“We will DISRUPT email marketing”

Jared Ward: 0:01

All right guys, welcome to this episode of Ops Unfiltered. Today we have a guest just down the street in Provo, Utah.

Brice Douglas: 0:12

That's right.

Jared Ward: 0:13

Brice Douglas from Zaymo.

Brice Douglas: 0:15

Great to see you, Jared.

Jared Ward: 0:16

Yeah, it's good to see you. We've interacted with each other quite a bit actually. First off, tell us a little about you. Are you a BYU dropout like?

Brice Douglas: 0:24

me, I am. Yeah, we have that in common. Kind of the story of Zaymo is we was three hackers at BYU. We met at a hackathon building some random stuff. We ended up winning. It was a trip to Italy over the summer that we won.

Jared Ward: 0:38

Oh wow.

Brice Douglas: 0:39

And through that process became really good friends and found a couple of problems we thought would be good at solving, which led us to Zaymo.

Jared Ward: 0:46

Okay, so three people you and who are the other two co-founders.

Brice Douglas: 0:49

So we have Santi and Danny are my two co-founders and they are both technical, great crack engineers and I'm just kind of the guy who talks. I don't know how useful I am.

Jared Ward: 1:01

Are you technical at all?

Brice Douglas: 1:02

No, I mean I can have a conversation, but I'm mostly sales and ops and stuff like that.

Jared Ward: 1:07

Okay, cool. Well, you're the co-founder who's going to have to be doing everything else. The onboarding the sales, the finance stuff.

Brice Douglas: 1:15

Exactly.

Jared Ward: 1:16

Are you involved with fundraising at all?

Brice Douglas: 1:17

Yes, so we closed a little under $2 million in the last year in kind of a seed round through Y Combinator and others.

Jared Ward: 1:24

My first question. Actually, I'm really curious about this. For those of the people who are watching that don't know what Y Combinator is, it's like statistically harder to get into Y Combinator than it is to like Harvard.

Brice Douglas: 1:35

What do they say?

Jared Ward: 1:36

What is Y Combinator and why did they choose you? Do you think?

Brice Douglas: 1:41

I mean, it's a venture firm. They have a slightly different model. They were kind of the first to go about and do the incubator model. So if you think some of their early founders was like Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, some of those that kind of took off, Coinbase and even here in Utah I know Weave and Podium both came out of Y Combinator as well.

Jared Ward: 1:58

Ah, I didn't know that.

Brice Douglas: 2:00

So they take you pre-product. They kind of bet more on people than ideas, is their thesis, and because Paul Graham and some of these other amazing partners they've taken on feel like they know a lot about startups, they kind of guide you through the first step, give you some cash and send you on your merry way.

Jared Ward: 2:17

So what is the biggest assumption that you had challenged while going through YY Combinator? In other words, you thought startups or your role was supposed to be this way, but it's like, oh wow, I was way off.

Brice Douglas: 2:29

The big takeaway was this is not like something you do for a couple of years and like sell it off and you kind of just did your thing. It was this kind of long term mindset of this probably won't do anything for the first year or two or three and as long as you stay at it. I think I kind of got the confidence to where, if you're smart enough, you have a little bit of capital just to keep you going for a few years with a small team, you'll probably find, like your, your way to the product market fit.

Jared Ward: 2:56

I couldn't agree more. I feel like that was. That was something that I learned as well, and I've I've watched so many companies get founded and then the founders just fizzle out after a couple of years, and it's always because they think like, yeah, I want to be, I want to be a billionaire in the next, the next three years or five, even five years. It's like dude, this is something me and my co-founder, Brendon, always say is like we're in this for the next minimum 10 years. It's I don't know where the fuck that mindset came from, but, um, yeah, that's. That's something that I I had to get out of myself too. Like we're not going to exit this thing in three years. This is like 10 years minimum. Well, that's cool. What is what has changed in some of your decision making by now thinking like with a 10 year time horizon instead of like two or three.

Brice Douglas: 3:44

I mean this might be counterintuitive, but part of it's just like being okay with the short-term mistakes. I think when you're in there, I'm less worried about immediate outcomes and more about are we solving this like long-term, deep problem, and I just have the whatever you call it like faith or expectation that if you're doing that one thing, that is the main important thing. The rest kind of falls into place, okay, okay, well, you brought up the magical word the problem.

