Only the Paranoid Survive: eCommerce Wisdom From Rishabh Jain

Rishabh Jain is the Co-founder and CEO of FERMÀT, the leading e-commerce experience platform. Before co-founding FERMÀT, he held leadership roles at LiveRamp, where he launched and scaled three new ventures, including a multimillion-dollar healthcare business. Rishabh also co-founded startups in solar energy and laboratory data sharing.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:29] The most significant strategic inflection point in e-commerce
[6:27] How midsize brands are adjusting operations to decrease revenue costs during economic downturns
[12:37] FERMÀT’s approach to helping brands navigate economic uncertainties
[19:58] Rishabh Jain critiques multi-touch attribution
[27:51] Triangulating data sources as an alternative to multi-touch attribution
[30:11] Why in-platform shopping experiences like TikTok Shop lower AOV
[36:59] Tactics for building high-performing owned properties to reclaim margin and increase LTV
[43:41] How to expand your audience cohort and the importance of product expansion
[55:23] Lessons Rishabh learned pivoting away from influencer storefronts
[58:07] Rishabh talks about his early years, including his interest in physics and being an annoying student
[1:04:44] How Rishabh pitched to Brian Halligan

In this episode…

Mid-market e-commerce brands are feeling the strain as tariffs raise costs and acquiring new customers becomes more expensive. With CACs climbing on major ad platforms and inventory risks increasing, many operators face tough trade-offs between growth and operational stability. How can they adapt strategies to maintain margins during economic uncertainty?

According to e-commerce growth strategist Rishabh Jain, brands are adapting by investing in channels like email and SMS to maximize existing customers. He warns against relying too heavily on multi-touch attribution and instead recommends using multiple data sources, monitoring cash flow closely, and aligning on-site experiences with each audience segment. Rishabh also advises expanding into new audience cohorts, designing purposeful bundles, and gradually adding products to support long-term growth.

Join William Harris in the latest episode of the Up Arrow Podcast as he chats with Rishabh Jain, Co-founder and CEO of FERMÀT, about practical strategies for scaling e-commerce brands in a volatile market. Rishabh explains how mid-market brands can survive market pressure, replace flawed measurement with practical insights, and adapt site experiences for various audiences.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

"Product market fit is not a singular thing and does not happen one time."
"Either you trust your team or you don’t.”
"You just need to be continuously meeting people with whatever their need is at any point."
"Growth is always exciting, and unfortunately, it's easy to get excited about the wrong things."
"It actually turns out that competing is not the productive use of energy for a founder.”

Action Steps

Prioritize fixing core cost issues before scaling marketing: Addressing problems like doubled COGS ensures a stable financial base for growth. Without fixing fundamental cost structures, marketing efforts risk amplifying inefficiencies rather than profitability.
Use multiple data sources instead of relying on a single source of truth: Triangulating metrics creates a more accurate picture of performance and reduces dependence on flawed attribution models. This approach supports better decision-making and more resilient growth strategies.
Tailor site experiences to specific audience segments: Aligning the landing page and on-site journey with the visitor’s context increases conversion and customer trust. This reduces friction and makes the buying process feel more relevant and personalized.
Expand into new audience cohorts to scale: Reaching beyond the initial core audience opens fresh revenue streams without requiring immediate product changes. Strategic cohort expansion can drive substantial growth from existing channels.
Bundle products based on customer needs: Creating bundles that reflect how customers use products increases perceived value and boosts AOV. Thoughtful bundling also improves purchase efficiency, making it easier for customers to buy more in one visit.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:00

William Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show. Hey everyone.

William Harris 0:16

I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million. To 100 million and beyond, as you up arrow your business and your personal life. Today's guest is someone who doesn't just think about e-commerce strategy. He engineers it. Rishabh Jain is the co founder and CEO of FERMÀT, the leading commerce experience platform which serves the most innovative brands and retailers of the world, like Glossier you, Beauty, Unilever, Bissell, Back Country, among hundreds of others. Before he was building software used by some of the smartest operators in DTC, he earned a PhD in solid state physics, studied at MIT Sloan and once pitched Brian Halligan, only to be told his nervous energy made him untrustworthy. Spoiler, we'll talk about how he turned that into a superpower later. Rishabh is the kind of founder who doesn't just ask what works. He asks why it worked, what stopped working, what's coming next. He's also the guy who casually drops Andy Grove quotes in conversation and isn't afraid to challenge some of the most entrenched assumptions in E commerce, like the validity of multi touch attribution or the myth of AOV on Tiktok shop. We're gonna have a lot of fun today. Rishabh, welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast.

Rishabh Jain 1:23

Oh, my God, that's the single best introduction I've ever heard.

William Harris 1:27

Yeah, man, you have a lot that I could talk about.

Rishabh Jain 1:31

Wow. That was so good. That was so good. I think that's the episode. There you go. Oh, gotta I'm super excited. Now you have me all amped up. Yeah, all right, that's the energy the meat has to somehow the meat has got to be better than the app. You know what I mean. So

William Harris 1:52

let's it will be that. It will be, I got one quick thing, and then we're gonna jump right into the good stuff. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800,000,001 that IPO Ed. You can learn more on our website, at Elumynt.com, which is spelled Elumynt.com, okay, let's jump in and talk about some of the foundations of strategic growth. You quoted Andy Grove with me one time on strategic inflection points. What's the biggest 1 e-commerce is facing now?

Rishabh Jain 2:29

Yeah, so I think e-commerce has had the most number of strategic inflection points of any industry. It's like, said differently, it's like, every year for the past five years, there has been, like, some sort of massive shift in the ecosystem, obviously with, like the pandemic, and then with inventory and shipping problems, and then, like now, most recently, with the tariffs. But I would say that like the one that's happening right now, which we are very surprised by. How exactly the shape of the landscape is evolving because of it is there seems to be particular pressure on what I would describe as the middle of the market in e-commerce. So let's call it like five to 100 million. So exactly the segment that, like you and your team are best at serving relative to smaller or larger. And I think the reason for this is with things like the tariffs and with especially in the first half of the year. Now, it seems like it's rebounding, but in the first half of the year the consumer was weaker. Like you saw it in the travel data. You saw it in all sorts of data. You would see it in like CACs going up for mid scale brands. So like, if you're a 30 to $40 million brand, you would see the highest impact to like, your CAC going up meaningfully if you tried to scale your campaigns, especially on like, meta or other platforms. And the reason for that is that you got hit two ways. The first way you're getting hit is you have, quote, unquote, benefited from growth up until that point of being able to acquire new users with, like, an amazing product and great angles. But at some point at that scale, you're like, you have hit most of your audience, and so the next new customer is more expensive, and meaningfully so. At the same time, your cost of new product introduction has gone up because of the tariffs. If you're like, depending on your product category, obviously, right, but generally speaking right. Like, if we, if we speak in generalizations, which I know is not exactly correct, but that's like, that's like, and, and the cash conversion cycle of that is really tough when you're in the middle, when you don't have supply side diversification. On the upper side, you have supply side diversification. So if you were to. Talked to, like, the CEO of Brooklyn, and when the tariffs hit, he was just like, Yeah, I kind of just, like, pointed my cannon in a different direction. He's like, sure, I went to our factories in location x instead of location y. And he has, like, you know, 15 suppliers, whereas if you're between 10 and 100 usually have one supplier, right? And then in the small side, you don't have a new customer saturation problem, and more importantly, you don't have a cash flow problem because you don't have as much inventory risk, because you're, like, probably ordering one batch of inventory for the year. You're not carrying month to month risk on your inventory. So so it has, like, this very intro. So, so that's what I would describe as the current strategic inflection point is, like, there's this weird market where the middle is facing the most pressure, and so we're gonna see, especially the middle do lots of interesting things. A lot of them are leaning out OpEx. I mean, yeah, we're gonna see lots of interesting things. So that's where I think the most interesting strategic inflection point is,

