Whatever you do, don't mention "Growth Hacking" to Nirav Sheth. Trust me, he's got something even better!

Nirav is the CRO mastermind driving success for some of the fastest-growing and most loved DTC brands like Molekule, Mack Weldon, Athletic Greens, Four Sigmatic, and more.

He has a truly unique and effective way of approaching optimization that defies all traditional CRO norms. It all begins with understanding what we should test and what we shouldn't based on the dollars behind it.

What we cover:

• How an eBike company turned the tables on their "add to cart" rate, resulting in a jaw-dropping $12 million impact.
• How a shoe company reworked its mobile experience to simplify and improve conversions.
• When to run quizzes, when to not, and when to ask more questions instead of less (this will likely surprise you).
• How to think about CRO from the customer's perspective in terms of "micro journeys."
• Should you go headless? Why Nirav thinks it's usually a bad idea, and when to consider it.

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Transcript

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're going to be looking at what it takes to be one of the elite D2C brands that's growing at a fast pace and delighting customers at the same time. So we're going to be diving into optimization and my guest today, the gentleman on the show today, no one better in the business, no one knows more about this topic. And let me just read for you the list of some of the companies this guy's worked for. So he's currently working with Athletic Greens, dollar Shave Club four Sigmatic, Mac Weldon. He was the CTO at WeWork. He was also the CTO at Athletic Greens. This guy knows his stuff. He's going to blow your mind. It's going to be a super fun discussion. So I'm delighted to welcome to the show ov she. So ov, welcome to the show, man. How you doing? And thanks for taking the time.

Nirav:

Thank you so much for having me, Brett. Super excited to be here with you.

Brett:

Yeah, I'm pumped about this. So obviously I've been in the D2C business for a long time, had the agency OMG Commerce since 2010. I'm an avid online shopper, and both from the service provider standpoint and the customer standpoint, I love good ux. I love a good user experience. I love a website that's easy and intuitive and fun to shop and I know that you do that so well. But I do want to hear kind of quickly before we dive into this topic, and we got lots of tips and insights and pet peeves that we'll talk about and some other fun stuff. But how did you get into this? How does somebody go from wherever you began to now working with some of the most loved and fastest growing D2C brands?

Nirav:

Yeah, well, great question Brett. Well, I actually started the whole business and my consulting agency Anata out of my childhood bedroom. So out of my parents' house, 1100 square foot home.

Brett:

That's awesome.

Nirav:

Green tile walls, the most ugly looking walls you'll ever see. Love it. Blue carpet, it

Brett:

Was. Do you have pictures of these green tile walls and

Nirav:

Blue carpets? I do, I do. It's still there. Yeah, you got to share those and then it's like a 60 square foot bedroom. And that's really where I started my company from. And it was a place where I had to grow up with immigrant parents coming from an immigrant family and first generation came out of college and I was three classes short of graduating and I had a decision maker. I was either run and create my company or go get a job and I had no other decisions. My parents made it very clear, you don't make enough money to make this work, you're going to have to find a job. We didn't spend $45,000 a month on it year at George Washington University education for nothing. And we didn't work our butts off for that. So I had six months to do it in while going back and forth from dc taking the mark train back and forth from Delaware to go get my classes done. And at the same time we're growing the company and luckily still to not a flourished, but I was able to make the $50,000 in six months that I needed to make. And that's what really started in nada. And from there, dude, that's pretty

Brett:

Good. 50,000 bucks in six months for a guy finishing up school. That's awesome. And if anybody's wanting know how to spell that or trying to type it in while you're on the go, it's a N A T T A, correct?

Nirav:

Yes, absolutely correct. Okay, awesome.

Brett:

And so then were you getting a degree in design in UX or how did the work relate to the degree

Nirav:

That and barely It went from, I had an electrical engineering degree, which helped me understand programming and knowing programming, but really it was really teaching me be how to be a really amazing project manager. I could be able to take any project from start to finish. And I think that's a true skillset that I got in knowing how to manage budgets, how to work with timelines and be able to complete something. And so that's really what it taught me from a business angle and how anada as I was starting to create it, that's where I fit in. I became that project manager and then I just staffing and going to hustle to find the next client.

Brett:

Love it. And really that engineering mindset is super valuable for optimization and testing too, isn't it like that? Did that training help you with the optimization process as well?

Nirav:

Absolutely. I mean the mathematics and the statistics side really helped out and to truly understand what is going to move the needle and what's not, especially on optimization front, if you don't understand both qualitative and quantitative metrics, you really lose.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah, so good. Yeah, so good. Well let's dive in then. So what are some of the most common mistakes you see D two C brands making when it comes to UX and ui?