Jared Ward: 4:06

So, Brice, what is the problem that you're solving right?

Brice Douglas: 4:10

now it's really interesting. Most people don't see it as a problem, but email marketing is a way to almost treat like a notification, like you send someone an announcement and what we do is we kind of change the email. The way it works, instead of being a notification is now a landing page where you can complete xyz action without leaving.

Jared Ward: 4:32

Email marketing is sort of antiquated. It's just these static emails with images, not super interactable. So front like this, my understanding like let me know if I'm I'm correct you have like Shopify, WooCommerce, big like all of these front end purchasing softwares essentially, or point points of sale, and they've created these amazing interactive purchasing experiences. But email, and especially email marketing, has stayed sort of just like it's just like this page that you scroll through. So Zaymo essentially gives you the same experience as like a Shopify, almost.

Brice Douglas: 5:06

Right, and so what we do is we build little widgets or modules that connect to everything in your software. So if you have like a reviews app or a subscription app or a forms app. We built an email front end for that so that your customers can then interact with that app in the email without leaving, and then we kind of send all those responses back to your app you're super powering your emails.

Jared Ward: 5:27

You're making them like an actual, like revenue generating machine. I mean emails. Email marketing already is a revenue generating machine, but this like really puts it on par with like a Shopify or your subscription app, or I mean I would argue a little bit with that email is a revenue generating.

Brice Douglas: 5:42

I think Klaviyo is really good at claiming a five-day attribution window to any email that was sent or or even opened by a bot and so it gets these big numbers. But really, like anyone you talk to is like I know we're just kind of driving awareness or bringing people to the page and then they might convert at some point of that, like there's a lot of this halo effect of capturing but with us.

Brice Douglas: 6:02

I mean, if you click buy now in the email and it purchases it. That is now like an actual conversion instead of awareness.

Jared Ward: 6:08

Yeah, so it takes emails now in in an e-commerce companies, like their marketing landscape. It's just a, it's an awareness or it's just another touch point.

Brice Douglas: 6:20

Zaymo makes it an actual purchasing experience right, and then you can plug in purchasing experience for X.

Jared Ward: 6:26

As a former brand founder and somebody who did email marketing, I don't understand why somebody wouldn't use Zaymo. I really mean that. Is it crazy expensive?

Brice Douglas: 6:38

No, we're actually probably too affordable right now.

Jared Ward: 6:42

So it's the perfect time to get on right now.

Brice Douglas: 6:44

If you get on the train right now You'll get locked into some good pricing.

Jared Ward: 6:46

Okay.

Brice Douglas: 6:47

There isn't much of a reason not to. I mean, our conversion rate on demo calls, transparently, is like really high. I'd say maybe two months or three months ago that wasn't the case.

Jared Ward: 6:55

We were still figuring out the software, okay.

Brice Douglas: 6:57

It's a really hard technical problem to crack. We've we've come over that hump and now you'll see us putting a lot of hiring ads or pushing more marketing to go tell people about this in an evangelicalistic way. That's cool.

Jared Ward: 7:11

So what impact do you make with brands? Can you quantify it?

Brice Douglas: 7:16

Yeah, the easiest to attribute is those transactions. So, if you think about it, this doesn't work with everybody, but if you have a credit card on file which if you're on Shopify, it probably means you're a subscription company If you have a credit card on file for those people, you can now one-click upsell them and add something to their upcoming order, or you can make a change there and because it's being done in one-click within our ecosystem we can track that perfectly and you just have a really clear ROI number there, number there from that wait so a one-click upsell process.

Jared Ward: 7:45

It's just charging their card on file.

Brice Douglas: 7:46

I mean, that seems like almost like a legal, not illegal, like so this is too good to be true for a brand like it's something you can already do, like recharge, quick links, and they've tried to make it okay like some people have gotten rid of like passwordless logins to your portal. They'll have like a link that takes you to another landing page and then that landing page you choose your order and then you confirm. So that's already there. Really, what we're doing is just a UX change where, instead of adding all this friction, these steps, how about you just do it right there, and it is almost too easy. So we do have, you know, an undo button for most of those.

Jared Ward: 8:28

But that first click, you know, know it puts you on like a two minute window before it actually sends anything. But they're like it's going through. I mean that literally sounds like a dream for a brand like you're. All you care about is the conversion rates and your upsell rates and like, and also it's so hard to attribute things like it is.