William Harris 5:59

right now, which is often, always a good thing to do, right? Like, there's, there's like that, you know, grow optimize, grow optimize, grow optimize. And so there's opportunity to improve the optics, but there's also opportunity to figure out how you can differentiate things. And I don't, I'm trying not to say too much here, because there's a whole section that I want to talk about with you on this, on, like, what do? What does that middle group do then? But I don't want to get into it yet, because there's a couple of other things I want to get to

Rishabh Jain 6:27

first. But I would just, I would say, yeah. The way I would paint it is, like, this is the market architecture that we are seeing, yeah. And like, the way other e-comm operators will relate to this is, you have seen email and SMS sends increase actually more than usual, because people are trying to get their overall cost of revenue to go down. So the cheapest way to do that is by hitting their existing base more and more you're seeing like, there's lots of data points you can look at that make this data like come to life, and that's what I would say, is like the most important thing for people to think about,

William Harris 7:04

is that a good thing to do right now, to milk your existing customer base

Rishabh Jain 7:11

right now? I mean, that's like an impossible question for me, like, because I don't know any given bit. Like, I know like, broadly, but like, for any given business, I have no idea, like, it could be great, it could be bad. I have, I have, like, no idea for any given business. What I will say is, if you're doing it because you know, hey, right now is highest uncertainty. And I just need to, like, grow through this, and then I'll, like, make another decision in like, September or October for the holiday season, and then I'll make another decision in January for the new year. I think that is a very, perfectly reasonable way to play it, like I have, like, no reason to say that that's not a good idea. Yeah.

William Harris 8:01

So the thing that I like about that is, let's just imagine we get to the other side of this year, a year from now, some people are going to just redline everything, like No caution whatsoever, right? And some of those people, it's going to work out just fine when they're going to be on the other side of that. Some people are going to, you know, maybe take this approach where it's a much more conservative approach, and they will survive, right? Like the whole point is, like you have to survive any one of these situations in order to stay in the game. If you stay in the game long enough, you're usually going to win. But if you, if you die in the game, you know, you don't have a chance. Some of the people who are going to go ahead and throw caution to the wind, are going to end up failing. And so say, and I'm just gonna guess, right? Like, I'm gonna make up a number, like, let's go to Pareto Principle. 8020 20% of the people who are just throw caution and win, they're still gonna end up on the other side. 80% of them, they're gonna completely go out of business. And so they're out of the game. What we'll end up hearing from though, are the ones who succeeded, oftentimes, right at the other side of this survivor bias, and so they're gonna say, Look, I told you, you should have just gone long on the s, p, you should have just gone long on this. You should have just done this, and you would have been fine. I called it. I was right, but to your point, maybe that would be right, and maybe some people are willing to take that risk, and that's fine, but more often than not playing a little bit of a little bit of a wise game to stay in the game is usually going to be the better bet for more businesses.

Rishabh Jain 9:28

Okay, yeah, I think, I think we have now entered the territory where I am probably going to disagree with that. Okay, please. Yeah, so. And I think it depends on the type of business that you're running, I'll give you a really good analogy from and it may not be perfect, but I'll give you an analogy from the tech world, which, again, is not the same as like DTC commerce. So these lessons are not perfect, but in the tech world, we had like. A tech recession in 22 okay? And in 2020 if you rewind the clock, like, two and a half years, 100% of VCs were advising their portfolio to just switch to profitability over growth, okay? And so this was, like, the rhetoric, like, if you could, like, do a rewind clock on x and like, look at all of the VC posts from back then, you would see, like, a massive over optimization for profitability overgrowth, right? Yep. Now, the problem is that that over optimization led to a bunch of businesses that were un investable. And so because, like, it turns out that the job of capital going into a business is to increase the value, and the only way you increase value is growth, like profitability doesn't actually increase value sufficiently relative to growth. And so the what ended up happening is the businesses that invested through it. And actually there's a lot of studies like HBs has done studies, McKinsey has done studies that if you look over long durations of time, the companies that are aggressive through like down cycles are the ones that end up winning in the long term. And so this is where, like, you have to be careful about being honest with yourself about what kind of business you're trying to build. So if it's a bootstrap business, and you're like, running it for cash flow, and which I'm not judgmental of, but you're not like you just at the start of this podcast, you were like, one exited at eight, one got acquired for 800 and another one went public. That doesn't happen by playing it safe, correct? Like, those companies have to invest through, like the flat and down cycles, otherwise they actually never hit those outcomes. And so depending on what outcome you are playing for, you actually have a different way of operating the business, which is why, I'm, like, not sure I would fully agree with that.

William Harris 12:05

That's fair it. And I'd say, like, it depends on the context in which you're coming into this. If you're if you've raised a series B, you probably have to be a lot more aggressive, because that's necessary. If you're a business that is, like you said, self funded and trying to stay you know, if they could go out of business all of a sudden, then, then you're out of this as well. And so I appreciate the nuance. How do you apply this mindset at FERMÀT when you're helping brands pivot through some of these economic headwinds, like tariffs, things like that? What are you

Rishabh Jain 12:37

talking through? I tell our customers what I actually think all the time, for better, for better or for worse, right? So, like I often tell this story, I like, met a prospect in 2022 I want to say it was early on in business, and it was like a hot brand at the time, and and they were describing how, like what they value, and how they value that thing, and there was a particular element of the business that they cared about very deeply. It was like a certain way that they kind of like, showed up for their customers so much they cared about it, so much so that they prioritize that over the unit economics of the business, right? And I was like, hey, if that's the priority, then, like, we should not explore whether or not firma doesn't fit for you, because we're like, too much of a metrics driven product for this to be a good fit for your organization, right? So anyway, I say that to say, like, hey, when, when businesses ask me today, like, hey, like, what do you think about this particular situation, or how would you go about it? There are plenty of situations in which I say, like, here's where here's where I would spend time, here's where I would focus, here's how we can be helpful. Or I might just tell them, like, honestly, like we're a distraction to you right now, like you have so many bigger problems to worry about, that any amount of time you spend talking to us is like a bad use of your time.

