Bonus Episode: Balancing Trends and Consistency: How Clean Data Drives Success with Maxx Blank

Maxx Blank is the Cofounder of Triple Whale, a leading tech startup specializing in direct-to-consumer SaaS measurements, data and AI automation. With over a decade of experience in the Ecommerce and tech industries, Maxx has successfully transitioned from a DTC entrepreneur on Shopify to a SaaS tech founder serving other merchants.

He previously started and scaled two brands beyond seven figures, showcasing his expertise in driving business growth. At Triple Whale, Maxx leads the company through hyper-growth phases, working closely with his leadership team to align cross-departmental efforts and drive innovation.

He is also a dedicated family man, actively engaged in community building, and is deeply committed to creating opportunities for others.

In This Conversation We Discuss:

• [00:58] Intro
• [01:44] Refining your brand message while being innovative
• [03:18] Balancing baked-in tools and third-party apps
• [04:08] Scaling insights: bespoke data for growing brands
• [06:45] Building websites that empower entrepreneurs
• [08:07] Building an Ecommerce brand from scratch
• [09:39] Lessons from a drop-shipping boom
• [10:33] From a small idea into a multimillion-dollar brand
• [11:41] Solving pain points with an entrepreneur's mindset
• [12:58] Scaling a business during COVID and hitting $7M
• [14:32] Pivoting businesses after COVID's impact on ads
• [15:27] Raising seed rounds and building early momentum
• [17:39] How Shopify’s community helped scale our business
• [18:26] The power of AI in business insights
• [19:45] Forecasting revenue and optimizing with AI
• [22:01] Overcoming analysis paralysis with AI tools
• [23:27] Transforming business with AI: a turning point
• [23:59] Utilizing community-sourced business intelligence
• [25:07] Streamlining DTC data with metric frameworks
• [25:36] Diversifying ad channels with clean, actionable data

Resources:

• Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
• All your data in one platform triplewhale.com/
• Follow Maxx Blank linkedin.com/in/maxx-blank-8886a421a/

If you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!

 

Transcript

Maxx Blank

Diversifying ad channels is a must. In order to do that, you really have to understand the small door hinges that move really big doors. And in order to do that, you need to have very clean, crispy data and know how to analyze it.

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.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. This episode has been a long time in the making. I can't believe it took me so long to pin you down, Maxx. 

So I'm bringing to the show the co-founder of Triple Whale, one of the leading tech startups specialized in direct-to-consumer SaaS measurement, data and AI automation, Maxx Blank. Welcome to the show. 

Maxx Blank

Thanks for having me. Yeah. It's interesting that it's been a while. This should have happened. We're both in Columbus. What are the chances?

Chase Clymer

I know. Well, before Triple Whale and before our agency Electric Eye existed, we both knew each other just in this space. 

Maxx Blank

Yeah. It's just wow. 

Chase Clymer

Columbus is great, everybody. It's a great place to live and to work and to build a business. 

Maxx Blank

It's underrated, right? Which is good. It's super well known and it's kind of like a gem. 

Chase Clymer

It is.

Chase Clymer

For the 4 people that are listening to this episode that don't know what Triple Whale is, can you give me the elevator pitch? 

Maxx Blank

Yeah, this is something we have to refine all the time to be honest because we're constantly trying to reinvent ourselves. And by doing that, bringing value. So how do you reinvent yourself constantly and have a consistent message and continue to be on the trends and just continue to bring value. Especially with the fast-pacedness that you're saying with AI and what's going on with data and how do you really bring it together? 

What we're really aiming to be is the backbone of data measurement, BI analytics for DTC brands. And really we aim to serve the startup all the way to an IPO. And we have that infrastructure to do that. And especially with Triple Whale, with the newest edition of Triple Whale that's rolling out now that has been out for a bit now, it really allowed us to deliver on that. 