Brice Douglas: 8:37

That's that's the worst. Of email marketing, too, is attribution is is the worst oh, that's incredible.

Jared Ward: 8:42

So, um, why are you passionate about solving this?

Brice Douglas: 8:46

problem. So I mean to be honest, just first of all, I love building software. I mean that's it's just really fun to make something that actually makes a difference, which I think led into we had an 18 month process where we, or maybe about a year where we actually just did consulting before we wrote any software.

Jared Ward: 9:02

Oh, no way.

Brice Douglas: 9:03

So we started this company in Augustust of 2022 and it wasn't until this February that we actually launched our app. So everything between that was talking to brands trying out different solutions as a one-off, like we would go and say, hey, what template do you have that means the most to you? Can we just go rewrite it for you? And then we would see the results, and the first, like 30, did not work the way we thought they would, and eventually we we got to the place where, okay, maybe abandoned carts aren't actually that sexy when you do stuff back up a little bit.

Jared Ward: 9:32

So explain what. What do you mean? The first 30 didn't work out how you thought they would. What were you doing and how was it supposed to work out?

Brice Douglas: 9:39

yeah. So if you look at your Klaviyo setup, where are you making the most like repeatable revenue, at least from latest standpoint? Probably like your abandoned cart flow. It's probably making 10 of your total revenue, if you look at the way Klaviyo attributes. And so we thought, hey, if we go there and we make it interactive, then we can increase that percentage of sales you know, pretty straightforward thesis.

Brice Douglas: 10:01

We tried that probably 20 brands before we gave up and it was you know, adding can we add an image carousel and can you change the variant in the email, before we then go like click through to the final transaction page and at the end of the day it did like jack squat, it was nothing. So it was like testing out these different theses and hoping they would work with. You know, it kind of made a lot of sense but in the end, looking at the data and deciding, you know what that's actually not useful for these brands. We have to cut that and find what actually does work?

Jared Ward: 10:28

How did you find out what actually did work, what specifically did?

Brice Douglas: 10:32

Yeah, we kept going that same way. Now, instead of spending you know we messed up we did 10 months on like one solution until we were 100% sure it didn't work. We were a little bit more like okay, let's go try this a couple of times this, this and this and so you'd see us collect reviews in the email, send it back to Yotpo, collect form responses in the email, do the subscription, one-click purchasing and those. We did just A-B test with every brand.

Jared Ward: 10:53

What are the results?

Brice Douglas: 10:53

Let's see, like, honestly, what's the truth here? And as we got more and more closer to the truth, it was okay, you're making a 20% lift, oh, but in reviews you can make a 40% lift In upsells. We can actually get you 90% more upsells than your current. And after getting some case studies and some happy customers and really being really skeptical ourselves of every result we saw, I think that helped us get to something that was more honest and real.

Jared Ward: 11:20

Oh that's really cool. So the building out Zaymo, the building out of Zaymo, was very much a data-driven decision very iterative and very data-driven and you know a lot of learning across the way.

Brice Douglas: 11:31

We were three dropouts from college. You know if someone could have probably pulled this off a little quicker at the beginning, but now we're the world experts in email marketing and there's not really any competition. Oh, that's amazing.

Jared Ward: 11:43

Yeah, oh, that's such a cool story. What did your family think of you dropping out of college? What did you sacrifice to do Zaymo?

Brice Douglas: 11:50

Yeah, I mean you should talk to some of my other co-founders. As a quick aside, like my, Santiago, he's from Argentina. He was on a student visa. On a student visa, you can't have work outside of school and it's kind of scary to give up, like kind of push the limits of this. Can you drop out and like lose?

Jared Ward: 12:07

your visa status and all this stuff.

Brice Douglas: 12:08

So for him it was a really big deal and he we ended up in the last like month or two we got him an O-1 visa which is like an extraordinary entrepreneur visa, and so that's fixed. And I don't think he told his parents he dropped out until like a year after he actually did, wow, like he even told them Y Combinator was just like a school trip, but, but for me, Y Combinator was just like a school trip, but but for me, um, the process was, you know, we built this while we were in school. We got to the summer in between, like my before my senior year, and I said, if we can raise a pre-seed round, that kind of de-risks, everything for me yeah um, and so we went out at raised some money. You know, we didn't. What year was this again?