Nirav:

So the biggest mistakes that I see in the UX side as well as UI is really trying to hack at solutions and think that by changing the color of a button or by making a small little change that is somehow going to move the needle in a massive way, especially with convert like C R O programs out today. You're really just trying to throw darts on a board and see which one sticks. And nowadays it's really, really difficult to be able to run the number of tests that it really takes in order to create a successful C R O program. When you're doing UI and ux, you're trying to figure out what's going to move the needle with conversion rates, what's going to move the needle with average order value? What's going to move the value the needle with lifetime value or churn? And when you're looking at these metrics, you're specifically having to figure out what benchmarks can you work with, what are you going to be able to move the needle on and how are you going to be able to do that?

And when you don't know why your customers are not completing their purchase or why they're not buying from you, but you're just throwing darts on the board to figure out, well maybe this will work or maybe this will work. You have to have such a large volume of tests in order to conduct that level of work. And when you do, are you really measuring how much it costs you to run that large volume of tests? So Brett, to give you an example, well when we think about running, let's say 50 tests and you get one winner, maybe you get two winners out of it. Okay, so then two out 50 you got correct. Well what about the 48 out of the 50 that you got losses in? Did you ever put that into your equation about the investment that it took to not only launch those 48 other tests but that the losses that you incurred while running those 48 other tests?

And so I think a lot of this common mistakes that we're seeing across a lot of the merchants that are how launching C r O programs that are doing UX UI work is that they're not paying attention to number one academic research that's already been done and used nowadays. So there's two companies that we really heavily rely on. One is Nielsen Norman Group and the second is Bay Mart out of Copenhagen. And we love these institutions because they use hundreds of thousands of hours of usability research so that we don't actually have to AB test every single thing. We know what are the common issues that people face from a navigation copy user journey flow perspective for, and especially with Bay Mart, it's all around the e-commerce funnel, P L P P D P cart checkout, these are all common terms in the e-commerce space and they have massive reports telling you the 300 things not to do on your product page.

And so leveraging that and having that say, I don't need to test that, I'm just going to make sure I don't do this and I follow these heuristics, is the best starting point for a lot of brands that just need quick wins. So if you're going to do quick wins, don't do quick wins based on, hey, I just want to test this, do quick wins based on academic research. That's actually been done because e-commerce has actually been around, it's funny to think about it, it's been around for more than 20 years. It's wild. And I wouldn't even think of that as 2020 long years. But we have that long period of time that people have been purchasing and buying online and there's a lot of research to start with. So I would say number one, starting with research is really important, but two, when you start doing a C R O program, pay attention to what are the tests instead of trying to do such a large volume of tests, what about trying to find one to five tests that you could be able to do that are much more insightful, that are bigger swings?

And I think that's the big difference, what we're focused on here in anta, but what we've done across with athletic grains, what we've done at Dollar Shade Club is that we actually said we don't want to launch 200 tests this month. We want to launch 20 tests this month. And out of the 20 tests we have such a higher win ratio because we've done so much research to back what the hypothesis was in the first place and why we believe that was causing an issue. So we're using qualitative data to figure out the why. And that's like going to, maybe, it might be going too detailed into this, but when you figure out what is an opportunity, you have to discover why that is a problem and discover before you start creating a bunch of solutions and trying to have an A B C D E F test, which will take probably 60 days to run in a very large volume site, why not just find one or two solutions because you actually did the work to figure out what the problem was in the first place. And I think that that's a common issue that people have.

Brett:

I love this so much. And then I've talked about this topic with a few other people and there's this kind of general consensus or a lot of people talk about it where you say, Hey, if you want to make a test, you got to isolate each little variable, otherwise you run a test and you won't know was it this button or this headline or whatever. But thing about that is if you make a small headline tweak or you make a button color change, most likely you're not going to see any difference, right? It's a small change. You probably won't see any measurable difference. If you do, it probably won't move the needle at all. And then how long is it going to take for you to get to something meaningful? So do you really want to know exactly what change it was that made the difference, whether it with the button color headline or a number of things, or do you just want to get the good results? You just want to get, do you just want to improve those problems? And I love how you outline that. How can we increase average order value? How do we increase lifetime value or reduce churn? And so looking at where are we off, where do we need to see improvements, what are our hypotheses behind why we need to see improvements? And then let's make some tests that are likely to move the needle and such a smart approach there. Any examples or any specific wins you can map out there following your approach?

