Chase Clymer
You can get in people's inboxes and arguably, they will read what you send sometimes. But what they're reading is 99% of it. It is the offer that you're putting in front of somebody. [This] is, I think, where almost... If people are screwing up, that's where they're screwing up.
Sean Wendt
You got to do better than just saying, “Here's a free trial.” That's too much commitment. You might be selling more against bandwidth than you are against budget. And so that's a lot of feedback that people learn.
Chase Clymer
Honest Ecommerce is a weekly podcast where we interview direct-to-consumer brand founders and leaders to find out what it takes to start, grow, and scale an online business today.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I'm welcoming to show a gentleman I've worked with for years and years now in the Shopify ecosystem. I'm excited to bring him on the show and talk about what he's been up to recently.
Sean Wint from DTCMVP. Sean, welcome to the show.
Sean Wendt
Thank you for having me. It's only when I get introduced that I realize how ridiculous of a name DTC MVP is and how many syllables it is.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, it's a bit of a mouthful. And it's also what I think about this podcast, too. Honest Ecommerce, the way it rolls together is everybody forgets about the E and they also confuse it with The Honest Company. And I'm sure you're familiar with them.
Sean Wendt
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair.
Chase Clymer
Alright. So before we talk about what you're up to now, I think it makes sense to talk a bit about your history in this ecosystem and what you had been doing. Because that just ties right into... You know what you're talking about.
Sean Wendt
Right. Yeah. I mean, definitely everything that I started building, I guess, with G2C MVP is certainly something that I feel like was born out of the need. But I started in Ecom at Postscript and I was the first employee at Postscript and that was back in 2019.
Chase Clymer
Is that when we first met in Denver at a meetup?
Sean Wendt
I think so.
Chase Clymer
Oh man, time flies.
Sean Wendt
Yeah. we're at this point that feels uh like OGs. I mean, they're still like, you know, recharging Bold Commerce and like Klaviyo and stuff like that. But we're definitely in like that next cohort.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. So you were the first hire at Postscript. What were you supposed to be doing? Starting at Postscript, we did not hire a huge team out of the beginning. So I would say Postscript felt like working at two different companies from a go-to-market strategy standpoint.
The first two years, I probably oversaw or helped hire maybe the first couple of people in a lot of the different client-facing departments. So BDRs, support, customer success managers, account executives, stuff like that. Right around when we raised the B, we hired a CMO, a VP of sales and a VP of CS within a 2-month period, like a 6-week period.
And then that's when I dropped into this more of a go-to-market strategy. I was doing the head of operations role. And we did a lot with Salesforce and getting territories and comp plans and analytics and stuff like that together. I ran training, stuff like that. But at Postscript in particular, that was a pretty different chapter of growing your SaaS in Ecommerce. Things were at peak frothy and everybody knew the Postscript name.
So we had a big team of BDRs sending emails, going to events. I feel like cold emails to an integral part of getting your name out there and getting meetings. Famously, attentive people are out there giving AirPods for demos and stuff like that. And all of that led to most folks' pipeline or how they were getting most of their pipeline.
From Postscript, I leave after four years and I wind up after a couple stops, I go to this company called Taito. We're doing reporting and analytics for brands. And now it's me and two BDRs and this is post-COVID. Cold email really didn't work very well for us at all. So cold email went from something that we had like a 20-person team sending emails.
Now there's AI involved and you're spending more time warming up your domains than you are sending thoughtful messages or anything like that. And so for us and our small team at Taito, we just wanted to get in front of brands. We had a really hard time just simply having conversations to find out if what we were building was interesting or novel. Or let alone have a proper sales conversation about it.
So that was the genesis of a lot of the D2C MVP stuff when we would talk to friendly brands and ask them. For years, we would send emails and we would have meetings and then that was a good way to get a foot in the door, [and] what changed. And I think the combination of putting junior salespeople on calls, doing 30 slides in 30 minutes.