William Harris 14:25

I love the honesty. I try to do the same as well, right where it's like, no, this is not what you need right now. But I'm curious, what are the things that you're seeing in a business that you would say, most likely we would be a distraction for you at this part of your business,

Rishabh Jain 14:39

most likely make it, sorry, a good fit or a bad

William Harris 14:42

fit, no, a bad fit that you're like, No, like, that you would be a distraction to them. That FERMÀT would be a distraction you're like, these are a couple of the things that are likely going

Rishabh Jain 14:50

on in your business. Ah, okay. The the number one thing is, your cogs have just doubled. Sure. Like. Like, for whatever reason, however, the tariffs have newly gotten applied to you, whatever is the sort of full downstream impact of like, the net E, the net impact to you is, if your cogs have just doubled, you should worry about the fact that your cogs have just doubled and like you should not worry about your marketing stack. You should not worry about your content. You should not work like, like, like. You need to think through what unit economics are feasible here in order for this to be a durable business, or do I just need to like, change how I do the product which is, which could actually be an answer, right? So, so I think that's, that's like, an easy example, and that was very real in terms of, like, the things that happened in, like, May and June of this year, right? Another very good example is if someone says to me, Hey, like, right now our big this is like, and I'm curious what you would say about this. If someone says to me, like, Hey, we're a $50 million brand. We have our DTC dialed in. We need to grow another 40, but we need to do that entirely on retail. Like we are going to be a dis like, again, I would say that we are going to be a distraction, probably because, actually, the CEO the CMO and the CFO should all be worried about their retail distribution, because to keep the DTC business where it currently is, should not be that hard. No. I mean, there could be things going on in the background that actually make it very hard, like, if it's a one time use product, and use product. And there's, like, lots of reasons why it's actually very hard to do that, but nominally, sure, like, it's a distraction, right? So those are the types of things where it's like, hey, growth of your DTC business is not the priority, and that is totally okay. Like, let's just be honest about it, and then we can move on. Yeah,

William Harris 17:00

yeah. We work with a lot of brands where DTC makes up, like, you know, one, 1% or 5% of their their business. And so, yeah, in that situation, that might not be the priority. There's a bigger, thick piece to the puzzle. What you were saying though about, you know, the cogs doubling and you could be a distraction that I like thinking about, like, word pictures, for some reason, that's just the way my brain works. And why picture there? What I pictured there was somebody saying that they need to, like, improve their vo two Max, and they have, like, two broken femurs. And it's like, I mean, that's a good goal. Like, how about we just repair your broken bones first, and then you can get back to running and doing what you need to do to improve that vo two Max, right? It's a distraction, right? Now, there's this glaring thing, and it's the, you know, your cogs are double. We need to focus on that,

Rishabh Jain 17:43

yeah, exactly, exactly, yeah. And, and I think that people want to, like, be excited about the other things that they could do. And, like, we play in growth. And growth is always exciting. And so unfortunately, it's, like, easy to get excited. But like neither us nor them are gonna benefit from just being excited and not actually being the core thing that they need to worry about.

William Harris 18:10

I think it could be an excitement, and I think it could also be a chaos. I think about people that are drowning. This is a metaphor that I use all the time. You know, if somebody's drowning, more than likely they start doing a lot of movements, but there are movements that are not conducive to helping them not drown. They're actually the opposite. And I think that I see brands do this a lot of times too right where it's like, I know that I need to focus on the cogs, but that problem seems insurmountable, so I'm just going to focus on this little problem here, because I feel like I could at least accomplish and tackle this and feel good about myself instead of tackling the thing that I actually need to do,

Rishabh Jain 18:46

yeah, that is, like, for sure, a big part of I mean, like, yeah, I don't want to go, like, on a whole tangent. But that's true in every business, in like, in every business, for every person, like, they want to do the thing that's like, fun, exciting and and gives them energy, versus the thing that's like necessary and is like critical path for two reasons. One is, it could potentially be less fun or less personally interesting. But more importantly, they know in the back of their head that once they start doing that thing, if they fail, then they're really aft, right? And that's super scary. And so that actually prevents most people from, like, doing the one thing that actually matters is because they have to come to terms with the fact that if they can't do that thing, everything else is irrelevant.

William Harris 19:35

Totally agree. Speaking of a couple of things that can be, let's just say, difficult to admit to couple of things that we talked on you've been critical of multi touch attribution. Why? Why does it break down as you scale? What is it about multi touch attribution that you're critical

Rishabh Jain 19:58

of? Yeah, oh. To find the least offensive way to so that's good, while still, while still being honest, while still, yeah, yeah, I think that like, so first of all, MTA is not causal. It is like, like, experiments and incrementality is causal, which is like, Hey, I turned off ads in Ohio, and here is the effect, right? There's like a there's like a cause and effect, right? Like, that's, that's like, just like normal experiment design, right? So, so the fact that it's not causal, but is used causally is, like, actually, my biggest problem with it, MTA is, like a credit system. It's like, Hey, I'm gonna, like, I'm gonna make up some reason why I want to give credit to, like, certain touch points leading to some sort of event. And very few people are disciplined enough to, like, actually take it for what it is, which is like, Hey, I am going to do this arbitrary credit assignment, and then, given my knowledge of how I have given the credit, I'm gonna, like, look at what it says and then use that as an input for decision making on like, how to allocate spend and things like that. If people were using it that way, then I would have no problem with it, sure, but people use it causally. So they're like, hey, my MTA model is saying it's like, you know, this thing is whatever, like new customer, ROAs, and I'm like, That is insane. Like, there's just no way for you to go so many steps from like an MTA model to like a number like that, because now you are using it causally, sure, and it is not a causal it is not a causal thing. It is just a credit assignment tool. And so And I especially dislike MTA, like black box MTA models, because now what you're doing is you're like saying, Not only am I going to not use it for what it is, but I'm not even bother asking where the weights come from, for the assignment to the different things, and I'm just going to trust some random system to arbitrarily give the weights. Now, you're like reading a monitor without understanding where the data even comes from. Right the way you decide, that's my problem. That's my problem. It's like, it's like looking at the whoop, like at your whoop, or whatever Fitbit and looking at your readiness score. I feel the same way about people who look at their readiness score. Sure, I'm just like, this is an insane thing for you to use to decide how to spend your day. Like, I cannot think of anything more insane, because you have no idea how it decided to come up with that number, and it is not causal. So, yeah,