We kind of re-engineered our entire platform to go beyond attribution, double down on attribution, bring in some more non-deterministic attribution as well, MMM, things like this, go deeper on our MTA product as well. 

Then also bring in some really robust capabilities for BI, for data, for owning your own data, really being a central source of truth for the entire infrastructure that you need to really grow as a DTC brand. There's a lot there. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Oh, no, no, no. Absolutely. 

But I think one thing I want to highlight here and I loved this ever since I... Well, I think it was funny enough. The last time I bumped into you was at that event up in Toronto at Shopify's event. And Toby was on stage talking about how Shopify wants to solve most problems for most merchants.

And that is the line in the sand that they draw as what they're going to do and bake into their product. And then that just opens up the app ecosystem and shows their commitment to those types of partners. 

Whereas I talk to a lot of brands often about Shopify's analytics. And I say, it depends on your goals. But I would say, almost every Shopify product that's baked in leaves something to be desired. There are some things they're really good at, but I would say analytics is one of the things where everyone's just like, ‘We use something else.’ 

Maxx Blank

Yeah. I think as the business grows and scales, needs become a bit more bespoke too. It's hard to have it out of the box. And so Shopify leaves that door open for guys like Triple Whale, for us.

And also the unifying of multiple data sets, whether it comes from different integrations you may have. As businesses grow, and we see this, we have a lot of data to kind of empower us to understand the life cycles of brands. 

And you can see it, you have brands that are just getting started, that are trying to find their products and their product market fit and they get to about a million dollars, let's say in that area. They would be fine with the limited analytics that comes with Shopify and they're not super diversified in their ad spends. So they can kind of get by with that. 

But as you start to kind of break through and you start bringing in beyond meta, because everyone starts in Meta, right? And then you're going to bring in Google, the next step. And then it'll start bringing in TikTok is probably the next one you're going to do. And then you're going to cover all your bases, Pinterest, Snapchat, you're going to want to go everywhere. 

As you go everywhere with your ad spends, you need a consolidated view and you need deeper insights in your business. That's really what we're trying to bring: to bring that almost like a bespoke offer, which is really tough to do at scale. 

When we re-engineered the platform, the reason why we sought out to double down on BI is as our customers grew, they kept asking us for things we didn't have. We had very limited views on data and they're like, ‘Well, I would really love to see it like this. I have a subscription box and we have unique intervals of renewal.’ Maybe you could buy it once a quarter or once a year or twice a year, not once a year, but twice a year. 

Our out of the box solution just didn't have that. In order to really get more bespoke and custom, you have to stand up a robust data platform. Our goal with our new platform is to be that for you. Whether you know how to manipulate data or architect data on your own, or if you need us to do it for you, we're basically able to provide data insights on your business for any type of Ecommerce business. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. And obviously, you guys are doing some amazing things these days. 

But take me back to the humble beginnings. Let's talk about the idea. Why does this exist? 

Maxx Blank

Yeah. I'd say about 8 years ago is when I really got into Ecommerce. And before that, I always was dabbling in some type of entrepreneurship going on. I caught the entrepreneurship bug my last year of college. And halfway through that, I'm like, ‘Why did I just pay for 5 years of college or 4.5 years of college?’ 

Now I realize that with the internet, you have access to labor and different things that you can build and sell and like, whoa, the whole world up and up. So I was really out of the end of college, I got heavy into entrepreneurship and did a few different startups and things like that. 

It wasn't until about eight years ago that I came across a group of people that wanted me to build them websites because I had a bit of a digital agency going on. This network that I had developed, they were all Amazon sellers. 

And they wanted, they all had, like, nightmare experiences of only being on Amazon and then kind of not having control of their own destiny in a sense, right? You can be shut down or deranked and things like that. And they wanted to get into the Shopify game, but it's just an entirely different game. And so they brought me on to build the websites to help them start that. 