We just got further and further away from senior conversations. If you're a VP of Ecom, and every time you get on the phone, it's not a VP on the other side. It's usually somebody like a lot more junior just trying to run through a script and sell you. So we had just gotten a lot of feedback that people would be down to explore new vendors and explore new stuff that's being built. But we had to go way more thoughtful with it.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And we're going to get into what you've been doing over there at D2C MVP. But I want to have you break down a few concepts for the audience. I would say, obviously, first and foremost, a lot of the audience is direct-to-consumer brands. So what we're talking about here, this go-to-market strategy for it.
Let's just call it a SaaS for lack of a better term, is a little over their head. What they're doing is Facebook ads and they're getting their product in front of customers. But the product for SaaS is the app. So when you mentioned BDR and these outreach strategies, I guess like 5 years ago, what was that 101 level like go-to-market strategy?
The number one thing you guys were trying and working at Postscript, you already mentioned it, but I want you to really call it out and then talk about how that isn't really, I guess, delivering these days.
Sean Wendt
Yeah, fair. No, a good call out for anyone that's working on the brand side, you're probably used to getting either a lot of emails from SaaS partners asking you to get on the phone and explore what they do. Or you're getting invited to events. And those events every year are getting more elaborate. Like now, Shop Talk is doing F1 racing sessions and helicopter trips to the Grand Canyon for lunch and stuff like that.
Every year, we've topped ourselves dating back to 2015 in terms of what the vendors are willing to do to get 20 minutes, 30 minutes with somebody on a Zoom call to explain what they do. In hopes that it can turn into a deeper conversation or a sale. And so to break down some of those terms, the concept of a business development representative or a sales development representative, these are common terms on the software side.
Sometimes on the agency side, for somebody who sits in a sales environment or sits at home. And they're usually sending a ton of emails, LinkedIn DMs. Different things to get somebody's attention and say, “I'd love to set up time with you and someone on my team.”
Early stage, you've got a lot of new up and coming apps or vendors. It's the founder sending those messages. But companies like Postscript and a lot of vendors get bigger. They're hiring dedicated people to send that, for lack of a better term, mass outreach, to try to get as many brands to get on the phone and explore what they do.
Chase Clymer
I guess [that’s] what I want to educate people on. Because these are things I've learned in the last 10 years of doing this too, is that the goal of SDR and BDR, however you want to phrase it. And they have all sorts of names all over the place. The ultimate goal is... There's two. One is just to get that initial, “Yes, I'm interested in something.”
But the end goal is getting them on the phone, getting the prospect that they're reaching out to on the phone with basically a more qualified salesperson. Or a more senior person on their team to talk about their product or service.
Sean Wendt
Yeah. And different people treat it differently. Sometimes they'll put that junior person on the first call to, “That or what we would say is qualified.” And those can be even less enjoyable conversations sometimes because it's like you reached out to me and you wanted to talk to me about what you're building.
And now I'm sitting here answering how big my business is or what my budget might be for something that I don't even really understand what the product is. But I feel like I'm all of sudden jumping through some hoops in order to earn a second call. Different vendors treat that differently. I think some are certainly better at it, hopefully.
Recognizing, “Wow, we have a CMO at XYZ Brand getting on the phone. Let's put our best foot forward.” But I do think early COVID, during what we would just call the frothiest time of selling SaaS, we developed a lot of bad habits for how we treat brands in those initial prospecting discovery conversations.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. And then the thing is that it's only gotten easier in the past 5 years to send a message on whatever platform you want. But just because you can doesn't mean you should. And that gets into my [next point]. The next thing I really wanted you to touch on here. And obviously, what is core to what DTC MVP does is you can get in people's inboxes.
And arguably, they will read what you send sometimes. But what they're reading is 99% of it. It is the offer that you're putting in front of somebody. [This] is, I think, where almost... If people are screwing up, that's where they're screwing up.
Sean Wendt
Yeah. I would agree because there's also a lot of conversation around personalizing emails. What we're going down this road is personalizing based on some college somebody went to. Or something you could look up online. But at the end of the day, what you're trying to talk to them about is not really relevant to their super busy life and their super busy calendar.
