevates it. It does the one plus one equals three.

Conner: [00:09:02.32] Exactly.

Phillip: [00:09:02.66] And so when I think about like how time consuming and how laborious and how difficult it must be to try to secure those kinds of partnerships, to have a technology solution that allows you to express interest, to cooperate and to participate together...

Conner: [00:09:20.96] Yes.

Phillip: [00:09:21.52] That is mind blowing to me because I think that is the future, especially when more and more brands are fully digital and more and more brands have to understand that they're going to have to cooperate and not compete to win in digital.

Conner: [00:09:38.26] Totally. I think the interesting part about what you just said too about competition is [00:09:43.09] these brands by nature are not competitive. They don't sell competitive products, but they are competing on the Facebook and Google auctions for the same customer. So if you think about it from that perspective, all of them bidding against each other, the only person that wins in that war is Facebook. The prices go up for everyone. [00:10:02.66] So if you have... If you're a deodorant brand or a natural skincare brand, you probably will never sell apparel. You probably will never sell these other products that are in different categories. So there's no real downside from partnering with other high quality brands in different industries that your customers might be interested in.

Brian: [00:10:23.14] It's really interesting. We talk a lot about the attention economy and how, you know, Netflix is competing with online shopping, which is competing with video gaming. And I think you're kind of tapping into that a little bit. The attention economy only has a few outlets right now, and Facebook is one of the big ones. And so if you want to go try to get after people there, you're literally competing with everyone else that wants the attention, not just in your industry.

Conner: [00:10:50.92] Exactly.

Brian: [00:10:51.46] So that's huge to get away from that. Actually that kind of brings me to another question, which is I think about what Phillip just talked about with his Soul Cycle experience. We think about the sort of getting outside of Facebook. I feel like you're sort of, we're blurring the line between traditional retailing, affiliate, and advertising, actually. And so do you actually see yourself as sort of like in the space of advertising? Or is it more like straight partnership? Where do you fit into this all the world in the terms that we currently have? What would you say you fit into in terms of like what your technology does?

Conner: [00:11:34.21] Yeah, totally. I mean, the way that I like to describe it is more than anything, we want to build a really compelling recommendation engine. So if you think about it, there used to be so many different channels that existed in advertising that you could just spray and pray. Buy a bunch of ads, hope that some of them stick for this specific user that needs that ad. Or you put something on TV, millions of people see it, maybe thousands of the right people see it and they go and convert. So efficiency has become so much more of an important thing when it comes to targeting and curating an audience and curating a brand. So when we think about it more than anything what we want to be known as is an amazing recommendation engine, making great recommendations for other products based off of information that we have at that moment, becoming a discovery platform for additional things that you might love as a consumer. And certainly there will be advertising elements to that. People will be able to pay us for additional placement across our network. They'll be able to use it for acquisition in general. But more than anything, we really want the experience to be relevant and feel good for consumers and help them cut through the noise that exists in the world of products, I guess you could say, in the world of commerce.

Brian: [00:12:58.89] Interesting. I love the idea of it being a recommendations engine, because really, I think that right now you're sort of shared across like direct to consumer brands and and such, but you could really apply this to anything. So like let's say someone watched Emily in Paris on Netflix and you could literally have this sort of experience pop up after you finish an episode or the whole series, like it could really apply to anything. It all comes down to how you go about making that recommendation. So I think a good next question would be like, how does it work? How does the whole recommendation engine sort of function? Seems like there need to be a lot of mechanics to make sure that it's fair in how people are getting surfaced. Would love to hear a little more about that.

Conner: [00:13:45.69] Yeah. So we've built an algorithm that essentially works in three ways. The first way that it works is every time you show Co-op on your page to a customer, we give you a credit to show your brand on the network. So if you're bringing... If you have ten thousand, twenty thousand, thirty thousand orders a day, you're going to be earning commensurate amount of credits for your brand to show across the network. The second piece that we use is an algorithm based off of the cart data. So looking at what it is that you just bought, what is tangentially what we are seeing that's performing best with that individual product? Is it a complementary product or is it something that that you wouldn't expect? That's happened a few times with some brands where other products that are selling well are not what you would expect, but with data we're able to tell. And then the third is over time, as we start to build a consumer profile, we'll know and have retargeting signals from other places that people are engaging on the Internet. We'll be able to use that to curate the recommendation as well, depending on where we're seeing that customer.