William Harris 23:10

the way you describe this, I would say that I'm completely in agreement with you. Wrote an article here's back, maybe 2020, 2021, I don't remember what year called The ROAs death spiral, and it was based along the same things. And what I tried to explain to businesses was there are only two facts. The only fact is how much you've spent and how much money you actually have in your like, Shopify, like, in your checking account, right? Like, like, those are the two like, how much money you made and how much you spent. Those are the only two facts. All of the other attribution sources are completely made up. They are helpful. They can be guidelines. We use them as one of the data points that we look at to decide whether things are working. And so when we look at things from an attribution standpoint with our agency, I'm like, great. What does your MTA say? Cool. I'll take that in a consideration, along with what does your customer survey say, along with what does your UTM say along with you know, what does your Shopify actually say? But ultimately, I'm right there with you. Our favorite thing is going to be a hold on test. It's the only way that you really kind of start to see a little bit more of causality, and there's a disruption to that. And so you can't use it all the time. You can't use it for every campaign. You can't use it for every single thing. It's like, I can appreciate MTA, but where I look at it, what I'd say is, if it disagrees with the other things, then I'm saying. All I'm saying is, there's a disagreement with this. Let's take a look at what's right and where it's right. We need to do a whole lot to house to figure

Rishabh Jain 24:34

it out. So can I ask a controversial question on the point? Yeah, so you said, you said, like, Hey, I can't do an incrementality test for everything, and so I have to use something to make Let me ask a totally separate question, what do you think drives the need for having something at all? Like, why not just do stuff and see what ends up happening to the cash flow? Mm. Yeah, yeah. Like, why? Why even? Like, why even bother? And this is actually what makes me extremely scared of MTA, is, I think it gets used as a crutch, 100% explainability, where the person does not have the confidence to just say, like, hey, like, I feel pretty good that, like, this is the way that we should continue to invest in our thing. And then, just like, letting it flow through to the like you said, letting it flow through to the cash flow, like, to the checking account, and being like, okay, when I dial this knob, the checking account gets bigger. When I dialed this knob, the checking account gets smaller. Like

William Harris 25:45

I have some hypotheses to your to your question. Um, I think part of it is signal to noise issues, especially across different teams. And so if you have one person who's a completely different person making changes on their ads, another person is completely different team making changes on their, you know, influencer stuff, I think that it can become difficult for each person to say, well, who actually is right in this situation? And so I'd say, like, some of it is the signal noise issue. Some of it is going to be the defense ability that is requested of them by, you know, the CEO or finance or or, yeah, a board, because I think that it's easy for you, and I sometimes, as a CEO, to say, I'm just going to do this thing, and if the account goes up, the business goes up, then you know, I was right. But I think that other people feel the need to have a defense, ability for them to keep their jobs potentially.

Rishabh Jain 26:40

And this is where my dislike from MTA comes from. Sure, is, is I think that that's actually the reason we use MTA as an industry. Sure, I don't actually think it's because it helps us improve our businesses. I think it's because it helps us keep our jobs, which I don't which I don't actually fault anybody for, but that's why I am trying, with all my power to like and which is very little, right? But that's why I like push very hard against it, because it's like, look, ultimately, either you trust your team or you don't, and like the person on the team might feel more comfort because they have something to use in those conversations with their boss. But the fact that we have, like, a whole segment of tools whose like, job it is to, like, architect those conversations is, like, really wild to me. Yeah, like, that's that's actually how I feel about it. Yeah, you

William Harris 27:40

raise a very good point, and I think that's interesting. What is a simpler model then for E commerce operators to use if they're gonna say, hey, you know throughout the MTA, what should they do

Rishabh Jain 27:51

instead? Like, closer to what you're doing? Yeah, look at the bank account. Look at start with, we will not have one source of truth. Yes, we are going to have triangulation conversations. Yes, we're going to have some incrementality. We're going to have some like, where did you hear about us? Where did you first however you want to do surveys. We're going to have some MTA inputs. We're going to, by the way, if you're going to do an MTA like, do do all of them. Look at the first touch, look at the last touch, look at a uniform distribution. And just like, say, Hey, we're going to be honest with ourselves about the fact that this is like, im like, we know that it is impossible to get the measurement correct. So we're going to start with that acknowledgement of reality, and then we're going to use multiple sources of data to make the best decision that we can, and we're gonna feel comfortable and confident in use, in doing that, instead of like, seeking comfort from false precision, like that is what I would suggest people to do, which I know is super annoying and painful, but that's my genuine suggestion. Yeah. So

William Harris 28:57

I love it. It is the most pedantic one, because that is how we approach it. So there's an example I love to give, which is I broke a lot of bones growing up because I did a lot of dumb things, like, you know, back flipping on a pogo stick off of a loading dock, and breaking my wrist and stuff like that. So when you go in to get an x ray for a broken bone, they'll take a picture of one view and the other view, right? Like they have to see three dimensionally, because every other one is still just a two dimensional, flat image. And I say the same thing about MTA. It's still just a flat look at data. It's been it's data that was three dimensional, but then it was flattened out. It's still just, now, just one look at it, I can only understand. I like the triangulation, is what you said. I I like seeing it from like, three dimensional point of view, where it's like, I need to see that alongside what people are saying, alongside what your bank account is saying, alongside what Google Analytics is saying, alongside what the platform is saying. I can take all of those, and if they agree, I'm probably moving the right direction. If they don't, then I need to probably run a holdout test to figure out which one's right which one's wrong, and how do I readjust?

Rishabh Jain 29:56

Okay, I agree.

William Harris 29:57

Let's talk about. Platform, AOV. You specifically mentioned that Tiktok shops makes it hard to increase AOV. Why is that?

Rishabh Jain 30:11

Sorry, that was more an empirical observation, just to make sure I share it like, like, it's just like, hey, empirically, it turns out it's hard to get high AOV on Tiktok now, like, why is that? I think that, like any in platform shopping experience, tends, for any given brand to reduce the total number of products that you buy from that brand. Totally agree, including and up to Amazon. I was gonna call it out if you didn't. Yes, 100% so, like any platform, right? So like, the only place where you get attached to your own products is your own and operated property. That's the only place, because every other platform, their incentive is not to drive just one brand products, but just to get the behavior of the consumer buying from multiple people. And the best way for them to do that actually, is to like actually to do the opposite, to make sure they only buy one thing from you and that they buy the second thing from someone else, and the third thing from someone else and the fourth thing from someone else. So like, if all you did was Wonder, Hey, what are the incentives you would land at? The most likely outcome is you're only gonna buy one product from me, right? Because that's the best case outcome for the platform. Now there's a secondary issue, which is, like the speed of like information flow. And again, because you're on a media platform, their intent is to drive consumption of media, not consumption of product information. And so again, like now this one is like, not as perfect, but it is generally true that the higher the AOV, the longer, the longer the information flow tends to be, or the more information flow is required, no matter how length is like a bad, sure measurement, but the more information flow is required, and given that they want you to spend your time on media, not on PDP information, the most likely outcome is that you get compressed down into the territory where the person can actually make a purchase, given the amount of information you are allowed to send to them. So those are the two primary reasons. So