Nirav:

Yeah. Well let me go a little bit deeper into the approach, Brett, and I'll give you an example please. While working through that. So one of our clients being a large e-bike company, they, what we wanted to look at is where does the opportunity exist? And a lot of times it's really hard to quantify where the opportunity exists, but if you have benchmark information specifically, to give you an example, let's take add to cart rates. And when we look at add to cart rates, specifically in the leisure space or in the activities and hobby space, we can be able to get a large benchmark of saying, okay, based on this size of product average, like average order value is above $500 in this specific vertical, we're expecting add to cart rates to be at roughly 15%. And that's what the industry benchmark is. So that provides us a lot of useful

Brett:

Information. And you mean 15%, 15% of people with an add to cart go ahead and complete checkout? Is that what you mean? Or 15% of business add to cart?

Nirav:

Yeah, 15% of you visitors add to cart. Got it. So in that industry it was a little bit lower just simply because the average order value is so much higher. You're selling products that are 2000, $2,500 a year. A, your add to cart brains are as high as you would get from a, let's say a $10 product or a $20 product. And so once we know that that's 15%, then what we can do is say, okay, where are you performing as a merchant? And so when we looked at the merchant, they were performing at close to around 10%. So now we have a 5% differential. And we can quantify that by taking their visitors and taking their average value and saying, look, this 5% differential, if we are able to get you from 10% to what the industry benchmark is at 15%, this one test alone or this one area that we're going to focus on is going to bring you 12 million in additional revenue. So yeah, because

Brett:

A 50% increase going from 10% to exactly 15%, 50% increase in add to carts. And ideally you would think that it'd be the same percentage of add to carts end up closing, and so could be a 50% lift. Right?

Nirav:

Exactly. But that's where Brett people don't actually take the time to quantify the actual money value behind it. What you traditionally see in the Optimizely based approach was this democratization around testing programs that says, Hey, everybody pitch your hypothesis everybody, and let's vote on which one we want to launch. And that whole approach misses one big factor is how much money is this worth? Because if I have a 20 million opportunity on one hand and a $10 opportunity, on another hand, I don't care if I got 99 votes on this $10 opportunity I'm using, I'm going after the 20 million opportunity.

Brett:

Absolutely. Absolutely. It's so interesting and I think that first of all, that's so brilliant. What are we going to test and why? And then if we do test it, let's just say we find a winner. Let's say our mind is blown, we have an answer, we go in a different direction. What could that do for us in terms of sales? It's kind of just a shift in mindset. I remember meeting a guy who was early on a team on Amazon, and then he was there for quite a while and he said towards the end of his stay there, as they would pitch new ideas to management for a new business use case or whatever, it had to be worth a billion dollars to even be considered. How would this idea generate a billion dollars in new revenue or otherwise? Why are we doing it? Because that's not going to move the deal enough. Now that's thinking huge Amazon scale, this was probably a decade ago too, but we still need to have a similar mindset with our business. Okay, got finite resources and finite time. So which tests am I going to run? And let's think about not only am I likely to win here, what problem am I trying to solve, but how much money could this make me? And if you know those things, then you're off to the right start.

Nirav:

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And if we're talking about the mid-market brands that you and I both speak to, brands that are doing 25 million all the way up to $200 million, you're looking for opportunities that are going to move the needle for you in millions of dollars of range, not in thousands of dollars of range. And if you're spending thousands of dollars, but your actual program to run UX and UI and C R O costs you $20,000, $30,000, it's not going to pay for itself and you're just wasting time and money to while doing it. So definitely have to find your r o. I

Brett:

Love it, man. That's so good. Awesome. So case studies examples, what are some of the tests you have run? And walk us through the process of how you got to that test and then what that did.

Nirav:

Totally, totally. So in the case with the E-bikes, one of the things that we really found from a lot of our deep research was that the more people that use search, the higher intent those people were, and that if we drove more people to search, the more people we could have to purchase. And this was claiming from both quantitative research that we could see those numbers, but also qualitative wise, when we spoke with the user studies to figure out, hey, what is it that you're, where are you getting stuck? What are you not being able to find? And they said the search was the part that was a missing component. And so finding that we actually did things to elevate the search results to make it not only more prominent, but also bring more focus specifically to that area, improve the search results, improve the empty search results, et cetera.

And by doing that, we saw a nice lift in not only the add to cart rates, but also the conversion rates. So the process that we used was very similar to what I was mentioning, which is one, let's focus on best practices and let's just eliminate all the common leaky funnels that could approach. Number two, look for benchmarking opportunities. Where are we seeing some lower rates compared to industry benchmarks? So we're seeing low add to cards. And then as we dug back to go deep into figure out why was the add to cart lower, we're seeing that people were not able to find the search leverage search and use search results as a result of that. So then we solution specifically around search versus solutioning around everything. When you think about add to cart, it could be a myriad of different issues, content can be a problem, PLPs could be an issue.