Jared Ward: 12:45

this was last summer oh, wow, so freaking recent. Yeah, like this was actually after the circus, like after the valuations had gone way down, right, so why? Why do you think you guys were successful fundraising? It's it like, speaking as somebody who's fundraised at these different stages, like, yeah, it's, it's harder to fundraise right now. You have to have some real results.

Brice Douglas: 13:05

So well, yeah, and if you're 23 and don't have much behind you, it's harder to fundraise right now. You have to have some real results. Well, yeah, and if you're 23 and don't have much behind you, it's pretty tough. We had some really good early angel investors that believed in us and I think once you get the first couple of checks at Domino's now, it was like a four or five six-month process and then we raised like 700K as our pre-seed and then we went to Y Combinator.

Brice Douglas: 13:25

And one of the benefits of Y Combinator is you have this branding thing where you get really easy access to capital yeah, now that doesn't build your business for you, but at least de-risk your your seed round. You can probably raise a seed round yeah, no 100%.

Jared Ward: 13:37

What did your parents think of you dropping out?

Brice Douglas: 13:40

they were very.

Jared Ward: 13:40

I think you're young enough for me to ask that like, yeah, yeah they were very supportive.

Brice Douglas: 13:45

I think I learned a lot, especially from my dad recently got an MBA because he wanted to kind of explore some other stuff and get more access, and so seeing me go through this process was kind of fun, I think, for my parents, and at the same time it's pretty logical. I mean this isn't the reason I'm doing this, but if you drop out and raise a seed round and get X amount of revenue, I mean your resume looks a little better than how I graduated from the Marriott School of Business, so the downside is actually not that high Like I don't think I gave up that much, to be honest.

Jared Ward: 14:18

Interesting. No, I like that. If there was a case study that you could plaster as plaster on your website or like that, you could say in this podcast what, what customer have you had the biggest impact on?

Brice Douglas: 14:30

so unfortunately, some of the best ones we like can't talk about them too much but, um, I think we'll change that a little bit. I'll talk about two. One is a brand called naked nutrition and I'll use them as kind of if you're supplements or nutrition brands like we can make a very big difference. So we take them and the first thing they do is add cross cells to it and we double the amount of cross cells they have you know.

Jared Ward: 14:54

So what's a cross cell? For those people who don't understand.

Brice Douglas: 14:57

So if you have a subscription, one item it's just adding something else, a different, different item. So if you're a supplement brand, if someone's bought your protein powder, it's very likely there's a good chance they'll try your creatine or something like that.

Brice Douglas: 15:10

So for this kind of brand, we can go and say, hey, you're like a great customer, we'll give you 15 off to try our creatine. By the way, it's only one click, it's right in your email inbox on your phone. It's like a really easy decision to make and it comes in your next box what categories or industries.

Jared Ward: 15:25

So software, we call it ICP. What is your ICP? Where you're? Oh my God, if you're a supplement brand that does subscriptions, that does this revenue, we guaranteed we can help you. What is that?

Brice Douglas: 15:37

I think you just said it, oh really. Okay, Supplementary brand subscriptions. I guarantee you will probably at least 50% increase your cross-sells and we have more features there. That was like number one your cross-sells and we have more features there.

Jared Ward: 15:49

That was like number one you can upsell someone to a bundle in one click from one item. Have you guys stopped to mountain ops? No, oh, we should introduce you, we should have a chat I seriously, like I'll intro you to. I like I said, Zaymo sounds like such a no-brainer. You guys are early on, but you're you're past that. I mean you're still iterating tech, but like it works yeah, we passed the thegy.

Jared Ward: 16:06

Thank you so much for trying it's still relatively cheap, though, relative to the value that it'll bring. So, oh my God, anybody who can get in early, get in early. So what are you looking forward to most? What's the end goal for you and your co-founders? What do you want to do?

Brice Douglas: 16:24

Wow, there's so many ways to take this. I mean, this just gets more nerdy and email marketing side. But I think there's just a huge horizontal play here where we we just make it so accessible for the average marketer to to have high converting content. If you look at our beginning stage, it was my co-founder. Santiago was a product manager at touringcom, which is a B2B software company, not e-commerce, and he right when this framework for Gmail came out to allow interactive emails, he was one of the first people at that company to ever try it in the world and they 3X'd their forum response rate, which is like nice. It was very valuable. It's forums which for most people like I'm not going to drop that much money on the forum response rate.