So what we found is that instead of asking people if they're interested in buying what you have, at the end of the day, you're better off asking simply for feedback. And because post-COVID, we've got a lot more people working remotely. We've got a lot more people doing fractional work or consulting work or things on the side. Nobody really wants either another pair of AirPods or tickets to like another concert or box seats somewhere.
There are a lot of things that have led to this moment of we ought to treat this a little bit more like consulting on the first call. Let's just find out if you can give me feedback on what I'm building. That's what founders do anyway, when they're first usually launching a product. They have a vision. They have some sort of a hack that they think they're going to build their product around.
And so to reach out to brands with more of a, “Why don't I show you what I'm doing? I will pay you for your time.” Things like MentorPass and Intro.co, [and] appstoreresearch.com. There are websites that have come before D2C MVP that would make it more of a consulting conversation at the beginning. And then it's only from there that you can find out if there's any kind of a match.
And it's a little bit more brand-driven at that point to say, “Okay, cool, this is actually a fit and let's keep talking,” or “No, this isn't a fit and here's why.” And that's a really important data point for anybody building.
Chase Clymer
Hey everybody, just a quick reminder. Please like this video and subscribe if you haven't. We're releasing interviews like this every week. So don't miss out. Now back to the interview.
And I think we maybe danced around it. So what is the service offering that D2C MVP is offering? Who is your customer? And then what is the service that you're providing that customer?
Sean Wendt
For sure. So at the end of the day, it's a marketplace, I suppose, that sits in front of both folks on the brand side. These are the people that we want to come to an event or to download our ebook or to respond to a cold email to ultimately explore what we're building on the software side. And then the clients are also just folks that are on the software side that want to meet more brands.
They want to either get a foot in the door. They want to get that feedback or they want to find customers through a channel this way. But they'll do it the more thoughtful way versus the spammy, cold email way. So everything that we do is about vetting partners that we think the brands would be interested in.
And then talking with the partners about what angle we're going to take? What is the feedback that we're getting? What are we doing that's different from the other vendors out there? And then we go to the brands and we source these meetings. And we say, “Hey, I have a client that's willing to pay you for your feedback. And If this sounds interesting to you, here's the details and you can click the link and book time with them.”
And so for a lot of these companies that would otherwise be out there warming up domains and doing the whole cold email game, this is a way for them to have a high velocity or high volume of meetings with eight, nine-figure brands. Get to that answer much quicker. Start a dialogue on, is this a fit? Why isn't it a fit? What could we do for it to be a fit?
Anything that would just result in that at-bat. And then on the brand side, we just get a ton of feedback that, “Great, I'm never going to respond to a cold email ever again,” because you're going to bring these opportunities to me. You've already done the work of making sure that they're legit. I'm getting compensated for my time the same way as I would on MentorPass or any other kind of consulting call.
So we've certainly tailored it to be as easy and safe and smooth as possible for the brands.
Chase Clymer
Is there any insight or stuff that a tech partner has learned from these calls that comes to mind?
Sean Wendt
Yeah. I think there's stuff on both ends of the call that you could say or both ends of the process. On one hand, we've had a lot of partners tell us, “Man, you've gotten us meetings with somebody who I can see in my CRM. I’ve cold emailed them 50 times over the last 6 to 12 months.”
So on one hand, just the insight of this feedback approach is such a better way to start a conversation in a relationship than it is to be sending mass emails that are never getting responded to. I think that there's a lot of learning in terms of how you show up in the market. A market that we all know is actually pretty small in terms of how many great brands there are that apps want to partner with.
And then more specifically on the feedback side, I think that we learn a lot about the sales process and a lot more about [if] it might not be that you're learning these giant eureka light bulb moments when you're talking about just the product. You know your product is good. That's why you built it. That's why you have happy customers. But people do learn on a pretty regular basis [on] how brands make decisions about vetting new tools.
What it takes to bring a new tool into the team to even evaluate it. How many different times a year is this brand in particular looking at their vendors and their contracts and consolidating or adding something new? What do they think about ROI? How does their finance team think about trying something new?