The way that you're showing imagery could be a problem. Instead of trying to solve every one of those, we needed to run some usability studies to actually figure out where are customers getting stuck. Both polls and surveys are really good, but also interviewing cus customers and some unique things we've learned about when one of our clients, another case study example is with M GM E, which is a footwear premium, luxury footwear brand for per women and men. And they make shoes out of Italy. Great, great client, great product. And one of the things we did was we did a usability study with them on their phones and on their desktop. And the craziest things we've observed Brett, but on your phone, when people are shopping and going through the user journey, they're being impacted by 40 different things when they're on their phone, their kids shouting from the side, totally husband's asking them a question, their TV's going on there may be

Brett:

Driving, I probably shouldn't infest it, but sometimes I'm look at stuff like at a red light or whatever, and that's probably not safe, but it happens. Yeah,

Nirav:

It happens. And on a phone that, and we saw the eyes going everywhere. We saw their focus going everywhere. And then on a desktop they were like eyes were concentrated, they were reading the full pages and you barely saw any movement. And just by doing that form of user study specifically with M G E, we were able to start ascertaining When we were looking at specific rates that we wanted to improve, we had to say, okay, this is what we're dealing with on mobile, so let's do things that really concentrate, focus on mobile and not put too much content in front of them because we just know we have such limited attention. So speed is of course important, but two, what are we trying to showcase to them? How are we trying to merchandise in front of them? Because if we only have such limited attention, maybe one or two product offerings is much better than the entire catalog where on desktop we could show a lot more, we have much more focus from them.

So doing use user studies helps us really understand that specific market. And while that mobile to desktop example can be probably true for many other brands, this is where brands like Athletic Greens have done really well. And another brand that we work with called Cloudera Lab, which is a men's skincare line, has done really well with one product called their serum, is that they keep such a centralized focus on just one thing. And the reason why I love that is because if you have such limited attention and they already have so much cognitive load on them because they're being distracted by 50 different things, what can you show them as just the one thing with one message that makes it easy for them to buy? And that's what I've always loved about athletic grains from their product line is that they made it so simple.

Now, not every merchant can only sell one product. I'm not advocating now destroy your entire cashflow. I can only sell one product. But at the same time, if you're on a mobile journey and you're trying to bring somebody who's brand new to you, can you maybe showcase and kind of merchandise one or a few products at minimum and then keep it so narrow because you already know that the cognitive load is so high and that they have no attention span. So what can you do to drive them in versus trying to serve them everything? One of my friends, Antonio would always say, don't tell the whole story. Tell a story. Yeah,

Brett:

I love that. Don't tell the whole story. Tell a story. And yeah, if you think about that, someone may be really interested in a product, they see a YouTube video, they see a Facebook ad, they get a referral from somebody, they're interested in one product, but then we get to your landing page or category page, they see all these other options and they think, well, maybe I should consider this, maybe I should consider that. And any confusion, any slowdown in the process, you just increase the odds That person's going to bail, they get distracted, they got to put their phone down. Exactly. They got to the light changes or whatever, a kid needs them and then they never come back. And so that's really, really smart. So don't just tell the whole story, tell a story. Yeah. So how do you help someone think about that then if it's, maybe I've got a large product line, but I know these are my two or three core products. So how do you help someone narrow that down to decide what are we going to showcase on mobile? What are we going to showcase on desktop? What is that experience going to be like?

Nirav:

I think you have to treat things Brett as micro journeys from how you segment your channel. So looking at various channels of where you're getting your incoming traffic from, whether it's paid search, organic, et cetera. And once you understood where that journey is going, then you can be able to ascertain which set of products can be merchandised specifically for that journey. And so when you're defining your initial landing page to your product detail page to where you're showing the catalog and the cart checkout experience, you have to then go through that experience and say, what was the ad that we served for them? What is the emotion that we're trying to elicit from that? And then where are we serving in terms of trust factors, testimonials, product information, et cetera, to really gear them into that one core product or two core product offering and move it forward from there.

But specifically to answer your question, finding not only, you have to know where your segment's coming in from that way you know what best to serve them because it's not always just going to be the two most popular product. It's going to be based on the copy and the messaging that you're saying all the way starting from the ad. And I think that's another problem where a lot of agencies who are doing traditional C R O fail and we failed at it. I I'll say very clearly that for so many years at my agency, we failed at this, was we were looking so myopically at just the website perspective and say, well, I don't pay attention to what comes before it. That's a black box. What I pay attention to is once you land on my site, what do I do with that? And it's like, but if you don't pay attention to what came beforehand, how do you know what messaging was being served? How do you know what emotions were being elicited? How do you know what was there? And so if you only pay attention to one area, you're missing out on the reason why that person clicked over in the first place and what were they being promised?