William Harris 32:40

the information flow reminds me of, you know, you're going through the checkout the grocery store, and it's like, they have a couple of, like, impulse buys there, because you don't need a lot of information to decide if you want to buy them. You're sitting there waiting in line. You got 30 seconds. They're like, yeah, go ahead and throw that on there, right? Whereas you're not going to likely pick something that is a $400 item up from the grocery store line while you're waiting in line there, because you're actually kind of want to take a little bit of time. Read some reviews. Check it out. Similar concept where it's like condensed time frame. So I like where you're going with that. When I think about Facebook, shop, Tiktok, shop, etc, I agree with that. I everything you just said, agree with the other thing that I think that's interesting, that I found, is that it tends to not drive quite as high a quality of a customer as a general again, generalizing things not as good because they're not maybe as ingratiated to your brand, to your point, as they would be otherwise. And so I, when I can, I like to still push towards the website, but I like using the shops for that very reason, the same reason that it's like, if I ran a grocery store, I would still try to sell you things while you're sitting waiting in line. Do you like the use of them? Do you think they have a place? Or you, like, honestly, just get rid of them. Just try and push as much as you possibly can to your website.

Rishabh Jain 34:00

Great question. Yeah, I this is like, again, I think this is in the territory of like, impossible to generalize. But I think sure the actual answer is like, like, it is based on your business model. Like, what I would not do is do it assuming it will save your business. Do it because you have heard it has worked for someone else's business, or do it because, like, you think there's some massive alpha to be had. I would do it if, despite all of those things being false, it is still beneficial to your company. So I'll give you, like, a good example, like nobody, like it is, there's going to be a category of companies where, even if they never come back and purchase from you again, even if it is like, perceived as like a discount purchase, like blah blah, blah, blah, blah, it is still beneficial. For you to reach those customers through that channel because of whatever other strategic reason that you are like thinking about your business like our like this is, this is like, potentially not true, but like, an arbitrary example would be like, Hey, I'm trying to find the best way to get women between the age of 20 and 30 to try my product and all, like, my own. The only thing I want to know is that they have had, that they have had exposure to the product, right? If, like, that's like, the type of business objective. It's like, yeah, like, okay, you don't actually care if they come back to your website later. You don't actually, like, later. You don't actually like, and that can actually work great, like it really could, because you just have to be first, like, you just have to make sure the math works right. So. And there are lots of businesses that grow like this, where they're just like, hey, I just need to get this in people's hands. I kind of don't actually care whether there's a repeat purchase that's happening?

William Harris 36:05

No, that makes sense. It's kind of similar to, maybe the ones that have done really well on Tiktok, you know, freeze dried candy, for instance, or things like that, where it's, like, It's sensational, you don't really need to get them to come to your website to buy a bunch more candy, or, like, I just need to get them to come buy this, you know, bag of candy.

Rishabh Jain 36:20

Yeah, exactly like, the best example of it is a product that upon, like, the biggest thing is that the trial will lead to a good customer. So, like, sugar is kind of good for that. Sure, it turns out that the more sugar, like, once you have a little bit of sugar, you're going to have more sugar, sure, so that's great, you know

William Harris 36:48

what? What tactics do you recommend then for building some high performing owned properties that will reclaim margin and increase the LTV,

Rishabh Jain 36:59

I think, like, I mean, the guys at rich have, like, talked about this before, but I think that they do a good job of this, which is, um, they actually, like, know that they are reaching different audiences with different products. So they actually run, like, what looks like one store, but it's actually multiple stores. And so I think that like meeting meeting the customer where they are, and being able to interact with audiences where they are, versus like forcing them to fit your mold of what should bring them to your site is like, by far the biggest source of alpha. Now, of course, that happens to be what we do, right? So they're like, I am 100% conflicted, in my

William Harris 37:56

view, on but this is why you believe in it. This is why you created it? So,

Rishabh Jain 38:01

yeah, totally, totally, exactly it, like it is the case, that it is the other way around, like, I believe it. And therefore I built the business, not I built the business, and therefore I need to say that I believe it. And so, like, Yeah, but it turns out that if you just meet people where they are and, and the reason that this is not rocket science is that's what we do with ads. We just happen to not do that with the website. Yeah. So,

William Harris 38:23

okay. So you know, for maybe people who are saying, wait a minute, I don't actually understand what FERMÀT does in this exact scenario, like, What is What do you mean by, like, multiple versions of a store? Like, what is this that you're talking about?

Rishabh Jain 38:37

Yeah, like, my simplest example of this is like, let's just take an apparel brand I usually like, use, like, alo yoga, right? As an example, arbitrarily, right? It's like, okay, Alo, when it was like, mostly a women oriented brand, right? And then they added men's products. When you go to the website, you still mostly see women right when you go to the main site, so if you're running at but it turns out that they actually have great men's apparel too. And so it's like, if you go to this, if you get directed to the site, like from an ad, an allo ad for men is not one that has a bunch of women in it. Like, generally it is like, like, showing the men's products on a male model. And so when you go to the site, you would expect to see the same thing, and you would expect to be in a site experience that is, like, sufficiently continuous to that ad experience and to where your psychology is that you don't want breaks in it, where all of a sudden you're like, now I'm confused. I'm like, looking at a bunch of women's clothes. Like, am I actually even buying the right product? Like, did I buy the men's version? Did I buy the women's version? Like, what am I buying? Like, you don't want all of that, because you want to, like, make sure that you can actually just meet the audience where they are. I'll give you this actually happened to me. There's a workout product I got the Father's Day email campaign for, and so it's like a male using this workout product. And I clicked on it, and literally, when I landed on the site, it was just all women. And I was like, Wait, what is like, did I click on the right place? I, like, went back to the email to make sure I clicked on the right place and not, like, on the web, not on the company name, because I thought for sure this could not be correct. Yeah. Like, that's how bad it is

William Harris 40:38

confusing. Yeah. In like, now you have to get over the hurdle of, like, Wait, you've just created doubt in a customer who you didn't want to create doubt for. What's an example of a brand that has done this? You talked about Ridge, you talked about what's an example of a brand that has done something unique with this, that you're like, oh, when we built this, I hadn't thought about it that way, but I really like the way they approach this.

