333 | Growing a Brand With Zero Ecommerce Toolkits | with Samantha Rose

Samantha Rose

One of our ambitions is to help brands structure the unstructured data that starts to explode from their business when they're scaling quickly.  

Chase Clymer

Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. 

On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating  real results. 

I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.

Let's get on with the show.

Chase Clymer

Hey everybody, welcome back to another on location episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I’m welcoming to the show Samantha Rose. Samantha, welcome to the show. 

Samantha Rose

Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. 

Chase Clymer

I'm excited. After a lot of technical difficulties, we have got this figured out. 

Samantha Rose

You don't have to linger on that.

Chase Clymer

I don't. When you read emails, it makes your life easier to use the equipment on location. That's all I have to say. 

Samantha Rose

Understood.  

Chase Clymer

Also, well, I guess just first at the top, let people know what are you up to these days before we kind of go back in time and kind of walk through your journey in Ecommerce? 

Samantha Rose

Okay, well, where I am today has everything to do with where it all started. So I'm excited to talk about that. But I'm building software to help founders build brands and kind of focusing on the things that were the stickiest, hardest, and frankly, most fun to solve problems for me as an operator over the years. Built a bunch of tools that we dogfooded for years and then thought, you know, like, it's ready for showtime. Commerce is chaos. Let's rock. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. So what was that impetus, that aha moment that was like brought you into Ecommerce?

Samantha Rose

That brought me into Ecomm, well, that's like a really way back machine. Well, the internet was a place to sell the thing that I was obsessed with. Like I did not get into this thinking I'm going to make a bunch of money. I got into it thinking I have this product that I really want to share with the world. It was a spatula, full disclosure. Not that that's a secret about me, but like my headshot has a spatula in it. So it sort of follows me around. 

I broke a spatula in my kitchen. I'm a nerd, I figured out a way to make a better one, prototyped it, took it to the next phase, just kind of like on the learning curve, you know, as I went, kept picking up a lot of random knowledge about, I don't know, manufacturing and operations and logistics. 

Chase Clymer

You're doing the thing on Reddit where it's like, it teaches you how to draw a horse and it's like one eye, one nose, and then it's the whole horse. You're skipping so much here. So, you break a spatula. 

Samantha Rose

Slow me down. 

Chase Clymer

You make a better one. Yes. Walk me through that. 

Samantha Rose

Tracking that. The making of the better one. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. Why did you even take that on? 

Samantha Rose

It was fun. It was fun and it was a cool problem to solve. And I had a little miniature thesis that I could make something in a better way. And I just started playing. I just started experimenting. 

Chase Clymer

When you're working on this, did you think you were going to build a business out of this or was it just like a fun afternoon, weekend challenge?  

Samantha Rose

It was somewhere in the middle like that. So there's a lot of entrepreneurs in my family and I grew up around businesses that were being built. Some in some high tech ways and some in some pretty low tech ways. People in my family were builders and building stuff. So I had that as a little bit of a backdrop. 

But this is not like this, this is my joke, it's not a master's thesis, this business that I built, it was a $10 spatula. And so I made like a buck or two per sale. And if I had been really thinking about building a business, I probably would be selling jewelry or something. It's lightweight, easy to ship, not breakable, a huge amount of price elasticity  and not a commodity. This was just like calling it a passion project is stupid and reductive, but it was just like something I was really having fun with. 

And it snowballed into being a business because other people and not just my friends were like, this is a really good idea. Like you should keep tugging on this. I was like, I'm just doing this on the weekend. And it really was just like this home brew spatula experiment, like to put visuals to the story. 

So there's like a spatula and it comes apart in two pieces and there's the rubber head and like the most of them at the time were either like wood or stainless steel handles. And I look inside the hole for the part that came off the rubber part. I'm like, oh, that's really gross. And that was like just in my cookie batter. What if we just made the whole thing in this way? And then the next logical step is like, well, that's so obvious, right? Like I very much generally believe that there's not that many unique ideas. There's just like really great execution or like mediocre or no execution. But ideas are not that hard to come by in general.

So I'm like, this has to exist. It's so basic. And I started searching the internet and it didn't exist. And I wasn't looking in stores and like, it didn't exist. And I thought, well, okay, what if I just like to take a chopstick and buy some silicone and like to make a mold? So I made a special out of putty and I made a mold for myself and I put silicone around the chopstick in the mold. I'm like, oh, it's kind of like this track. It kind of works, but you can't really like to eat with silicone that you buy on the internet.