Brett:

Yeah. And that's thinking about just looking at the website as a silo, that's looking at it from your perspective. Yes. Not the shopper's perspective. The shopper's coming in with this context, these expectations, these hopes, these dreams, promises made in an ad, and they want consistency. They want to see what they see in the ad or wherever they saw you, and then they want to know immediately that they're in the right place when they land on your site and that you're going to deliver on those promises. So really, really smart. Other case studies you would reference, but both of those were brilliant. Any other case studies you would reference?

Nirav:

Yeah, I mean, another reference that I would have was say there's a really great company that we've been working with for the last couple years is a company called Thesis and they sell nootropics and their product really works well. And one of the things that we've really learned and identified, and this came before we even started, was that their quiz experience was their main kind of core acquisition funnel. And a lot of brands are starting to go this quiz approach and they take say, Hey, don't have a starting point, take the quiz and learn about the products. But especially when you have a product that requires more education and people don't really know what to start from, quizzes can be a really, really great place to work with. But one of the things we learned in the quiz experience that a lot of people don't understand and see is that they launch these quizzes without understanding what are we trying to do in terms of delivering value.

So when you have a quiz that's too short, meaning you're not asking enough questions to ascertain what it is about that person, the psychological behavior of that person is like, Hey, you didn't ask me enough, so before you deliver me, Hey, these are your results. You are, you're making the consumer feel I answered a few questions and now you're delivering a result, how is that result even possible? And so you're losing them in that track. So just by making this fundamental change, by understanding that user behavior and watching them go through the quiz process and seeing how they processed it, we learned that by asking a lot more questions and making the quiz even lengthier, which is normally the opposite, you would see from most people say, Hey, make your quiz shorter. That's the reason people are abandoning because this quiz is too long. It's like, no, no, no, people are actually not purchasing because the quiz isn't long enough. And so interesting, the more we actually got into it till a length process, the higher the conversion rates got, the higher the overall clickthrough were. And people who completed the quiz were at such a higher rate of conversion and people were willing to go through it because the questions, as long as they're relevant, we'll stick through the process. And it's not about how many questions you answer purely, it's about making sure that those questions were valuable, that it felt like it was dictating towards what the result was going to be.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good. I think some people's advice, whether you're talking about ad creative videos and stuff, is make it shorter. People don't have good attention spans, but that's not really the point. It's make it better, make it relevant, make it speak to the person. And the same could be said with quizzes. People know people have a sense of what does this question have to do with anything that I'm shopping for? Or you ask a really good question, I think this person's smart. This person asks good questions. And we've seen this work a lot. We've done a lot in the beauty space and personal care and hair coloring space worked with a number of clients and help them scale. And we found the same thing that a slightly longer quiz is better because people want to get this right. The target market was women. A lot of people, a lot of ladies try to cover the gray in their hair with color.

They want to get it right. They're not messing around, they don't want to use your product and then live with a mistake for a long time. And so they would rather you ask them questions. And I love that perspective that if you don't ask enough, they're like, wait a minute, this is not a, isn't a recommendation. This is just some canned thing. This whole quiz is a hoax. But I also wonder, because we see it's on the video side too longer, YouTube videos, two minutes, three minutes, someone engages that long, they're much more predisposed to sell. I also kind of wonder if someone engages more with a quiz and they spend more time with you, likely more, more inclined to convert, I would think at that point.

Nirav:

And that's exactly what we learned, was that they were much higher to convert once they actually spent that much time with you because they realized that you're spending the time to ask them all these right questions. And again, I go back to was that question relevant? So don't ask questions simply to ask another question, make sure it's relevant. And one of the things you said early on is what's one of my pet peeves when it comes to UX and ui? And one of my pet peeves is just asking something up there simply because it's satisfying the requirement of, Hey, I put a quiz up there or I made this hack in the conversion funnel. It's like, I hate that if it's not relevant. That's my biggest pet peeve is that you're doing a quiz just because everybody else is doing a quiz. So if you're selling pistachio milk, for example, and you put a quiz up there, what is the quiz about at the end product you're selling is just going to be a pistachio milk and there's no other versions of it. What am I doing it for? Flavor That doesn't make any sense. So don't use a quiz that's irrelevant. Help me find the right

Brett:

Flavor of pistachio milk.

Nirav:

Yes. Which

Brett:

By the way, I like pistachios. I like pistachios a lot, but is pistachio milk good? That sounds disgusting.