Brice Douglas: 17:03

But for that company it's sending 3 million of these a month. It was worth them paying six engineers to build this out in-house. So Santi was a product manager managing that product. It worked. He came out of this and said, wow, they spent a lot of money, it was valuable. No one else has access to this. Let's go open it up and make it no code for everybody.

Jared Ward: 17:25

Oh, I 100% agree. Even in Luminous something that we're really passionate about we embed content into. So we've been so curious about how embedding content into the sales process will actually increase our conversion rates. Obviously, it's totally different. We're selling an ERP, so it's like multi-touch. You can't really do much. So, instead of even having just like a super bland sales deck that everybody just sends out, like, we've been really curious about like what is, what is the content that somebody watches that actually makes them convert?

Brice Douglas: 17:56

Interesting.

Jared Ward: 17:56

Even on the B2B side. I totally agree with you. There's so many different parts of a buying process that can be disrupted, and email seems to be like that's yeah, you guys are going to blow up in the next five years Almost guaranteed, unless somebody gets ahead of you guys somehow they won't. Actually, that's a great question. How do you think about that? I think a great comparison. They're not that comparative of a product, but I do see it as maybe something similar If you think about route like order protection, where you get the castle and you have to build the moat around it. Oh my God, I mean shipping insurance providers. There's a new one every week.

Brice Douglas: 18:41

Obviously, this is much more technically. You're adding a snippet into the front end of your store.

Jared Ward: 18:45

Yeah, yeah. So how do you see?

Brice Douglas: 18:47

that? How do you view that into the front end of your store? Yeah, yeah, so like, how do you, how do you see that? How do you do that so luckily, one of the reasons it took us 18 months to get anything in value out the door is this is a very technical problem that not even klaviyo wants to touch um.

Brice Douglas: 18:58

So, if you think about it, there are between three and like seven different emails um inbox providers that you have. So I like use gmail on my phone. My my wife uses Apple Mail, my grandparents use Hotmail, you know. And then there's all these other small ones that pop up.

Jared Ward: 19:12

Well, then also the subscription apps and the reviews and like yeah.

Brice Douglas: 19:16

Yeah, so those are important integrations. But on the email inbox side, the tough part is they all treat email code differently, and so if you're an email marketer, what you do is you design for the lowest common denominator, which is Outlook, and it means you can use text and images. Now, if you dig deep into it, gmail has some framework. Let's go a little further. Apple Mail has some framework.

Brice Douglas: 19:36

These others kind of have something like that, and so all we did is just take these, we push the bounds of what people thought was possible, and then we bring these different frameworks into one single drag and drop piece and we bake the four different emails into the single template for you. So it's actually a very complex problem where even our head-to-head competitors like I'll even tell you who they are, there's kind of small but spell bound is one who tries to do the same thing. You just can't send your interactive emails to apple mail, which is where 55 of emails are opened. Um, so we're the only ones in the world that can pull it off, because it's just so technical and difficult to do.

Jared Ward: 20:12

What I would say is, I think, what you could learn from Route if I please interject with my opinion, where I think Route went wrong was they stopped making the merchant the hero. They started doing big parties and they wanted to be the cool brand. At the end of the day, they were just a plug-in for a cart. They caught lightning in a bottle. But I feel like, as long as you, as long as your brand is making the merchant the hero and you stay curious about that, oh you guys, won't you go, you won't lose I like that when I think back to my pre-seed way back a year, year, two years ago.

Jared Ward: 20:46

No, but seriously actually, when I think back to like our pre-seed way back a year, year or two years ago no, but seriously actually, when I think back to like our pre-seed days, like the early, early days of Luminous man, there were some crazy times, like the shit that I had to do to keep customers happy. What about you guys? Is there any memory that pops up that's like yeah, we did this. Like I don't know, you pulled a 48 hour shift or something.

Brice Douglas: 21:08

Absolutely yeah. I'd say early on, when we were in that testing phase, we would get a deck and make a Figma mock-up and say we do this, can we have it for you this week? And we weren't even sure if it would work. As soon as we got a yes, you know, it was like, okay, here's a design, we're coding this. There's a million problems, we, we'll get it live. You know, ship it. I mean, it might not have worked as soon as it was live, but by the time it, you know, got to the hundredth customer that, like the hundredth person to send it out, it was working. We still like to sell first and then design and then build. Although I think we're a lot, I think we're a lot more transparent about it now we're like, hey, this is something.