Chase Clymer

Yeah. 

Samantha Rose

Kids. don't literally don't try this at home. But it was a good enough idea that I would just make a few as gifts. And then I thought, I'm going to kill my grandma. Literally, like, let's not do that.  And so I thought, well, let me formalize this process a little bit, like I'll call a bunch of factories.  And, you know, the process of product development at that scale is really just a lot of smiling and dialing. I think it felt mysterious to me at the time.

And then the more I leaned into it, the more I was just like, oh, I'm just talking to people. And then they're telling me things. And then I'm like talking to the next person that they introduced me to and they're telling me more stuff. What came out of that was like, well, you have to make a lot of these to make it a real product. And I had enough external validation, but I didn't do any market research other than this doesn't exist.  

And there was enough external validation. was like, okay, like let's kickstart it.  So I  ran a Kickstarter project and 1500 people that I'd never met bought this thing and I'm like, oh, okay. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah, there's an idea here. Well, I really want to highlight what you said in that there aren't many unique ideas. just takes better execution. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs listening to this show that want to start a business are waiting for that aha moment where they're like, I've got this next Twitter or Facebook or whatever. And it's like, no, take something that already exists and just make it better, do it better, find a differentiator to make it unique and make the value prop better. Like that's all you really need to do. 

Samantha Rose

Yeah. Or like finding an itch that you must scratch, right? Like a problem that you feel like you probably could stay obsessed with.  

Chase Clymer

Yeah, I think that's important too. 

Samantha Rose

It becomes really boring because there are boring troughs and then there's like extraordinary peaks of it all. And if there's a problem that grips you enough  that you feel like you wouldn't mind doing it  nights and weekends indefinitely, then like go for it. 

Chase Clymer

Now, all right, you've got 1500 people that buy your spatula. At this point, do we have a business or do we just have a lot of orders?  

Samantha Rose

At that point, I was going to build a business, right? Like it wasn't a business, but then I knew what was next. And we were blessed by an extraordinary amount of earned media, which I think was just, you know, just one of those really lucky things that I could not have manufactured in any way, or form. And I think that  looking back and I, you know, I was in it at the time, like feeling this, I felt product market fit for a few different types of products in my life.  

And this was one of those moments where like just people were finding my cell phone and, like calling me and saying ;ike chefs, famous chefs, don't know how they felt about themselves. They're like, can I get 10 for the kitchen? I'm  like, sure. So it's just pulling me forward, right?  And I was having so much fun. And so I thought I'd build a business around this, but that didn't turn academic at any point. And maybe I would have built a bigger, better business if I had been more academic about it.

But I was just kind of like doing the next right thing and building my little machine cog by cog by myself mostly. And then, you know, I've dragged my husband and my best friend in like  my best friend's friend in like just,  you know, kind of glommed on to the problem as I went. And then you've got like five people on a mission with you and you're like, okay, we have a business. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. I don't think we've even mentioned the brand name yet. 

Samantha Rose

We may.

Chase Clymer

We may eventually stay tuned.

Samantha Rose

That first brand that I found was called Get It Right and it still exists. I've exited it to a great you know kind of a great new custodian. But I ran it for nine years and I started another brand in the internet connected coffee grinder space. That's not really a space. That's just an object

I started a brand in the coffee space, but it was an internet connected coffee grinder. And that was kind of my first crack at software development. We built a native iOS app for reordering coffee beans when your grinder said, you run out or these are stale invented, wrote an algorithm around that. And that was fairly technical. And then we really had a business.

Chase Clymer

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Chase Clymer

I do want to go back to the spatula company. And that derivative evolved beyond spatula is that a certain point? Correct? 

Samantha Rose

Yes and no. I mean, we were, you know, cute and delightfully designed and very well made kitchenware. So kitchen utensils and storage of all shapes and sizes and you know, we just kind of brought a very design centric point of view to this mostly commodity area that just hadn't been refreshed in that exact way. And it worked.

Chase Clymer

And so after the initial Kickstarter launch, you build a business, you start to really lock down, you know, manufacturing and building this thing, marketing it, selling it. Like what was the transition like beyond? Like Kickstarter kind of helps you find customers. But when you now have your own dot com, how do you find more customers? Like how did you grow this thing beyond that initial pop that you had?