Phillip: [00:14:57.84] And it seems so... I don't want to be a little what you've done. It seems obvious when you explain it, which I think is why it could be really just the beginning of a wave of... I hate to even say it. I feel terrible to even say it's like no good idea goes uncopied.

Conner: [00:15:23.13] Right.

Phillip: [00:15:23.43] You're proving out something that I think will become very commonplace in the future. It sounds like you've built a little bit of a moat around being able to onboard so many brands so quickly. Two hundred is not a small number. How did you do that? Could you explain to me how you got them to participate? I think that that's super interesting.

Conner: [00:15:45.28] Yeah, it's probably the most interesting part about the product, to be honest. And when I was talking to investors in January, that was the first thing that they wanted me to disprove, was individual brands wanting to work together or be willing to work together. It's a lot easier for Facebook or Instagram or Amazon, because you can do whatever you want. It's your platform. You can curate the recommendations. Facebook does this all day, every day. If you go look on a competitor site, the second you get back in Instagram, whoever has the highest bidding price will be what your hit with when you enter on Instagram. So if you're looking at one brand of soap and then you don't buy and you come back to Facebook, that's going to be the first thing that you see from a competitor. So Facebook uses that data to its advantage and oftentimes not for the individual brands. So for us, I think there's been a lot of, especially in 2020 with rising acquisition costs and everything that's happened with new brands and acquisition, DTC brands are looking for new avenues. They're looking for new ways to grow. And this year specifically has been a year where they've been particularly open to trying new things. So one part was timing. The second part is just building the right growth levers. So introductions from our investors and picking a group of investors that are well connected within the consumer space was a was a big strategy of ours. And then the second is activating the community itself. So [00:17:17.92] our second largest growth lever is actually the brands that are already part of the platform inviting partners or brands that they've partnered with previously because the solutions are so much easier for them to continue in an evergreen partnership capacity. So a lot of brands that are already live, we incentivize them with added distribution across the network to invite new brands to the network. And that sort of snowballed and started to snowball where we're now at a point where we've doubled month over month for the last five months with no real end in sight. [00:17:51.34]

Phillip: [00:17:53.85] Well, congrats on the success already to this point.

Conner: [00:17:58.68] Thank you.

Phillip: [00:17:59.06] I feel like it can also there's this interesting opportunity to get in now, especially if you're building a new brand now, because it enables such an incredible discovery mechanism for things that are sort of like minded. I know there is. I feel like I'm going to I'm going to mess this up, but Fly by Jing, I think. Are they a customer of yours?

Conner: [00:18:23.19] They are.

Phillip: [00:18:25.11] It's so interesting because the re-brand just launched last week, they were everywhere. And by nature of them being on Co-op, I feel like you shared a part of that story. Such an interesting thing to see how it does work both in their favor and to build awareness of yours. It's like people sat up and take notice all at the same time. I find that to be a really interesting dynamic in the way that you can build your company and your business, drive adoption alongside the success of others that are being discovered via the platform. That's incredible.

Conner: [00:19:03.78] That's everything. And when you were talking about Fly by Jing, what I was thinking about is just how strong that community of brands that are cross promoting to each other just within the category. You have Fly by Jing, Win Coffee, Supply... We have Brightland. We have a ton of amazing CPG brands where the Founders know each other quite well, and now they're helping each other out by cross promoting. And that's just part of the community element that we're trying to strive for are brands that really believe in partnerships and believe in collaboration to drive growth.

Phillip: [00:19:40.65] Let's ask some hard questions, Conner.

Conner: [00:19:40.65] Yeah. Let's do it.

Phillip: [00:19:40.65] {laughter} Because we've definitely lathered up the love of the idea. Is Hero on the platform? Just kidding. Lather.

Conner: [00:19:40.65] There are...

Phillip: [00:19:40.65] {laughter} OK, great. We're getting all of the organic SEO into this one episode right here. I love it.

Conner: [00:22:08.69] I love it.

Phillip: [00:22:09.20] Does someone ever ask the question about if folks were going to buy from another brand anyway is there a concern around stealing away from average order value, or AOV, or potential retention business or my ability to have a fast follow up sell or something else? Are there other criticisms around share of wallet that kind of are leveled at Co-op?

Conner: [00:22:40.43] Totally. It's a great question. So the first thing I would say is we actually launched up sales for same store yesterday.

Phillip: [00:22:47.18] Oh wow.