Nirav:

I have no idea. I haven't tried one yet, but I know it exists. Yeah,

Brett:

That's hilarious. So yeah, why are you asking me a quiz? I don't need aqui. You sell two colors of t-shirts. I don't need a quiz for t-shirts. But yes, if it's something like nootropics where I've heard about it on podcasts and I know people are talking about it, but it almost sounds like I'm trying an experimental drug, and so I want to make sure I get it right or hair color, I do not want to screw this up. Quiz makes a ton of sense. So yeah, exactly. Not blindly following the trends that are out there, but how is this relevant to my shopper's journey? What am I making easier? What am I making better? What am I making clearer or am I just checking box? Yeah, totally makes sense.

Nirav:

And wherever you can deliver value. Yeah,

Brett:

Yeah, for sure. Deliver value. Any other pet peeves is just always fascinating to me. People that have a keen eye and are really good at what they do, I love to know what are their pet peeves. It's fascinating to me. I

Nirav:

Would say so many of my pet peeves are around growth hacking. I've been around growth hacking for a long time that some of the tactics that people use. So to give you an example, we worked with a very popular bone broth company and they were growth hacking. And they were looking at, okay, how do I get a O V to or my CAC to go up against my L T V and say, Hey, if my CAC is $90, I have to sell at least $99 worth of bone broth and be able to make a profit off the first purchase. I get that. But then they get them into a subscription program. So to buy $90 worth of bone broth meant that you're buying close

Brett:

To it would be a lot of broth, man.

Nirav:

It's a lot of broth. You're selling 1516 bone broths and then you're getting them on a 14 day subscription and then you're seeing a churn happen, a churn rate of close to 80%. And they were questioning, they were boggled. Why are people churning? And it's like you just sold 'em 15 boxes of both broth and then you got another one shipped 15 days later. And you're asking the question, why isn't this working? And it's purely because they're playing the

Brett:

Numbers game only. They gave up water and all other beverages and just drank bone broth. That would be the only way they're going to consume that much

Nirav:

All the way. Yes. If they drank it like coffee at some point. Yeah. Yeah.

Brett:

But

Nirav:

This is what bothers me on that growth hacking side is that you're, you stop paying attention to the qualitative or what the consumer experiences and you're just hacking away at the numbers and you're forgetting that brands are not built from just purely hacking away at these numbers. They can help elevate you, but if you create a brand experience that really sucks because of this, you're, you're not finding that right middle ground between brand and growth. You're too on the growth side. And the other one is still, I see a lot of these spinning wheels on our websites, the wheel of fortunes. And I cannot understand why certain companies need a wheel of fortune. I understand that if you're a gaming company or you're selling toys, by all means use a wheel of fortune, but you're selling makeup or underwear. I don't know why a wheel should ever be used when it's next to a piece of underwear

Brett:

And I guess you got to can test it or whatever. I've never once in my life, and I'm an avid shopper, I shop from tons of Shopify stores, never once put my email address in there. And obviously I know how they work. I'm a marketing guy and we run email as a service. But I have put my name into a lot of popups because I'm like, well, I'm about to buy this. I do want to get the 10% off, but the wheel never done the wheel. Even one ton.

Nirav:

Yeah. So I'll say with you, yeah,

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So what's interesting to me, and as we talk about the bone broth company, that's sort of like your KPIs are driving your strategy rather than here's strategy and delighting customers and making good business decisions. That's our strategy. We got to have KPIs, we got to measure stuff and see how we're doing, but the numbers aren't in charge of everything. We're trying to give customers a wow experience and get them to buy from us forever. We're not just trying to optimize a K P I. We're not trying to hack away at a K P I.

Nirav:

Yeah. So I can't agree with you more, Brett.

Brett:

Love it. Love it. So you said something to me before we hit record that may be a little bit controversial actually. I think what we just talked about could be a little controversial, but I think people are going to agree for the most part. But you talked about, you gave me a perspective on headless, which headless design may maybe describe what that is really quickly for those that don't know, but you've got a unique take on headless, so explain what it is and what's your take on it.

Nirav:

So a headless environment is taking the front end layer off your, let's say your Shopify store, your Magento store, whichever platform you're on and saying, Hey, I don't want it to live in that platform anymore. I want it to own my entire front end. And so you're lifting your liquid theme or whatever the kind of setup you have and saying, I'm going to host the webpages now I'm going to make sure that I can control the full gamut of it. And now because of that, I will technically load faster as a site because I'm now not having, being so dependent on the monolithic platform on the backend side of it. And that's what traditional headless e-commerce is.