Jared Ward: 21:40

This is something that's not built yet, but would you like to?

Brice Douglas: 21:42

just to build it for you, oh god whereas I think early on it was very much. Oh, we do this all the time.

Jared Ward: 21:47

Yeah, that's so similar to Loomis. We're the exact same. I think we're far enough along where we can't really do that anymore. But man, there's like a bone in entrepreneurs that allow us to do something like that. There's so many people they won't commit to anything. It's bold.

Brice Douglas: 22:06

There's a line. I mean you don't want to be dishonest, but you want to say like hey, I really believe we can do this for you. Let's pull it off. Yeah, exactly.

Jared Ward: 22:12

What about your best memory starting Xamo? Anything stick out to you Like when your seat round, when your pre-seat seat round's closed.

Brice Douglas: 22:25

I think it's with my co-found that. So we started this as kind of a side project while in school and it was a slow and sure process. But you know, like there's a point where one of us decided, hey, I think we can actually pull this off and maybe we should drop out and very heated, tough conversations at that point. But you know, I don't know if there's a single point in time, but that process of becoming unified into we want to do this was very special and we kind of have a bond from that for sure.

Jared Ward: 22:48

That's awesome. I always go to Y Combinator content when it comes to how we handle team and culture and co-founder relations. It's difficult to have co-founders it totally is but it's also amazing. I've had co-founders that didn't end up working out Some amicable, some not very amicable. What do you guys do to keep your relationship strong?

Brice Douglas: 23:07

Great question. I mean, there's so much we could do more, I'm sure, but we at least knowing that we were friends first is very helpful. So we didn't go all in on this until, like I said, we were like spent a summer in Italy together. All of us were roommates at some point in college, so we kind of knew what we was tough about each other, what was good, and so going in with that thought was very helpful, was tough about each other but was good, and so going in with that thought was very helpful. But today we do things just like making sure we check in. We have daily check-ins that are longer than probably most, where we just one talk about what we're doing that day, but two like what are the blockers? Is there any frustration going on? I think getting to those early and often is just good for any communication, whether it be a marriage or a co-founder relationship or friend.

Jared Ward: 23:49

Yeah that's awesome. Honestly, I wish I had followed Y Combinator before I started. I didn't get really curious about the interpersonal dynamics between co-founders and learning from Y Combinator and all the data that they have until probably I was like three years in to the company and like that. That's honestly my biggest regret. Anybody who's trying to start a company go consume startup content like go consume Saster and Y Combinator.

Brice Douglas: 24:22

I fell asleep to that stuff every night.

Jared Ward: 24:24

Yeah, it's, it's incredible. I think you'll you'll save yourself a lot of trauma if you just listen to it. If you could offer other potential founders advice before they start the pre-seed, the iterating of the product, what advice would you give to other founders?

Brice Douglas: 24:40

I mean, the advice is pretty tried and true. It's make something that people want. I mean, I love that tagline that White Committer has Make something that people want. Everything else is ancillary to that. So if you're not building product or sales, you're probably wasting your time. So I think you get bogged down into what's my company capital structure look like, or am I?

Jared Ward: 25:01

a C-corp. Yet what's our core values? What's our mission statement? You haven't built a product yet. Who gives a fuck?

Brice Douglas: 25:08

But it takes some. I mean you have to get rid of some hesitancy if you're going to go out and, like, sell something that doesn't exist or go build something that hasn't been built before. I mean, it's just assume it can be done and then go from there, I think, is the most helpful thing that I've learned over time.

Jared Ward: 25:23

It's not for the hesitating soul or the hesitating of heart. You just got to go.

Brice Douglas: 25:28

Because most doors are. They're not closed doors when you pass them Like you can go and mess up as many times as you want for most decisions, and if you can do that, then just start messing up before thinking about it.

Jared Ward: 25:38

I'll tell you mine but favorite Y Combinator piece of content or lesson. I'll start with mine. My favorite from Y Combinator is yeah, I know it is tough, I've watched so much of their stuff. First off, I love Michael Siebel. Incredible. Y Combinator says a version of this over many different speeches, but this is something that's been true at Luminous. In my experience, you can fall into the leadership trap at an early stage, which it's like if somebody's been here for two months and they haven't made an impact. You don't have the time at an early stage to deliberate whether or not like oh, could we have better training? Could we have better this, could we have better? That like that's for a later stage. If the the reality is is like precede seed startups like your first employees, like they gotta figure it out. There's, it just is, if they haven't become irreplaceable after two or three months, like you have your answer right there.