Conner: [00:22:47.54] We don't believe in and capitalizing on or cannibalizing your own growth, essentially. So what we've been saying to our merchants has been resonating really well, is give your customers the choice. Show them products from your own brand and show them products from other brands and let them decide what it is that they need. So using the recommendation engine to promote other products alongside your products and giving your customers the choice is something that we've been thinking a lot about. [00:23:22.04] We don't want Co-op to be an and/or. Like I care about driving AOV or I care about driving additional conversions. We really believe that with the right model in place, we can do both. We can actually end up becoming one of the only up sell tools that also drives you net new customers as well. [00:23:41.54]

Brian: [00:23:44.53] Another really interesting thing I think about this, is this just open for anyone? I was thinking about the Amazon marketplace model versus the Target marketplace, at least what Target started with. Right? Is this an open community or is it something that you have to apply to be a part of?

Conner: [00:24:01.59] I'm really glad you asked this question, because it's something that when you're thinking about solving really big problems, like discovery and marketplaces, you observe a lot of what's going wrong right now. And I feel like I just watched a TV show and someone on it was talking about how they just got another crap thing from Amazon. And it just it seems that my wife ordered from Amazon still. And every time something comes at the mail, she's like, "Ugh, this doesn't look like what I thought it was going to be." It's like we all have felt that right where it's like the convenience though, Prime, 2-Day shipping. And it was so easy to find it. I got it. I bought it in two seconds and then it arrives and you're like, I wish I wouldn't have bought this. One thing we think a lot about is like Amazon's an open ecosystem. Pretty much anyone can sell their products on Amazon, which makes it really crowded. When you type in the word candle on Amazon, you'll have like thirty million results of different candles, and that's great. But there's just too much abundance now and there needs to be... One of the main things that we believe in is just a limited set of recommendations that are highly personalized to you. So it's like a back end way of answering your question is no, it is not open. It is not an open network. We take the process of observing all of the brands very strongly. We read customer reviews. We sometimes ask for products ourselves to test them, to make sure that they're high quality. And then one additional thing that we're thinking about launching is for brands that we're not quite sure about is to program an NPS score, a Co-op score, into the onboarding itself, where we can survey customers and ask them directly if they recommend the brand just so that we can keep the quality good at scale.

Phillip: [00:25:53.16] Wow.

Brian: [00:25:53.28] At scale... I think that's my next big question. That sounds really, really laborious. And we talked about how this is going to help eliminate high CAC. As you onboard more and more merchants, how are you going to sort of keep this financially successful for yourself, but also keep costs low for your merchants?

Conner: [00:26:15.82] Yeah, I think one thing that I think a lot about is there are different customers at every end of the spectrum. There's some customers that care a ton about price and not about fancy branding. They wouldn't spend one hundred dollars on szechuan inspired sauce. Like they just wouldn't ever. And that audience is a completely different audience than the audience that is buying Haus apértifs and Fly by Jing. So what we want to do is build communities at every stage of that, of every process. And I think that there's such high quality brands that exists in that full spectrum. So it by no means means that we're only going for the the high end, beautiful, good looking brands. There's just a lot of really high quality brands that aren't like a high price tag. So the process of thinking about brands and looking at brands is more around, like, do customers love the products than does it look cute. Does it look great? So I think there's like a balance there of getting to scale and having thousands of merchants while also keeping it high quality.

Phillip: [00:27:33.22] You have this really interesting amount of data that you're building on the consumer side and how consumers are interacting and how they're expressing interest, satisfaction, dissatisfaction with the recommendations. That goes into making a better recommendation product. How do you get that data back to the retailer so that they can make a better product? How do you do that in such a way that helps them to build better in the future? I guess to put it more simply, who owns the customer here? And does the up sell brand have visibility into who that customer is? And do they own that customer?

Conner: [00:28:20.83] Yeah, they do, because the beauty of the product is in order for someone to convert, they're a customer on both sides. So if you're up selling the customers, they're already a customer of you. And then it's also a customer of the downstream brand. So from that perspective, they're shared customers and we share data around how customers are engaging across the network if that customer is that brand's customer. If that makes sense. So they're able to see that, what up sold on their site. And they're also able to see the up sales that they've driven. And we use that to right now, we're just in the beginning stages of using that data to forge a much better partnership strategy. So right now, if you think about all the different partners that you might want to do engagements with, there's a whole slew of them. And you're a Founder and you have a team of five. It's really hard to navigate that. So you might call up your friend and say, hey, let's do a partnership, let's do an email giveaway. But it's not a data informed decision.