Samantha Rose

So it was building in a time when the tools that are available to everybody today, they literally didn't exist. But brands like mine are why they exist now, why those tools exist. But there was not a ton of really cool remarketing stuff and there weren't incredible platforms for conversion optimization or customer management or retention or anything like that. So I built a lot of stuff from scratch. I was just coding newsletters and HTML. Like sending them out. 

Chase Clymer

That makes me feel terrible.  

Samantha Rose

And I built our site on Magento because it was, you know, open source and out of the box. And I knew again, just enough code to build my store. We took all of our photography ourselves and it was just very, very small and very, very scrappy. And that was in part because I think I was comfortable being scrappy and I liked stuff and  I was building fairly inexpensively, but also because something better did not exist. So kind of started in this very modest way.  And as I was building, over the course of that nine years, Ecommerce just lit up. But at the very beginning for us.

Chase Clymer

Can you, for the audience though, like what were those nine years? Would you say you start to the exit? 

Samantha Rose

So I started working on it in the late 2000s and started the business in 2012 and I sold it in 2021. So I kind of, you know, I round off to like the stuff that was built between 2010 and 2020 for commerce enablement was extraordinary, especially for like top line revenue generating. I mean, but we were not afforded all of those tools. 

Chase Clymer

Well, even just the tools that existed, the change in pace between when you first started the brand to around 2016 is when Shopify really started to take hold of the market. And that's when things really started with gas. But everything before that was custom and scrappy and expensive. 

Samantha Rose

Yeah. And so as a result of that, and our unit economics, which I could really wax poetic about it. We didn't have a lot of money to spend on digital ads. None of the toolkits, like the Ecomm toolkit that I deployed today on brands. I was just not there. There were no arrows in the quiver.  We went omnichannel. 

We went wholesale and we built a pretty extraordinary multi-channel business in thousands and thousands of specialty brick and mortar stores around the country and then all the way up to, you know, like the most joyful like Target says yes and you're like best day ever.  

Now I have to deal with it but it's like the best day ever. 

So by the end of my management of the business, we were in a lot of the majors. We were in numerous larger regional specialty chains.  I consider that businesses that have say between like three and 10 locations and those tend to be regional. And then like lots and lots of just one-off mom and pop shops and specialty stores on what I would consider Main Street. And so that created this wonderful, robust financial foundation for the business. You can turn one of those customers and there's like, oh, there's a lot more. There's a lot more that came from. And that allowed us to start to play in the Ecommerce space a little bit more. 

But again, I didn't have a huge budget for customer acquisition because I had $2 left to spend after every sale on average. That is not the CAC budget. And so that really started to influence our product roadmap because I was, I think, probably learning before there was a lot to learn from that I needed to be careful with managing CAC and that like I needed to create bundles in order to, and this is like the beginning of Endless Commerce. 

I'm like, okay, I need an algorithm for bundles, so that like Target and Walmart.com are not fighting with each other over the same skew. I'm giving them different skews and I'm making sure that I have available live inventory for each of those bundled offerings and their virtual bundles because I don't want to have to lock up inventory at my warehouse, which we manage ourselves as well.  

Like, you know, there's, this is a seven piece bundle. I want to be able to sell each of those seven pieces individually because they move at a different velocity, Like red ultimate spatulas move at like literally 10x the velocity of most of our other SKUs. So I'm like, okay, well, got to do virtual bundling. Like, write an algorithm for that. And I got to like, you know, run the demand algorithm for each of these channels and start to give them inventory advice on how to live on a basis as possible.

So we started to build some pretty incredible tools for ourselves to power those operations. But it was very much  more like  omni-channel focused  and like a different type of top line, right? Like a different type of  growth. This kind of like steady pace of you can acquire a customer in four minutes with like a good funnel, maybe less. Actually, I'd be interested to know  what the fastest kind of conversion funnels are, but I'm guessing it's on the order of.

Chase Clymer

Yeah, definitely, definitely speedy when you get it super optimized. But I've got two questions that came out of that. Well, one is more of a statement like bundling. There are so many clients that we come across, and I'm sure when you're looking at brands, acquire or coach or whatnot,  just not bundling isn't a thing that they're doing. 

And it's just like, you're leaving so much money on the table here. The perceived value with a bundle is through the roof. The margins get better. Shipping is easier to kind of  mark into the wholesale. It's just such a thing you need to do. So I'm basically what I'm telling the listeners to do is like work on bundles. 

Samantha Rose

Work on bundles, that’s two bundles.