Rishabh Jain 40:59

So let's do target swimwear. So here's a really good example, and I only got turned on to this recently. So target does this thing. Okay, so here you see this women's extra high leg, whatever. Okay, so I'm gonna click on this with target and with Wayfair, what they have started to do is when you click on a Google PLA ad or like a DPA ad, it does not take you to the PDP. Instead, what it takes you to is a page where you see what looks like a PDP card of the product, and then a bunch of other inventory that they merchandise. And the way that you can tell this, and I encourage people to do this, is go to Google search like whatever swimwear target, or something like that, some generic thing that you know target will sell, click on it, go to the URL, and then remove the entire referral part of the URL. But don't remove the main URL, okay? And based on where the refer is, it changes the page. So once you remove the refer, then it takes you to the PDP, but with the refer being the Google PLA ad, it takes you to a like, special merchandise thing. And so what this has turned me on to is, okay, like the most sophisticated retailers, clearly understand that where you are coming from impacts how you will buy, for sure, and so like that has directly influenced how we think about what are the types of products we should be building.

William Harris 42:41

I love that. It reminds me of my Product Hunt days back in the day when, you know, we used to have, like, at least, I was at SaaS, and every single time if we had a free trial and somebody was coming from product Hunter, they're coming from somewhere else, it's like, we made sure that that custom, like the whole website experience, was customized to them. Because, well, I say the whole website experience, the landing page experience, was customized, but to the point where it's like I know now more about what their problems are, what psychology they have. I can usually gear this a little bit more towards a way that makes them more excited, more understanding of what we're trying to do.

Rishabh Jain 43:12

That's true for every human Exactly, exactly I

William Harris 43:15

want to talk about the thing that you started to started to allude to in like, the very first question, audience cohort expansion. Because this is something that you had talked to me about, and I really liked the way that you went into this. But you told me that most brands can get to maybe 10 million with one core audience, but getting to 100 million requires more. What's the right way to find and activate a second or third audience?

Rishabh Jain 43:41

Yeah, it's funny. Do you know Brian Kano, the head of marketing at now true classic, previously at nude.

William Harris 43:49

Yes, I know him. I know of him. I don't know that he would know me, but yes, I'd know of him.

Rishabh Jain 43:53

Okay, okay, okay, okay, so he has this, like framing that I really like, so I've, like, borrowed it from him, so I wanna give him credit. Sure he's like you can reach 100 off of just Facebook ads, like no other channel, basically. And to most people, that sounds like a too big number, like most people would say, you have to add other channels way before that. But I think that the thing that he does not say, and I've worked with him a bunch so I know what he is doing under the hood, is he is, like, incredible at extraordinary diversification of creative to, like, get all sorts of people, and very wide breadth of people to be excited about the product category. So what he's actually doing under the hood is, like, taking full advantage of a very wide spectrum of types of people who are on meta, right and like, most of the time. The reason why people are changing. Channel diversifying is because they are not able to get outside of the core audience that they have on meta. And so then adding another channel is a way to accomplish that. And so to at least the what I've observed, and therefore my framework about this is the 10 to 100 stage is like you to hit 10, you have probably gotten your like first core audience that loves you for the thing that you have set out to start doing. And now the question becomes like, why should anybody else care? And there and all of those people have reasons to care, but you need to meet them with that message. And so like, meeting them with that message all the way from the ad all the way through to how they check out, is my opinion of, like, why the audience diversification is the way you get from 10 to 100 and I think Different people use different words for this. Some people say, like, creative you know, I gotta have, like, more creative diversity and all these sorts like, like people will use different words for the same actual underlying problem, which is like, how do I find the next segment of audience, the next segment of audience, the next segment of audience. And I think you just have to be more disciplined about measuring it by audience cohorts, as opposed to, like, saying things that are a little too loose, like creative diversity.

William Harris 46:30

I agree, yep, somebody who would agree with what you were saying. There Christian Lamone, who is the head of growth over at wish, and I think that he scaled on Facebook only, I think until they're, you know, spending, they were the number one spender on Facebook, I think before they even diversified over to Google as a channel, for the very same reason that you said, but they had the product breadth that allowed them to do it right. So they were able to reach every audience with something. They had a product for literally every single person. So that allowed them to do that. But when I think about this, let's say without product expansion. If you're just going from 10 to 100 million and you're not doing product expansion, you're just doing audience cohort expansion, the example that comes to my mind would be something like the Stanley mugs. They had an audience, they had a product. They basically took the same product and they modified it slightly, but it's essentially the same product, and they were able to find a completely different audience, you know, middle school girls who are like, I have to have this. And every single one of them needed to have that audience expression. So that's the one that comes to my mind. But when you talk about this, is there one that comes to mind to help people understand that it's like, it's the same product, you're just expanding into a different audience.

Rishabh Jain 47:43

The one that I use most often is like supplement benefits and like audience types. So like, let's just use creatine. Like, creatine is my favorite example to use, because there's like, okay, there's like the very, already very athletic, like, body type person who would use creatine for, like, continuing doing what they were doing, right within the category of like, hey, this helps with muscle build. And then there's like the person like me, who's like, Hey, if you have any shot of, like, being stronger than you are today, you got to start taking creatine, sure, right? So there's like, you know, within the like benefit of becoming stronger, there's a massively wide audience, right? A more like current example, even even more current than creatine is like rucking. Like rucking, whatever reason is, like, super hot right now, especially like to see Twitter, yeah. But it's like, you know, you want to be able to show that rucking is like something that, like a very athletic person can do, and not that athletic COMM A person. It's like, hey, actually, just go for a walk with weight on right. Like, that's also good for your health. So, like, first of all, like, within a benefit, you can, like, have a very wide audience, and then now if you have a second benefit, like creatine, which is, like, mental focus, yeah, it's, it's, it becomes painfully obvious how you need to have different creative, different landing experiences, different PDPs, different checkouts. Because the person who's buying it for muscle build probably is going to want to buy it on a recurring basis. The person who's buying it for mental focus is probably going to want to try to see how they feel after trying it for like, a month. And so like, one can be one time purchase focus, the other one can be repeat purchase focus. Like, there's, like, lots of different reasons why the whole funnel changes, depending on the audience and the benefit that you're selling to. And so those are the those are the types of examples that I tend to go to. I

William Harris 49:56

think those are great examples. I'm glad you called out both aspects of it, right. Like, one. The within one benefit, there's different mentalities. But then even outside of that, you have other benefits, and so a lot of opportunity to expand, going beyond 100 million, for the fun of it. Then let's say you've begun to expand your audiences. Then what's next is product expansion.