I think that there's actually a lot of steps that we skip on the vendor side just thinking that we built a cool new app or software or whatever. But what you learn on these calls is how to become a part of brand new businesses. How to be a new part of their stack. You know what I mean? From a business process standpoint.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, this is getting a little bit more high-level consulting. But I think there is a little bit of the founders' ignorance. A lot of people build a product they think people want without actually making sure people want it. And this type of feedback loop… We'll make sure you're on the right track. Or give you some direct feedback that shows you might be going down the wrong path. With either the entire product or a feature of the product that you're working with.
Sean Wendt
Yeah. Or you might just learn that the way that you're going about it.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Sean Wendt
Because outside of my program, you're doing the dinners and you're doing the E-books and you're posting into the void on LinkedIn and the rest of it. You get quite a lot of feedback that maybe you're making this thing too hard to sign up for. You find out after doing 20 calls, 30 calls, simply saying, “Our stuff works and we have a free trial,” isn't quite enough to actually make somebody download a thing.
You're talking only to busy people that have a full plate. And you got to do better than just saying, “Here's a free trial.” That's too much commitment, you might be selling more against bandwidth than you are against budget. And so that's a lot of feedback that people learn.
And another like pretty common one is a lot of times founders are doing the hosting of these calls. And it's like a bummer, but it's very eye opening. When we've even had brands say like, “Wow, when I met the founder of that company, that was a fantastic call.” Like I really see, you know, his or her vision kind of thing.
We've heard multiple times like 6 months ago, I talked to someone in this other role on their team, did not come away with nearly that same experience. Because you realize how much more insight and consulting strategy comes from the founder level of these companies. And when you're putting maybe more junior salespeople on the call, it's not your best foot in the door.
And that reflects in the results of these feedback calls too. So people just learn more about how to start these conversations.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And again, just getting that direct feedback from your ideal customer. And one other thing that I know. And this may be more developer-minded founders, is [that] they are super into the tech and the features of their products. When brands are, will this solve my problem? They're outcome-oriented and that's what they care about.
So I know that you and I have talked about this where folks learn that they're talking about things that don't matter to their customer. And their customer will tell them what actually matters. It's like if you talk about this, or this thing is like the selling point of the product, you'll get more sales.
Sean Wendt
Totally. I feel like I could do a whole TED Talk on what performs well when somebody's like a complete stranger and you're trying to get your point across on what you've built. You want to go into show and tell mode. And it can be very tempting, especially when you've paid for somebody's time to do that 30 slides in 30 minutes.
Like, “Maybe if I just say the right thing, 11 minutes into the call, their ears will perk up and they'll get excited about what I'm building.” But ultimately, what works really well is finding the stuff that they're already working on. When I was selling Taito, for example, if I asked 10 brands, how many were interested in better reporting and analytics. It'd be like 1 out of 10.
For the most part, nobody ever felt like they were in-market or what I was selling was more of a nice-to-have. But if I asked the same 10 brands, “How many of you are tasked with in 2026 to increase retention or you want to get better at segmentation?” You find these things that are already probably the projects people are talking about internally anyway.
Whether it's you or some other app, they've got other ways of going about the same thing. The stuff that works really well in feedback calls is trying to get to the bottom of what folks are already spending all their bandwidth caring about.
And then you have to find a way to pretty much say, “There are lots of ways to reduce CAC, to increase conversion rate,” to do these different things that are universal OKRs for a lot of brands internally.How is what you built the cheaper, faster, better way to do these things? And how are they going to make it easy for them to test it or try it?
Chase Clymer
I hope that a conversation like this is educational for our listeners because I know there are more than just brand owners out there. I know there are a lot of people working these SaaSes and stuff like that. So if I'm listening to this and I'm working at a startup. What makes it a good idea for us to reach out to DTC MVP? Or what would actually maybe is not a good fit? Maybe are we too small? What are some of those indicators of fit?
Sean Wendt
Yeah. There's probably a couple of spectrums that you would see like, where do we fall on this for it to be a fit or not. At the end of the day I think, anybody that's playing the cold email game and or they're spending a lot of money traveling to events, Shoptalk, for example, does hosted meetings.