And so through that journey of working with them, they already had an Amazon business. I built them Shopify websites and then they're like, ‘Okay, well, we need to run ads.’ I'm like, ‘I don't know how to do that’. Like, ‘Well, you could probably figure it out.’ 

So I think a handful of clients just paid me to figure out how to run ads. And so I turned to YouTube. Turn to wherever you would turn to to learn, right? Whether it was like Ezra Firestone's courses or whatever mastermind group I found at the time and started to learn ads. And it started working for some of these sites and driving them traffic. 

And then I'm like, I saw the potential. So I started my own site. And early on, connected Oberlo via AliExpress. And that was like my sandbox to play in to learn how to build an Ecommerce brand. So it really started with drop shipping. 

And that's like where I started my career in Ecommerce. Built a few stores, one of which was like a boutique for women's jewelry and handbags. 

Chase Clymer

I remember that one. 

Maxx Blank

I had no idea really what I was doing at all. And just testing, like you would set up five new products today based on trends on the internet. 

You'd have an out, I had like a team overseas that would set up the ads for me and I would just watch them and you'd go through five or 10 a day with a small budget. Back in the day, you could make some dents and then one would like catch. And so that first store was like my experience setting up that system, understanding DTC, and understanding direct response.

That store ended up scaling very quickly.

So up until September of 2016, I had done like 100 grand on that store from that entire year. And then I had one ad that hit that October. So Q4, right? It went to $500,000. And then it went to 1.2 during November. And it was all drop shipped from Oberlo and AliExpress. And it was a nightmare. I had to jump on a plane to China and work out stuff with my suppliers and throw stuff on a speedboat and get it here in time for the holiday season. That was a fun experience.

So that was my first run at getting into Ecommerce. And that was a store that lasted like two years. I ended up selling it at a loss because I got into all sorts of debt, trying to manage, bring inventory over to a warehouse and here stop like actually drop-shipping and control the customer experience and keep customers long-term. Can't really do that by drop-shipping in that way back then. Ended up selling that. 

And then I started another one shortly after. My wife actually had an idea of these braids. Pre-braided hair braids that were sort of trendy. And so we started a store and women's hair accessories. It was my wife's idea, I had no idea. And it ended up working. It ended up scaling pretty rapidly. 

The original target audience, this is a funny story for people that appreciate direct response, like direct response and just ad buying. The original target of that store was actually Orthodox Jewish women who cover their hair. 

And so we found a website that sold accessories and fashion to that cohort. It's a very small cohort like in New York. But we had our pixel on our site. So that site would actually send us traffic. It wasn't like a marketplace. We bought ads daily and I just retargeted them on Facebook and Instagram, but I loaded up the pixel. 

At some point, my wife was like, ‘I'm seeing these things everywhere. Let's try to go broad.’ So we took that pixel data from that site, from that cohort, made it look like audiences. And I think year one, we did about 50,000. Year two, we did about two and a half million. And it was from that original cohort of data. 

So during this experience, I'm scaling this, we set up influencer programs, we're sourcing at UGC for ads, set up manufacturing, didn't do drop-shipping, did the whole thing, had packaging, did the whole thing right. Running that whole, had success, had customer success, had procurement, the whole nine yards. 

Every good, I think, owner operator has their credit card game, their credit card points game worked out. Every dollar you're spending, you're getting one or two points, whichever one you have. 

I would like to travel with my family. Take my kids, take my wife on holiday seasons or wherever we would go. When you're abroad and you're traveling around, you can't open up all your screens and see where my ads, what's my ROAS, things like that. I really just wanted a concise dashboard in my pocket where I can see the metrics that matter most. 

What's my ROAS? What's my spend right now? The Facebook mobile app for ads is the worst experience. 

Chase Clymer

Oh, it was.

Maxx Blank

This is where I'm like, ‘I need to make an aggregated simple app.’ I just want to do that. And that was really the inception of Triple Whale, the idea was through that experience. And so I built it, the idea was to build it for myself. And I always, you know, I'm entrepreneurial, so I'm like, ‘Okay, I'm going to get this thing working. We'll try to make a business out of it at some point.’