Rishabh Jain 50:15

It has to be, I know zero companies that go past 100 Sure, whether brand or software without product expansion is like, literally zero, yeah. Like, even, even, like, even, like, the hyperscalers, like compute, they're adding, like, a very large number of products under the hood, right? They're adding, like, okay, maybe ChatGPT and cursor. It's like one product and it's like, scaled to, like, the billion dollar mark, very few, yeah, but it's like, it's so, I mean, like, it's so rare that even, like, AG, one just launched new flavors, right? And, like, you can call that not the same product. But there's a reason why they like it used to actually be, like, literally one product. Like, you either buy a g1 or you don't, yeah, I

William Harris 51:05

don't know that. I would call new flavors a new product, but like, to the point of what you're saying, it's like, it does, it can reach some other people, but you probably be going beyond like, that single product, still right for a lot

Rishabh Jain 51:17

of I just think, I just think that you, you have changed who like in I think in a good way. I want to be very clear about this. I'm not saying like, I'm not saying it to be critical of ag one, but like, I think ag one is very smart to acknowledge that they went from like, Hey, we are just this to actually, we're going to meet people where they are with like, product formulations that are different from our initial product formulation and flavoring for a beverage product happens to be the biggest lever for most beverage products like it would not surprise me if after flavoring, they actually started to change formulation, and once they change formulation, then we would agree that it's a different product, right?

William Harris 51:58

How much of the growth above 100 million do you think is because of the product expansion allowing you to sell more to your current customers, or because the product expansion allows you to now open up to a completely different audience,

Rishabh Jain 52:14

cohort? Um, I think it is more the former than the latter. Okay, like, I think it is more the case that there are people who are either consuming less of your product, or who are only consuming the one SKU or whatever it may be, who now you can sell another product to, or who previously did not exist in your like, this is now the second product, the second part of your point. But I tend to think that if you're at the 100 million dollar mark, the total number of people who are like, Hey, these are net new people, sure. Uh, it's just not that big. Yeah, $100 million is a lot. Like, like, if you're selling, like, just think about the like, the pure math of this. Like, let's say you're $100 million brand in the US. Very roughly speaking, there's only 300 million people in the US, right? It means like, you've sold $1 of stuff to everybody in America every three years. Like, that's, you know, like you are going to, at some point hit like, what is your attainable audience? Yeah,

William Harris 53:26

no, that's good. Something else that you've chatted about that appreciate is using bundling as a lever to increase AOV. So we touched on AV on other channels. But you know, using bundling, what makes a bundle work and what kills it? Um,

Rishabh Jain 53:47

um, I think, like, the bundle has to be useful, the bundle, again, the bundle has to meet the consumer where they are for why they got to your website in the first place. So the reason, like, I'll use true classic as an example again, the almost everybody who buys their first product from true classic buys like, a 3t shirt bundle, okay? Like, white, gray, black, and, like, there is a reason for that, right? It's because it's like, Hey, I'm not gonna buy just one, because that feels like not a good use of, like shipping cost to like cost of product. And so, like that is a very well architected bundle, so to speak. And so, just like meeting people with the with why they're there are the best bundles, I think, like stuffing people basically never works. Sure, like trying to doing it for the sake of doing it never works. Like there has to be a reason why these things are being purchased together. Yeah.

William Harris 54:55

Again, that's true for everything in life, right? Like, the more there's. An actual reason, the better. It will work. And so get away from the scammy tactics. Find out what your customers actually how would they benefit from a bundle? That bundle will likely do a lot better. I want to talk a little about FERMÀT. You pivoted from influencer storefronts. What happened, and what does that teach you about product market fit.

Rishabh Jain 55:23

A lot of people have said this before, and I finally understand it. Product Market Fit is not a singular thing and does not happen one time. So like, you may have product market fit, and then the market changes, and now you don't have it anymore, or something else, some other dynamic changes. And you like, no longer have it anymore. Like you're hopping, and people have to stay at home, and there's no longer a pandemic, and people don't have to stay at home, right? And so like, you like, fall into and then out of product market fit, right? Or do you even remember clubhouse?

William Harris 56:00

Oh yeah, for the very brief time that was I got an early invite, felt pretty cool. And yeah, that died, yeah.

Rishabh Jain 56:07

You were just like, oh my god, I haven't thought about them in years, right?

William Harris 56:11

I had to think for a second when you said that

Rishabh Jain 56:14

Yeah. And so like, yeah, it would be impossible to say that they did not have product market fit. They did, yeah. And I mean, they should feel very proud of the fact that they did, like, it's it's so hard to build something of value, and it was of value to a lot of people. And it just turns out that, like, the market changed because we no longer had a pandemic, yeah, and like, people are now happy to, like, hear podcast format, or watch video podcasts or whatever it is. And they don't need that like live audio anymore, because they just like talk to people as they walk around and go about their day. And so I think, like product market fit for me, I'm like, Hey, you just need to be continuously meeting people with whatever their need is at any point in time. And you have to be cognizant of the point in time the contacts, all of these sorts of things, and that is your product market fit. And it's going to, like, keep it's going to keep doing this. It's going to keep going back and forth like, Uber massive product market fit. Then it all went away, and then it came right back. Yeah, you know. But like, nobody's gonna, like, even think about the fact that they lost it for two years. Or nobody would say, like, hey, they didn't have product market fit for two years, because that would sound derogatory and it would be a weird thing to say, but they literally did, right? Each kept the business alive for two years.

William Harris 57:48

Yeah, you're right. That's wild to think about. I want to talk about who is Rishabh Jain, because I like getting to know the human being behind some of these insights. Tell me about your childhood and how that has helped shape you to be the person that you are today.

Rishabh Jain 58:07

Yeah, I'm trying to think about what is the most useful way to share this so I I think I have always been attracted to like, why do things work the way they do? I don't, I don't know why that has been like a natural attraction of mine from, like, a very, very early age. So I it early on showed up as, like a love for physics and a love for economics and things like that. And then, for whatever reason, I also, from a very young age, probably because of my dad, believed that like for profit business was the best way to like, share those ideas with the world. So it's like, understand how things work and why they work the way they do. And then for profit business is like, your distribution for those ideas. And and that's like, basically just like, has, has, like, yeah, has been the number one thing that I've been pursuing since I was, like, very young, so like, and even as early as seventh and eighth grade, I was, like, extremely oriented toward physics and the natural world and how things work and why they work. And was, like, almost an annoying student. And then I can relate to that, yeah. And then, yeah,

William Harris 59:33

like, like, like, how like, like, when you say that you're, you know, an annoying student, or that you were extremely into physics, like, what does that look like? It's like reading books. About it like, you're like, Hey, I'm going to take home this textbook.

Rishabh Jain 59:50

I mean, it's like going to class and like challenging why the teacher is teaching things in a certain way. Or it's like, hey, like, shouldn't this imply this a. Other thing, or, Hey, actually this other thing is true, like, You're misunderstanding what the textbook is saying, and

William Harris 1:00:07

not to be disrespectful, it's because you're just genuinely curious and wanting an answer for that.