Brett:

And what's usually driving that decision is part of it just because it's like cool and it's a buzzword buzzword. People are like, well, we're headless now. Yeah. Or what, what's like, what's driving that decision to be headless?

Nirav:

I would say there's a couple factors, Brett. Number one, speed is the most enticing place because so many e-commerce stores are slow and they think that that's the quick and fast solution. They say, Hey, and this is coming from developers, this is coming from agencies that can make a lot more money from being doing a headless build because they're close to 150 to $200,000 build. And so that's where a lot of agencies and a lot of people want to play, and it's fun new software. And so they'll say, Hey, let's go headless because it's going to make your speed a lot faster and it's just not true. Can you build a fast headless site? Yeah. But can you build a really fast loading Shopify site? Hell yeah. You, it all depends on the architecture that you use, whichever one you want to use you can use and you can still bake both fast. But I would say earlier the answer to that was no. And the reason I can say that is been 2019 and 2018, I launched Roth's headless in 2018 being their C T O and then worked with being working with Athletic Greens. And we launched Athletic Greens headless in 2019 along with molecule with air filter company as well. Asmatic,

Brett:

Beautiful, beautiful product molecule.

Nirav:

And we've launched some headless because their platforms at that time in 2018 and 2019, their platforms were inherently slow. And we tested that because their T T L, which is their time to first bite, and to be able to get that kind of first load coming in from 'em was extremely long. It was like 0.8 seconds. So if you were saying, Hey, I want my site to load in one second, and your system takes 0.8 seconds to get there, you only have 0.2 seconds of a gap to say your site's going to get to one second load time. And so we had to make a decision at that point during those times to go headless because the technology was not moving up and performing at this space at war. And nowadays all of that has flipped entirely. Shopify has rebuilt their entire architecture in such a great way that their TTLs are close to 0.2 seconds, which is a massive 400% decline in T T L, which is great.

But also just their infrastructure and their setup allow you to build a really, really fast loading site on them. So you would say, but why is my Shopify site slow? 99% your site is slow, is because it has bad architecture and bad theme code on it. You're using a theme that has way too much crap in it. Or two, you have your Google tag manager or your segment set up whatever's loading your pixels. It's not optimized. And so that's taking things off. So if I just unload your G T M and say, Hey, turn it off, I guarantee I can make your site load a hell of a lot faster. And so there's a lot of these different solutions out there to make your site faster. And headless is not the only way to make it faster. I can make a really slow loading site and headless too if I just architect it really badly. So got it. The same case.

Brett:

So if your Shopify store is running slowly, it might not be Shopify's fault, probably your fault or your, the designers, developers, whatever. So you got to fix that. So then when are the use cases when you might consider now, because the speed is probably not the deciding factor, when should you go headless or when should you consider headless?

Nirav:

Yeah, so I'm going to answer that in one second, Brett. The only one other factor I wanted to make sure I brought up was that people say I don't launch as many features and functionalities in Shopify. Shopify just doesn't have enough. So I want to go headless because of that. And again, that's a fallacy that there's enough app integrations and systems out there, but you can also use React and View jss as JavaScript platforms to add the additional layers of functionality that you previously wouldn't have been able to. So that goes to kind of going towards your answer, the earlier question that you just posed, which is, when is the right time to go headless? Well, I think that headless when, and you have a set of engineers like a 10 to 20% engineering team, and you want to be able to feel like you have more control of everything because you're willing to pay for that control.

That's might be a good time because at that point you can say, Hey, I'm willing to take the risk. I want to take the risk so I can control every little facet of my site experience, so exactly the way I want it to, and I can be able to use so many different third party systems to make that happen and unwilling to spend the engineering costs that requires. And that answer to it is there's a few companies out there who have 30, 40, 50 person engineering teams, but even those including brands like Dollar Shape Club who've had large engineering teams have gone back to times where they're not headless and they're not kind of using this kind of customer architecture. They don't want to waste engineering power on that. And so even that, I bring that point up, there is a strong contention that unless you really can afford that, normally most of these brands, whether they're Unilever owned or not, they're cutting back their engineering power. Why do we need to keep paying for this when I don't need it anymore, right? Yeah.

Brett:

Don't need it. Or are we really getting wins? Are we getting enough wins with having control of every little aspect of the website to make sense to have this extra cost of going headless? Or is it more of a lateral move? So yeah, yeah, continue.