But I struggled with doing two things at once. So it was like, ‘Oh, what timing for me.’ I'd say in 2019, my co-founder AJ, he and I had known each other for a while already. We kind of stayed in touch. He was in Israel. I was over here in Ohio. He was big in startups and tech, always, always into that. And everywhere we talked, it was always about tech and the future and AI and things like that. 

At some point in 2019, he was coming off of the startup. He and his co-founder, Ivan, now that's the three of us, right? I was over in Israel and I met them in a coffee shop one day and I was telling them about Ecommerce and how it's working. It's amazing. 

And AJ is like, ‘What can we do? How can we work together?’ So I paid them to build this first version of Triple Whale. And they got started. In the meantime, AJ needed a job, essentially. What's this next thing he's going to do? So he started working for me, apprenticing. How do I run ads and teach him and train him? And we worked really well together. 

In 2019, he actually moved to Columbus with his family and we worked full-time on Madison Braids. It was he and I and our wives. We were running this brand together. 

And then COVID hits. And we hit a tear, right? Everyone did COVID 2020 when they shut everything down and CPMs were super cheap. Right. So we were able to scale Madison when that 12 year, that 12 month period of time. I think we scaled it to like $7 million. It was amazing. Out of our garage, essentially. 

And then fast forward a little bit. Triple Whale is on the side. They kind of built something, but we were focused on one thing at one time, which was Ecommerce. 

But then when COVID ended essentially and everything opened back up. Well, CPMs went through the roof. My AOV and Madison Braids were like 58 bucks. I couldn't support it anymore. It wasn't enough. So I kind of had to take a pause and re-engineer the business, maybe get some other product in. 

At that point I'm like, ‘AJ, why don't you just run with Triple Whale full force?’ I took a few months to re-figure Madison Braids. He finished the product and got our first beta users on it. And then people just essentially ripped it out of our hands and just wanted to use Triple Whale. 

Very quickly, we had about... We had hundreds of people using Triple Whale. Some of them were paying because it was just free. Just try it. And it very quickly just blasted off. I dropped everything with Madison Braids and jumped full-time into Triple Whale. 

And AJ, Ivan and I, we basically incorporated the company in June of 2021, I think. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. When was that big iOS and attribution hiccup?

Maxx Blank

Probably six months later. Yeah. And so all we had was like that summary page product that people I think love. And that was growing pretty wild. We had raised our first rounds, like four million bucks just off that with early adopters, some influencers. And then we raised a small seed round also from a very prestigious fund out of Israel. 

That was awesome. But that was before we had the Pixel. That thing was blasting off.

But then came iOS 14.5. We started expanding the team on the engineering side. First thing we did, grabbed some buddies to work for us, to run CS with us, like our friends. That's what you do when you first get started, right? 

And then we started building this pixel because of many reasons. Our clients were asking, ‘What are we going to do in iOS 14.5?’ ‘What are we going to do as a company? What are they going to do as customers?’ ‘We didn't really, we had a way to see your aggregate numbers, but we couldn't get you the granularity on the campaign level you needed to understand what's going on.’

That's when we started to say, ‘Okay, you know, if someone was going to disrupt us, they would build a solution to this.’ And then also if we wanted to really execute on the vision, which was to do more with data, more with AI, more with automation, we need reliable data from the ad platforms. What you're getting from them now is it's not going to be reliable. 

So we made the decision to like, to build a Pixel, to build basically our data resolution product, which is behind it, right? Pixel.

We actually pre-sold it. I remember we took a page out of the old Ecomm pre-sale book and we pre-sold it to the current customers and we did a launch on Twitter. That was a crazy time. It was like Rabba. The whole crew was assembled then. That was fun. That was the early days. 