Phillip: [00:29:19.99] Right.

Conner: [00:29:20.26] So one of the things that we have started to do through the Co-op community is make introductions to brands that have similar customers, that have similar buying behaviors, that actually have a similar profile and using some of the metrics that we have to index those specific partners accordingly. So as we see customers engage with brands on your thank you page, we can tell you which brands we think have a high propensity to be successful partners for you in other places outside of Co-op as well.

Brian: [00:29:54.76] That data that you get from that relationship, like the shared data, seems absolutely invaluable. Are you also a data play? {laughter} Is this really ultimately a big data sort of business where you're going to use that data? Effectively that's your value prop in the future?

Phillip: [00:30:16.12] This is how I keep getting Parachute home catalogs at my house that I never signed up for. {laughter}

Brian: [00:30:21.23] Right. Exactly. Totally.

Conner: [00:30:24.25] So one thing I thought a lot about is how you can take that recommendation engine and apply it to individual retailers. So for instance, say you're on Allbirds. You and I get the exact same home page on Allbirds, but I like gray shoes and maybe like gray shoes, too. But that's not personalized right now. So there's a lot of different tools that we want to build to help individual retailers with just better personalization of their own assets, making it work better for them on site using that collective data to help everyone is definitely something that we've been thinking about. And I gained inspiration for that product just by working on Dynamic Ads at Facebook. Dynamic Ads similarly work in that way, where everyone's contributing pixel data and as a result, everyone gets a better retargeting solution. The issue with that is that those they don't own the surface. So if something happens, like if Facebook wants to do whatever they want with that on their servers, they have the control. And in our case, if we start doing that and it becomes not a benefit to the merchants, they can start yanking us off of their own sites. So it's really in our best interest to make the merchants happy and to provide value for the data that they're providing to the network, hence the name Co-op is a give to get, making sure that brands are receiving commiserate value for what they're contributing and anything that we do in data will be under that guise.

Brian: [00:32:02.08] With that then is there like a customer profile that that is consumer facing ultimately that you want to build here? Is this... I think about like Affirm and Klarna and the difference between the how they went to market. Klarna eventually went direct to consumer and now has commercials on TV. Is this ultimately something where like people sign in and that way they've got sort of a profile?

Phillip: [00:32:31.90] Are you building a brand or building a brain? That's the question.

Brian: [00:32:37.77] Right.

Conner: [00:32:37.98] I like that question.

Phillip: [00:32:40.18] I stole that from someone else, by the way, so I can't claim credit for it. But you heard it from me. And so therefore, I'm the one who said it.

Conner: [00:32:46.65] I think the first thing I would say is it's still early days. Right? Like, we are still at the earliest stage of understanding where we have the strongest product market fit and where we want to live in the ecosystem. Do we want to be a B2B company? Do we want to be a consumer company? I personally love the consumer challenge. I feel like there's so much wrong with discovery for consumers right now and there's such a monopoly on where to discover new things that personally that's the challenge that I'm most attracted to. So that would lend itself to figuring out a consumer play, understanding how to build better loyalty programs maybe across the network, figuring out ways to incentivize customers to shop within the network and to not leave it and building almost like an un-marketplace marketplace of all these individual retailers with us bridging them together, but them still owning their storefronts. So that's something that we've been thinking a lot about and thinking about what the consumer value prop needs to be in order for that to unfold correctly.

Brian: [00:33:55.52] Oh, my gosh, my brain is like flying right now. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:33:58.70] I can see it. I can see it from all the way over here, Brian.

Brian: [00:34:01.93] I bet you can. I'm thinking Chrome extension where other platforms that provide, like information about customers...

Phillip: [00:34:11.27] You're shouting.

Brian: [00:34:11.48] Oh, I know. I'm sure. I'm like freaking out.

Phillip: [00:34:12.71] I get it. You're so excited. Oh my gosh.

Conner: [00:34:16.52] {laughter}

Brian: [00:34:16.52] Fit data. Carbon footprint. Everything can all go in this. And you could... {laughter} There is a lot that can happen here.

Phillip: [00:34:23.93] Oh my gosh. Brian's ready to invest. Where does he cut a check.

Brian: [00:34:27.74] Where do I sign? I'm in.