Chase Clymer

Like that's going to help your business. But so I know you sold, you sold that company, but you had built this kind of technology. How did you work that out of the sale? I'm just really curious about that. 

Samantha Rose

Well, you know, I was in the luxurious position of not needing to sell and frankly of selling near the top of the market. And when our acquirer came to see if we were interested in selling, my  kind of immediate mental math and then like the thing that I said was like, well, yeah, I'm working on this really cool tech over here. So sure, I'll sell you the brand because I want my time back to focus on this software platform and on something like a services platform that we had kind of built alongside it. And so it wasn't even that it didn't come up in that way.

Like it wasn't a contentious element of it because it was more like this is my this is my reason for.

Chase Clymer

You give me this. We'll figure this out. 

Samantha Rose

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, they were acquiring brands. So the technology thing I had on the side wasn't necessarily even though it was highly of interest to me and the next big challenge that I was excited to solve for. That's not what they were going out looking to acquire in any case. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. But you are, it's come full circle now but you've reinvested back into a couple more brands. 

Samantha Rose

Yeah. And you know that my most kind of honest take on that is we sold in 2021 which was a tough climate for consumer brands. Post that, sorry, we sold at a great time, but post that, we were rebuilding in a tough climate. And I thought, you know, I'm kind of fighting a battle here to acquire customers for my services business, but I have a way  of investing in  and restructuring and turning around some of the businesses that are in the most trouble.

And so I started to buy consumer brands that needed a second life that had really great fundamentals and great branding and great teams, but that needed restructuring help, financial help, some operational help. And we have a team of, well, it's a lot of people now. At the time it was around 30 people in like commerce operations on the services side for another business that I owned.

And I thought, well, you know, if we just kind of put more brands onto that platform, just like we did in the old days running our own brand, then like, we really might have a thing here. And so that's one of the things that I've been doing recently. And it's all like just great learning and a playground for how we can help brands the most. And so when I acquire a distressed brand, some of what I'm looking into is well, what can I extract here that is like repeatable, scalable, and useful to everybody that I can put into Endless Commerce as like a feature that will help brands, you know, get to escape velocity? 

Chase Clymer

That was, I was working on my follow-up question that was around like, are you dogfooding these brands with the Endless Commerce product? 

Samantha Rose

It's delicious. Absolutely.  I will eat dog food all day long. Yeah. you know, I think that's, look, I might not be the most typical SaaS founder or brand.

Chase Clymer

I mean you're just writing your case studies with brands that you're like, yeah, you're working with them, but also you own them, but it's still here are the results. 

Samantha Rose

Yeah, I think it's very powerful to have a blend, right? Because you need the gentle pushback  or maybe antagonism or chaos of brands that you don't control because there are totally unexpected lessons, aka features that come out of relationships like that. And then I think it's also very valuable to have like these live, these live action, living, breathing, brands with customers and optimization needs  where we can carefully run experiments and controlled experiments with features that are more ambitious.

Right? Like we're doing catalog order, inventory management, demand planning, forecasting, bundling, supply chain management. A lot of those things are like you cannot,  we may not screw them up. If we screw them up, we've ruined someone's day or life or year. 

Chase Clymer

Well, that's what terrified me about getting into Ecommerce in the first place. And Sean convinced me to do it a little over eight years ago. Here we are today.  

Samantha Rose

You know, there's a lot of responsibility in that, right? Like we were a part of success for people. And I think that's at its highest and best what we want to be. But if you tread too far left or right of that, then you're part of their failure. And that to me is  totally unacceptable. So we've experimented pretty successfully with some of these kinds of bigger, badder features on ourselves. And then when they're ready for showtime, it's like, okay, now everybody can have this tool. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. Now, the name of the show is Honest Ecommerce. Looking back on your tenure in this industry, are there any mistakes that may come to mind or just advice you want to give the audience? Like, hey, I did this. Maybe don't do this. 

Samantha Rose

I mean, give me a, yeah, pick a lane. There's so many mistakes and so much fun that comes out of that. I think there's a few different ways that I can answer this question. So I'll give you my first kind of knee jerk answer and then. If you want me to dig into something that's like, I don't know, more technical or operational can. 

But like founder to founder and I was alluding to this a little bit at the beginning of our conversation, if you cannot  find a way to just be in the, the like zen of extraordinary joy around this thing that you're building, it will consume you in the bad way. And if you can be in that joy.