We went from like 50k of MRR to like the month later, it was like 300 just by pre-selling that thing. Then we launched it. And then very soon after that, we were raised to Series A and then added more product, added more product. Series B. And now, we've got about 26,000 stores in this Triple Whale right now. And Shopify is behind us. 

Chase Clymer

It's wild. 

When did Shopify come into the picture? Obviously, they were the key partner for the product. 

Maxx Blank

Yeah. I think we did that in 2022. January time, possibly. Yeah. They've been awesome. They're awesome. 

Chase Clymer

I mean, we... I think it was 3 months after Shawn and I started the agency, we just ignored every other platform. We're like, there's just something special about Shopify and the partner ecosystem here. I know people's names. They're very nice to us. Everyone wants to help everyone. There's Rising Tides raising all ships around here. 

Maxx Blank

100%. 

Chase Clymer

This is a cool place. 

Maxx Blank

And that's how the company... And that's how they are inside. It's just... Not only is that what they've created with their partners, but the people inside the company are really awesome. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely.

I... First of all, the story is amazing. But let's now circle back. You guys have this amazing mature product. You're adding some new features and functionality to it. You mentioned earlier some stuff about what you're doing with premium and business insights. 

If you were talking to a customer right now who was thinking about it, what are some of the things that you'd want to point out? Like, ‘These are the cool things that our customers are using from our product?’

Maxx Blank

There's a lot of vectors, right? There is our new GPT product, essentially, which is called Moby, right? I'm sure a lot of people have seen it and it is, I'll say a word, but it's not going to do it justice until you actually play with it. You couldn’t just say it's ChatGPT with your data, but it is ChatGPT with your data. 

It really knows your business and it can serve insights. You can ask it questions. You can reason with it. You can brainstorm with it. You can create new copies for your ads with it. You can create metrics to measure things in your business. You can actually create templates.

You can create like BI visualizations, tables, graphs, charts with it, and then save it and send it out to your team to monetize and, or to operationalize. 

We were just jamming on ChatGPT before the call, right? 

Chase Clymer

Yeah, we were. 

Maxx Blank

You really can, I'm sure you're asking business questions all the time to ChatGPT about your business, right? And you have to feed it the context. It doesn't have all the context. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. I told you before this. I built my own GPT. I trained it on all the SOPs that we had at the business. And that took some time. 

Maxx Blank

This is amazing. So all the integrations that you connect to Triple Whale now go into Moby. It has access to all that data. And you can chat with it. You can ask it questions. You can create sequences of questions that lead to outcomes. 

You know when you have a canvas? Like paralysis. You don't know what to put on the canvas. There's just so much opportunity. So we run into that with Moby because it's like, ‘Yeah, you can do anything you want.’ Then it's like, ‘Well, what do I do with it?’ 

So we had to kind of create curated paths of getting value from it. So if you log into Moby right now, it's going to have your store’s data right behind it, obviously. it's going to say: the power of chat, GPT with your data. And then below it are trending questions that people are asking from across our community, like different cuts of data that you wouldn't think of even asking.

You can do a CTR analysis. You could do Google analytic type things inside of it because it just has everything. We've built the infrastructure so you could create visualizations that would replace GA4. We haven't been able to take the story out yet because there's so much that can happen. We're in the middle of writing this story and shaping those journeys. You could create CRO. You're talking about CRO a little bit ago with me.

We can create landing page analysis that can help with CRO type questions. You could ask it to forecast revenue because we've incorporated models from Facebook and Google on like MMM first of all. So you can do MMM type questions that people have. You could ask about revenue forecasting, inventory forecasting using validated models that Google and all the big tech players use and trust with ways to validate them as well as historical. 

And it's really a platform that can… It's like an infinite machine. So that's one thing. It takes time. You have to learn how to prompt it properly. There are still some rough edges, but they're getting better and better. And the more data we have, the better it gets too from your store. 

So that's one thing. And that is super exciting. 