I just came back from ETAL last month. They will also do hosted meetings. I'm really just doing that over Zoom at the end of the day. So there are things that you can look at, “If we're doing this, is this also a good way to meet new brands?” But then you should just ask yourself, “What would make that, even those other avenues, a good channel for us?”
Because if you're brand new and you're still just working with a few design partners and you have no idea if what you're building is ready for prime time. It’s not like gas on the fire mode, then you probably don't want to kick off what is more thorough. I'm doing 10s of meetings a month. And that would be a pretty expensive way to just validate if it's even a good idea or not.
Usually, folks that I'm working with are somewhere in that sweet spot. Maybe they've got 10 to 20 team members. Maybe they're a bit bigger. But at the end of the day, they're looking for new ways to meet brands that don't involve spamming the cold email button and things like that. But at the end of the day, I'm not really working with Klaviyo or Yotpo, for example.
The brands aren't like, “Oh, yeah, Klaviyo wants to get feedback.” We're just naming bigger companies that probably don't need to use feedback as a way to open the door. Most of my clients are probably in that sweet spot of having customers, but you're not working with thousands of brands, most likely.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. You're not going into a series yet of fundraising, it would be a guess.
Sean Wendt
Right. Yeah. I would say a lot of partners maybe have done seed or A kind of fundraising. But they're still in gas on the fire mode. They’re coming out with new products all the time. They're very much in the, want to meet as many people as we can and find out the edge cases and who this works for and who it doesn't.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Unlike the flip side of it though, I think there are maybe more of these folks. I'm director of Ecommerce at a successful company. Ecommerce manager. Heck, I'm a CMO. I'd like money. I'd consult on these calls. I'd talk to these brands. Do I also reach out to you?
Sean Wendt
Yeah. Ultimately, like sean@dtcmvp.com is the email that catches applications or just sort of reach outs from both sides. A lot of times everything is going to be match based. So when somebody reaches out, we might ask a couple of questions. We want to find out, A, is there anything that's actually of interest to you so that we can do a better job matching with somebody?
But B, what is the profile of your role, the types of functions you oversee? The types of projects that you're typically going to have the most to weigh in on. Especially because something like Ecommerce, for example, is just, it can be a pretty catch-all term and mean different things at different brands.
So anyway, once we figure out what types of vendors you're a good fit to meet and either give feedback to or network with. That's when we try to get into a rhythm where we'll send you an email that kind of lets you know who you've matched with. And you can take the next step from there.
But as you can imagine, because everybody's busy, it's all extremely flexible. And sort of meant to be working around people's calendars because if this was born out of cold email not working very well anymore, we just know that we had to make it super duper flexible.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Now, Sean, is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience today?
Sean Wendt
No. The only thing that I didn't comment as much on is probably the folks that I do see maybe not perform as well with these sorts of channels. Because I'm not the only one doing the types of things that I'm doing. I think that at the end of the day, the feedback approach works really well. If you genuinely have a new thing, like a very novel approach to something.
You want to get feedback on why that might be different than something that people have worked with in the past. But at the same time, if your only goal is to get somebody to rip and replace a huge piece of software in their business, then usually a feedback approach is not going to be the most conducive way to getting very far with somebody.
Because a feedback call can be really good for explaining why your thing is ROI positive. Why your app is really easy to test. Why it's a new approach to doing something they haven't done before. When you start getting into some of the other vendor categories, I think about ERPs, for example. I think about things where if your value prop is that you're just easier than that suite.
There's nothing wrong with that. It's probably true. But in the span of a 20-minute call, it can be difficult to get over that hump. Unless you just have the right mentality going in that I'm simply planting seeds and these are not easy conversations to have and finding people with the right timing.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Now, one more time. What is the website? And what is the email to get ahold of you?
Sean Wendt
For sure. The website is d2cmvp.com. So full circle back to the beginning of the call, I was very excited to get the .com. But it is simply d2cmvp.com. Sean, so my first name at d2cmvp.com is the best way to reach out. I'm also super active on LinkedIn. So I feel like any DMs are hitting me up there. I'm around.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Sean, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today and sharing all that amazing information.
Sean Wendt
Definitely. Great to chat.