And like almost self-actualize into it, then it will consume you in a good way. But one thing we know is it is going to consume you. And so I have had to, I've got three kids and my husband's a part of my business and we're co-founders and it has consumed my life. But I find it to be super joyful because I like playing a game with my best friend. It's a serious game. You know, our livelihood is at stake.

But that means we can't, having that attitude means that we can get energy from the like 9 p.m. work sprint sessions like Saturday afternoons, you know, working instead of being somewhere else. And I don't know that, I don't know that every business is as all consuming and we happen to be running a couple. But I think that my most kind of heartfelt advice for folks is like, you can just find a way to gamify this for yourself and your whole life, then you can go forever.  That's like, you start a business and you're like, well, what if it works? But I mean, think about that.  Really, like, what if it works? And because if it works.

Chase Clymer

Those overnight successes took 20 years to get there. 

Samantha Rose

So I can give you other operational lessons or pain points or whatever. 

Chase Clymer

Sure, let's run through the, you know, those one or two more, a little more quickly, maybe. 

Samantha Rose

I'll go fast. Unit Economics, know them, love them, breathe them, but do not ignore them.  

Chase Clymer

I think that Unit Economics is the number one thing ignored by a brand going from zero to one. They're like, money's coming in, I don't know. 

Samantha Rose

Yeah, and just, and no, it's arithmetic. Just know, okay, next most honest take. There's a lot to be said for specialists and specialization. I think at an early stage, finding an obsessive, obsessed team of generalists to just go chase with you is really valuable because founders have to wear a lot of hats and that should be the fun of it. And I've found that in building teams, if you over specialize too early on, then you're left with a bunch of folks who are like, well, that's not my problem. 

And I'm like, it's all our problem. So from a team building perspective, I just love throwing in with people who've sort of like lived various parts  of it before or are willing to learn every part of it. and like, for example, all of the folks that work at Endless Commerce get exposure to the brands in our portfolio because they're learning like the customer pain and the customer pain is like a pretty generalized pain. There's a lot of different needles sticking into every customer. And I want us to kind of have a lot of that lived experience of empathy and knowing how to solve for it in a very aligned way and not just like, this is the way our tool works. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. Regardless of whether you're building a software product or an Ecommerce brand, your customer is going to tell you exactly what they want, how to make it better, how to sell them more of something. 

Samantha Rose

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer

Now, is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience? 

Samantha Rose

Oh my gosh. Well, no, we've covered a lot of territory. I mean, we could talk about stack overall, and I have a point of view on this. So would sort of here's my ulterior. I'm talking about my book.  You know, I've found that building commerce stacks is really fun, but complicated.  And I think that we've gone through these eras or phases of like, unbundling the tech stack and rebundling the tech stack, like unbundling it again. And I'm interested actually in your perspective on where the bundling is. Are we in a rebundling era? Like which Taylor Swift era of cover stacks are we in?  

Chase Clymer

I just want to clarify for our audience, we're not talking about bundling as in like you buy a shirt and a pants and an outfit. No, we're talking about right now a lot of money went into a lot of big technology companies. They started gobbling up smaller ones and now their thing does nine features. I am a fan of a feature that does the best job. 

I think I can understand why some companies want, and it's why I think some pump companies want an agency of record that does everything for them because they like just talking to one person. And if that simplifies their life in business for the better, so be it. But I think if you are looking to get the best outcome, having the best person or tool for the job is going to  be the best result. 

Samantha Rose

Yeah, absolutely.  

Chase Clymer

And it's Shopify.  

Samantha Rose

Do they pay you to say that? 

Chase Clymer

No, but I would love for them to sponsor this podcast. I do own Shopify stock and all I do is build Shopify stores all day long. I can see why you might feel that way. We'll also hear it from all the people that pay us lots of money to move them from another platform to Shopify. 

Samantha Rose

Totally. Yeah, I'm in the midst of a couple of migrations like that myself. And it's like, you know, they've built such an extraordinary tool. And I think going back to an earlier thought here, like they have turned commerce store building into play. It is fun. It is fun to build a Shopify store. 

Chase Clymer

I was just talking about this earlier and I hope this thought comes out completely, but Shopify has made it so easy for founders and non technical or subject matter experts, even at this point, people to like to build and manipulate their stores. But what they're doing is they're setting up their stores in goofy ways  that then make it difficult later on to figure out stuff and fix data. Yeah, I think it was a gentleman actually from a similar company to Endless Commerce now that I'm thinking about it. But he was just like, yeah, we see so much just bad data. 