People come to us today for attribution and BI. They don't necessarily come to us today to chat with their data. But once they taste it and they feel it, they understand it, they get leverage. Like ChatGPT and these things, they just give you leverage. This thing gives you a ton of leverage of accessing data and understanding your business. 

Another thing that we built this for, one of the questions that would always come to our success team is, ‘Well, I have all this data, but what do I do with it?’ It's like analysis paralysis. If you go to Triple Whale today, you've got a series of dashboards. You have to know what to do with them. We have tips and things to help you. People just learn it through.

They learn it through their experiences as being an ad buyer, right? But we did bring Moby inside the dashboard too, and you can just generate a conversation with it. It can talk to you. You can talk to it about the context of that dashboard right there. ‘What's performing well, what's not? What should I watch?’ 

‘If I look for X, Y, and Z in my ad performance, what should I look at right now? When you're in the ads manager, you're like, ‘I'm going to look back seven days. I'm going to look back five days, three days. I'm going to look at ROASs and CTRs’ and things like that. You can have it do that for you and serve those ads directly to you to look at and analyze. 

I think the next step with Moby, once we have all the data and the experience really tight, is can it do action stuff for you based on things you want it to do? 

I've always had a level of skepticism with AI. For 10, 12 years, you're hearing, ‘Oh, we've got AI in our product. There's always ad products out there too that have AI in the DTC world.

It wasn't until you saw ChatGPT that you were like, ‘Oh, wow.’ And then that sort of became real and you're like, whoa. So we went all in on that thing. Okay. So, you have to try it. You got to try it. I'm going to give you an account after this, Chase. You're going to try it. 

Chase Clymer

Oh, I love it. 

Maxx Blank

Okay.  

Then the next thing that we have, which is huge, is Sonar, which is enriching. It's taking the pixel data, which is enriched customer journey data that is time to where you're spending on ads. But now it's like, can we feed that back into the platforms and enrich data in platforms? 

So increasing the quality of audiences inside ad platforms, inside ESPs, like Klaviyo, right? So that you can specifically, like I say for Klaviyo, like we can enrich flow, flow audiences. So you can make sure you're hitting more people that are already on your lists. 

But due to whatever, maybe they logged in from another IP or they're using a different email, just with the same person, they've already opted in, you have the opportunity to send them a message. 

So there's a lot of providers out there and we have the best pixel and identity resolution product out there. So we built that. And now that for sure is like a no-brainer. You got to get it. You can make incremental new revenue on day one. 

And then there's just added business intelligence. We have a whole template library that you can flip on. You can go through it and add it to your plan and you can see it. And it's different cuts of data and it's community sourced.

And from our team, and now we're getting with influencers and people in the space that just look at data differently. How should a business look at these metrics? And so we have a template library. Think Notion but for DTC metrics. So that's huge. 

I know I'm missing something, but there's a lot. 

Chase Clymer

Oh, absolutely. And there's not enough time in the world, especially when we just want to... 

Maxx Blank

I talked a lot, man.

Chase Clymer

No, no. It's perfectly fine. And I know this episode, people are going to love it. And I'll have you back next year and we'll talk about some new cool things. 

But I will give you parting words. Is there anything I didn't ask you about or something that you want to make sure you mentioned before we go today? 

Maxx Blank

Just an overall trend that we're seeing, just to put it out there for the audience. Diversifying ad channels is a must. In order to do that, you really have to understand the small door hinges that move really big doors. And in order to do that, you need to have very clean, crispy data and know how to analyze it. 

And so that's what we built. And I just think that that's a message that's going to become more and more necessary to hear in the space that if we were all performance marketers before, we got to lean a little bit heavier into now data and data analysis. And with tools like Moby and GPT and things like that, it's gonna make it easier. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Max, thank you so much for coming on the show today. 

Maxx Blank

Thanks for having me. I'm glad we got to do it. We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us.

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. 

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