Nirav:

Yeah. And the big risk with going headless is you're owning hosting again. And remember the day is when you had to worry, is my psych going to go down? Is my checkout going to go down? You? That worry is back on your plate now because if it does go down, it's your fault. It's not Shopify's fault anymore. And that was the reason why we moved to platforms like cloud hosted platforms. We saw that whoever's been around since the Magento days, I have, that's, that shit went down all the time. Me too. Why police workers

Brett:

When it went down all time, it goes down at the worst possible times, right before a Mother's Day sale, or God forbid, yes, right before Black Friday. And then what are you going to do? Right? And that's where, yes, yeah, there's a reason we all kind of went to the cloud and it rather than self-hosted for the most part. So yeah, totally makes sense. Yes, totally makes sense. The

Nirav:

Cases where I do see headless being still dominant and being really good is that there's two different places when you're launch, when you're having a brand that is multinational, that you have multiple different storefronts. Shopify has now kind of done a pretty good job of growing global. And I love the international plays that they've made now because it's actually enterprise ready. And so being able to have one single store that you can be able to take internationally can be really helpful. But there was time period where you had to have multiple individual storefronts, but that meant that you had to have multiple individual front ends. So every single, let's say you existed in the uk, you existed in Germany, you existed in China, you existed in Australia. You actually needed to maintain 10 different code bases or 10 different front ends. And that's a part where with athletic greens, still today, it's a headless site experience.

And the reason we built it as a headless site experience is what we wanted one unified experience across the board. Didn't matter which country you were buying from, that the front end was one combined experience and then we could push it to separate checkouts. So that way if you needed to transact in the uk, you needed to transact in Germany, you could do so, and the purchasing and the seller record could be in that country, but that you could still maintain one common front end. And that solves so many, so much engineering problems and it solves so many experience problems and actually elevated the ss e o of the core parent domain because the parent domain owned all that ranking versus it being out to individual sub-domains, whether it be athletic greens, UK athletic greens, Italy, et cetera. You didn't have to own separate, separate domains. It could all just be part of one core parent domain.

Brett:

Totally makes sense. Love it. Love it. Nav, this has been fantastic. Our time has flown by. I could keep talking about this stuff with you. Love your passion, love your skill, love the insights and what you guys are doing. Talk to us a little bit about ADA design. So obviously we got a really good flavor, really good, really good feel for what you do. But tell us a little bit about the agency. Are you accepting clients? Are you all booked up? What is it? What that like?

Nirav:

We are accepting clients. Thank you so much, Brett. And NADA is really an inter-agency. What I mean by that is that we're taking a sli taking a different approach to the agency model. Typical agencies work on an hourly business model. So they're trying to rack up hours for the most part. They work in silos so that you don't really know what's happening behind it and that they're working with fractionated resources because that's a typical agency model, especially when we're fractionating resources. One person is put on 5, 10, 15 accounts. And so for us, we said we want to be able to create a better experience for the merchants in places that we work with. So we're not doing billable hours where we're working purely on a retainer and we're saying you getting dedicated team members for that. So when I say dedicated, it means only working for you.

Dedicated, yeah. Point to sleep, waking up to you only. And we're fully transparent. So that's a digital product team that's fully formed, ready to go to work with the brands that are there in a transparent way. So every desire developer, project manager, QA is on all of your calls and all of your messages and being very clear. And that has allowed us to really be able to work in the same KPIs that they're going after is our mission. So we're no longer trying to rack up hours because that's somehow going to make us more money. We're saying if your conversion rates go up by 50% and that's what you want to go after, let's all go after it. Because the more you are successful, the more we can be successful as a result. And so that's what Anata is. As an agency, we kind of work with brands in that capacity, and we work with mainly brands that are in the mid-market to side. So any brands that are doing at least 25 million online and upwards, we're working with traditionally D two C brands and digitally native brands as well.

Brett:

Love it, man. Love it so much. What about those that are listening and they're just like, dude, I got to learn more from neuro. How can they do you have free resources, you have other podcasts you're on, and I can link to all this in the show notes if you do.

Nirav:

Primarily I'm linking through everything through my LinkedIn profile, so I'm posting a lot of content there both through my personal profile as well as the company's profile. And I will be on tour speaking as well.

Brett:

That's right, man, we were just talking about that before we record. Yes. I'm going to try to get you on some stages, dude, because you're really, really good and more people need to hear from you. So I'll link to your LinkedIn profile as well, but it's ni of N I R A V, chef, s h e t h. So look him up on LinkedIn. Ni of You crushed it, man. This was super fun. Thank you so much.

Nirav:

Thank you so much, Brett, for having me. This was such a great conversation.

Brett:

So good. So good. As always, we would love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? What'd you think about this episode? If you listen to this and you thought, oh man, this person I know has got to hear this episode, share with them and leave us that review. If you've not done that already helps other people find the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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