Conner: [00:34:27.88] It's a really fun problem. And it's something I mean, it's especially for 2020, right? I mean, everyone that's in eCommerce right now is riding a wave that is unprecedented. And the energy on this side of the house and with the brands themselves is just so strong. There's going to be some fundamental massive companies built in this era for sure.

Phillip: [00:34:53.68] Yeah. Someone explained Co-op as such, and it made me realize how old I am because I knew exactly what they were talking about. This is like StumbleUpon, but for eCommerce.

Conner: [00:35:08.32] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:35:08.98] And I kind of love that as the elevator pitch. It's like I'm going to stumble upon a brand that I didn't know that I was going to love. But I do love. And I think that's just a really succinct way of saying that. We're all looking for better recommendations. I salivate when I'm like, how did I not know about this brand? It's such an interesting thing. If it's not in the Twitter sphere, I'm probably not finding it. And there are hundreds and hundreds of like minded brands that are in search of consumers and they need a place to be able to connect. And I think this is just brilliant. I really do. I wish you so much success because this is such a necessary thing.

Brian: [00:35:51.13] So we've talked about a little bit of phase two. There's also a second side of this. We talked about products, but there's so much other stuff out there on the Internet that needs help eventually down the line. And maybe I'm giving away all your business secrets. Maybe I'm not. But like, it seems like there'd be an opportunity to recommend content in or against these products as well, to explore and learn and grow. And I feel like there's a whole additional side to this that once you nail product, you've got a whole new set of stuff you can go after.

Conner: [00:36:22.21] Yeah, there're a lot of industries that are in a similar place. There's just too much. There's way too much going on. And there's a need for a better recommendation even in enterprise, it's kind of insane. There're so many SaaS tools now. There's like hundreds of SaaS tools, all for different businesses. All of them are going to market, spending so much money to acquire customers. You see like this partnership play with Brex and Ramp and some of these fintech companies that are really taking it upon themselves to get discounts and offers from all of these individual companies to help with the stack of a startup. There's so many different industries that need that. Newsletter's today is another one. There's hundreds of millions dollars in 2020. How do you find the ones that are most relevant to you that you didn't know about that are written by individuals? So I agree. We're starting in commerce. It's definitely where we focus for the immediate term. But I'm excited about all of this coming to light. Personalization really seeing its its heyday in the 2020s.

Phillip: [00:37:36.94] Brian, he just got CoopCommerce.com. Don't make him change his domain again.

Brian: [00:37:41.09] I know. I know.

Conner: [00:37:44.70] Co-opt.world?

Brian: [00:37:48.92] Oooh.

Phillip: [00:37:48.92] {laughter} Yes. Don't get fm, whatever you do. It pigeon holes you. Promise. I can speak from experience.

Brian: [00:37:57.47] {laughter}

Phillip: [00:37:57.47] Conner, it's been great to have you on the show. Any parting thoughts? Where can people sign up to be part of the community that you're building of brands and recommended brands?

Conner: [00:38:08.00] For the rest of the year we're actually doing a promotion for any new brand that joins us they'll earn ten thousand premium displays across the network between now and the end of 2020. So feel free to go to platform.CoopCommerce.com to sign up and put in the code, the referral code, Future Commerce. And we will...

Brian: [00:38:32.36] Love it.

Conner: [00:38:34.16] We'll gift you ten thousand credits to help you with this holiday season. Some free inventory.

Phillip: [00:38:40.40] That's the hustle right there. We're not getting paid anything for this show. I didn't get any credits. So that's totally for you guys. I love it. I love our audience and Conner, game recognizes game. I love the hustle. This is so cool. I love seeing this kind of innovation. I love that you were game to come on the show. Thanks for doing a podcast and thanks for being so transparent and open. Like I said before, we wish you so much success.

Conner: [00:39:06.59] Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

Phillip: [00:39:08.12] Thanks for listening to Future Commerce. And we want to hear from you right after you go sign up for Co-op. Why don't you drop us a line at Hello@FutureCommerce.fm and tell us what thought about today's show. Stick around, we got some really cool things coming up. We have our vision report coming in early January. And if you want to get on the list, so they'd be the first to read about the top ten things you need to watch out for in 2021, go right now and subscribe to Future Commerce Insiders get it at FutureCommerce.fm/Subscribe. And that's it. The future is what you make of it. So let's build a future that we all want to participate in together. Thanks for listening Future Commerce.

Brian: [00:39:42.08] Thank you.

Conner: [00:39:42.89] Bye.

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