Brice Douglas: 26:35

Yeah, it's a tough truth, but it matters a lot.

Jared Ward: 26:38

I think so many people I've I've seen so many other founders. They get caught in this like cause, everybody's going to give you their story, like why they couldn't make an impact. And the reality is at a young stage, I can't stress this enough Like, if they haven't made an impact, like sure, maybe you didn't empower them enough, Maybe you're a micromanager, that could be something that, yeah, you got to change that. But I mean, it's the writing's on the wall.

Brice Douglas: 27:01

I love that. If I had to choose my best piece of advice, it would be the content. Again, there's lots of versions of this about when to start hiring. I think, again, you get into this leadership mode where like, oh, I am a company, now I probably should have like a CFO, I need to have all these people to do these things, because that's you know, when I go to Airbnb's website, that's what they have and I have to be impressive, but we, you know, we still haven't hired anybody. Now I think we actually crossed that line. You're going to start seeing job posts from Zaymo soon.

Jared Ward: 27:31

Let's go Nice.

Brice Douglas: 27:32

We waited a very long time until we were 100% sure that this is the direction we're taking, because any other headcount, even if it's helpful to do certain tasks, just slows you down so much.

Jared Ward: 27:42

Oh 100%.

Brice Douglas: 27:43

And just the nimbleness and the ability to change has kept us light years ahead of some of our competitors that do something differently than that.

Jared Ward: 27:50

Yeah, no, that's awesome. What's next for Zemo? As far as gone through a very iterative phase, you've gotten a product that's working. It's past the bug phase. Is it just sell this thing as much as possible, or is it like constrained growth? What do you think?

Brice Douglas: 28:05

Somewhere in the middle. Our product is great, but our vision for the future is so big of what it could do, and it's just a sliver of that right now, so we feel a lot of pressure on that side. But, for example, something we're doing this week is we're launching a free for life tier for anybody to use, and the reason behind that is not just because we want people to eventually get paid, but we just want to give this access to everybody. We think there's so much that can be done and if marketers can just get their hands on it, they can go and tell us what needs to be done. Next. We listen to our customers.

Jared Ward: 28:35

Ah, I like that.

Brice Douglas: 28:36

Yeah, so just get people in the door, listen to what they have to do. I think that idea of changing from emails being a notification to an actual landing page we haven't scratched the surface of what that means. I think it touches every touch point. Like you kind of change the way you design, the ways you message, the way you actually send and segment your customers when you do any marketing, and I think there's still a lot to learn for us on that front.

Jared Ward: 28:58

Okay, well, that's awesome. Where can we find you guys Like how can somebody follow along the journey of Zaymo and what you guys are building?

Brice Douglas: 29:04

Go to Zaymocom.

Jared Ward: 29:12

You can sign up for our newsletter. We'll keep you updated. You can also just book a call with me and I'll probably personally onboard you to zemo nice, okay.

Brice Douglas: 29:14

What about linkedin? Can somebody find you on linkedin? Follow me on linkedin. I post a lot of content there bryce with an I and follow jared with a j.

Jared Ward: 29:19

Yeah, that's right okay, anything you want to leave, leave, leave the folks with.

Brice Douglas: 29:24

Just keep up the good work. It's. It's hard like this this time. In e-commerce, capital is not as accessible as it used to be. Everyone knows meta and other ways of acquiring is tough. Just hang in there. I think, going into just really the basics of marketing and selling, is important the way Facebook ads had worked for so long.

Jared Ward: 29:46

it was this arbitrage that you could just do, and it worked and you never even had a brand. Same thing with, I would say with SaaS and fundraising. You could just get away with like money was almost free.

Brice Douglas: 29:56

You could just fundraise. I'll probably do something with it. Yeah, and I'll get something.

Jared Ward: 29:59

Yeah, we'll get something out of it. Like now, business, I think it's just exposed a lot of businesses Like a lot of businesses, Like if you're not good, then you're not around. But with that being said, I think everybody can win if they just build the right way, both on B2B and on direct to consumer. That's it, guys. We'll see you next time. Bye.