Samantha Rose

Yeah. And what I love about a tool like Shopify, and I think a lot of the paradigm and opinionation that we're bringing to Endless Commerce is like, we want to build the very best tool for the job that's easy and fun to use, that guides you toward  really good outcomes. And those are data outcomes too, right? We're going to help you structure this data. And when I'm talking  about our business in a really nerdy way, which is not how I'm characterizing this right now. 

This is like a cool podcast.  But if I was talking about it in a really nerdy way, I would say that one of our ambitions is to help brands structure the unstructured data that starts to explode from their business when they're scaling quickly. Because you can build structure for your data if you have time.

And whether you're doing that in Excel or Google Sheets or a point solution,  if you've got the time, you can kindly build for the tool.  And what that overlooks is that oftentimes the most exciting scaling moments for a brand are unpredictable. Like you launch a new product and it just hits or some other element  of  the customer or the market starts to push you into product market fit in a way that is just extraordinary. 

It's driving from within the business and not just something that  you're hacking at anymore, but it's starting to kind of fly wheel. And in those moments, you don't really have the luxury of rebuilding everything. You just got to roll with it and be grateful for the success. And tools like Shopify, tools like, hope, Endless Commerce make it so that the structuring and the scaling in those moments is a little bit more like, it's already just here. So let's just let it fly. 

Chase Clymer

Now, if I'm listening to this podcast and I'm curious about Endless Commerce, like what's going on in my life, my business that Endless Commerce might be a solution. And if so, where the heck do I go to learn more? 

Samantha Rose

EndlessCommerce.com. I almost feel thankful for the opportunity to share about this. I  desperately want to help founders that are sort of on the path that I was on. And that's where a lot of this is coming from for the slightly shameless shill piece of it all, which is not what this is about, we're going to go back to talking about  shitty growth experiences. It was a brand that  is hitting some success, that has probably some data living in a few different places, right? So there's maybe like a team of, I don't know, more than two people, maybe like three or four people up to a hundred or more that have varying levels of kind of ownership or responsibility around the core data infrastructure  of the business. And to make that like less mysterious, it's like, well, what's in our catalog?

Like what are we selling and who's making it and how much does it cost us to make it and what are our import costs and  oh wait, who's our freight forwarder? Like how are we importing it and how many channels are we selling it on and what channels do we want to sell it on next and  how are we describing this product differently on different channels so that we map to what makes that channel tick the best? Like, so that's the catalog at the heartbeat. You know, it is the heartbeat  of the business.

There ought to be a lot of different people  generating that catalog, right? Like the marketing team is describing the thing, but the product team is like inventing the thing and the supply chain management team is like getting the thing. And then like the Ecomm ops team is starting to sell the thing. And then like the brick and mortar sales team is like selling it, you know,  in real life.  And all of those folks are stakeholders to that kind of core heart of data.

So if you've got a lot of people that are responsible for that information and maybe like  starting to trip over each other a little bit and it's slowing down your growth, like I wanna talk to you. That's at the core of it all. And then I think another way to characterize the businesses that we will add the most value to are ones where they're not just direct to the consumer. And I've mentioned multi-channel a couple of times now. Like if you are on Shopify or any other  cart of record,

And in any physical store, we can help you. And that's where I think the rubber really hits the road with unstructured data for businesses. If you've ever gotten an order, someone's sending you money as a fax or as a PDF or as a Slack message or as a text message. Like I've gotten purchase orders from stores as text messages. Hi, Sam, can you send 20? I'd like to write you a check. Like,  yes, please.

I would like that checked, but like where do I put that information? So if your growth is starting to kind of explode in that direction, the kind of lateral direction instead of deeper, just pure digital penetration, including dropships and stuff like that, then you're going to need a place to put it all. And that's kind of the exciting big bucket that I want to build. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. We can't thank you enough for coming on the show today and talking about this. By the way, we are recording this at Shop Talk in Vegas. How are you? Are you enjoying the conference? 

Samantha Rose

The best. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. And we have to get back to it. So we do have to end it today. Sam, thank you so much for coming on the show today. 

Samantha Rose

Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.  

Chase Clymer

We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes. 

You can subscribe to the newsletter at https://honestecommerce.com/ to get each episode delivered right to your inbox.

 

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Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to Electric Eye at electriceye.io/connect.

Until next time!