Rishabh Jain 1:00:13

I mean, I was also a little bit of a jerk. I mean, at that age, I was also a jerk, but, like, it turns out you can be a jerk and not be curious. I was a jerk and curious, sure. So like, the choice, the words I used, unfortunately, were not amazing, yeah, but the underlying motivation was just Yeah, extreme curiosity for like, why is this thing the way this is? Yeah,

William Harris 1:00:37

I can relate to the I've grown from my jerk ways as well. You just reminded me of an example. I remember we were learning about, like EKGs. And you know, there are lines that are measuring amplitude, and there are lines that are measuring time on this. And I remember the question was, what do the horizontal lines plural? What do the horizontal lines measure? And I said, amplitude, and I got it wrong. And she said, Nope, the horizontal lines are measuring time. I said, No, the horizontal axis is measuring time. The horizontal lines are integers on the vertical axis. Apparently I'm the only one who got it right, including You jerk, move, but to your but to your point. It's like, you know, curious, but a jerk, and I think most of us are probably jerks around that age, you are also highly competitive with yourself, not highly competitive with other people, but you you held yourself to a very high standard. You said that you would come home with a 99 and you're like, Yeah, but you know, could have done better. Is that something that's just intrinsic? Is it something that was learned?

Rishabh Jain 1:01:42

Oh, no. So that actually was like, I would come home with a 99 and my dad would be like, where's the one? Okay, yeah. So this is, like, this is like a part inflicted and part self learned, yeah. And so where it switched was basically in, like late high school and college, where, and then, for sure, in grad school, but like at a certain point there's it's not that valuable to compete with others. It is more valuable to understand where exceptionalism is coming from, from for others, and then to use that to improve your own like, work, basically, right? And so, like, the best example I have of this is, like grad school, like everybody's doing their own research, or whatever. And so there's not really a competition with other grad students, per se. And so the only thing you have is like, Okay, what, what is the most impactful thing I can study, and how do I do it most effectively? And so instead of like, and this is where the like 99 where is the one like, sort of mentality starts to come in, is okay, what am I not doing that? I could do that. Would like meaningfully shift what my output is. And then you just, like, keep doing that, and at some point it really is not valuable to like, compete with others. I also did this exercise. You might find this interesting. I did this exercise recently where, like, when we were first raising our seed round for firm ad, I remember, like, we would get compared to a bunch of other companies, and people would be like, Oh, is this the right angle, or what about this other company and that other company and that, whatever, whatever, whatever, none of those companies exist anymore. They're all dead. And I was like, This is why competing is IR like, you should never be competing. Because if all I was doing was worrying about what those other companies are doing and like, trying to be better than them, I would just be like, on I'll be like, spending energy on all of the wrong things. And then that happened with our a and all of those companies are dead. And it's like, it just like keeps happening, and it's like, it actually turns out that competing is not the productive

William Harris 1:04:08

and we hear that time. I mean, you like the story, you know, let's say that's overtold is the runner who's in a race who looks back to see where the other person is, and they get beat because of that, right? It's ineffective use of time. It's ineffective use of resources, time, money, whatever it might be, but some type of ineffective use of that, um, I'm glad you brought up grad school, because there was another story that you told me that I really wanted to make sure we touch on, which is your pitch to Brian Halligan. Why were you pitching to him? What was going on and what, did he have to say to you? We kind of already alluded to,

Rishabh Jain 1:04:44

yeah, that was, I mean, I tell this story all the time because it's like, there are moments in time where you're like, upset in the moment, but it's like, actually the most valuable lesson that you could have learned. I was taking, like, entrepreneurship. Of class at MIT, and this like class was, you're just starting a company. And so actually, there are very large companies that got started in this class, right? So one of the ones that was like in my class is this company called solid, solid energy systems. It's like a large battery company now, anyway, that's like, neither, yeah, neither here nor there. But it was taught by Brian Halligan and Paul, gosh, I forgot his last name. He's the founder of kayak, so, like, the founder of HubSpot and the founder of Kayak basically, were teaching this class. And so part of that was like, hey, pitch us like you're pitching a VC, right? And so I, like, did my thing, and he's like, Brian basically said to me, the reason why I would not invest has nothing to do with anything you said to me, but you just give this nervous energy that is not inspiring of confidence. And at the time, I was like, oh, like, blah, blah, blah, but I'm but I like know what I'm doing, but of course, I like ruminated on it, right? I'm not like one to hear feedback and to not think about why is he saying that? And it's true, like you have to exhibit confidence and conviction in what you're doing. Otherwise. How Will somebody else have conviction in what you're doing? And so that was, like, a super valuable interaction, and he didn't have to do that. Like, the thing I think about all the time is he could have just been nice to me, sure, but instead, he was kind enough to actually tell me what he thought. And I'm like, so grateful that he did that, yeah, because yeah, like, if, like, there's so many other people who would just choose not to give you, actually what they thought feedback. So

William Harris 1:06:48

I love that you said that he could have just been nice to me. But the reality is, telling, not telling you that feedback is not very nice, because you've gone on now to have to pitch to real VCs, and it has resulted in very real, multi million dollar Series A, Series B, you're leading a company. Had he not given you that advice, that's not nice to you, that's not nice of the people that you've employed, that's not nice of the businesses that you've helped. Like, there's a significant ripple effect to him having the kindness to say what needed to be said in that moment.

Rishabh Jain 1:07:19

Yeah, totally. And in fact, if anything, now, people tell me, I'm a good fundraiser. So,

William Harris 1:07:25

yeah, I've heard that. I know somebody who was in one of the boardrooms with you, and I don't remember the series A or Series B, but that is something that he had told me, when I, you know, said I was gonna be interviewing you, is, like, he's very good, like he really knows how to tell his stuff, like it's impressive, and you should ask him a little about throughout that. So to that effect, what is like a tip that you would give to somebody who is going into raise Series A, Series B, something along those lines? See, money, I guess it doesn't care what raise it is, but they're pitching a VCs PES and they want to make sure that they're putting the best foot forward

Rishabh Jain 1:08:01

here. Yeah, yeah. I think that, like, the surprising thing about what I'm gonna say is that it's like, super unsurprising. So it's like, my number one advice for people is, do not use any of the like, standard deck formats that you see floating around on the internet. Like, I cannot think of a worse way for you to pitch your business, like, the whole like problem, solution, whatever those like things are that are floating around on the internet, that is the fastest way for someone to consume the information about your business. It is not the best way for you to pitch your business. Sure, the best way for you to pitch your business is the same way that, like a DTC brand hooks you to buy their product. So it's like this person, like, what do they get excited about? Okay, so you start with the thing that they would get excited about. Then you tell them, hey, like, I know you would get excited about this, because this is the thing to get excited about. And here's how you would know if the thing is happening. So now you tell them how to measure the thing. Okay, so you tell them what they're excited about by doing your homework, you tell them how to measure it, and then you show them that metric. It's like, not rocket science. It's like, Hey, here's what you love, therefore, here's how like, here's how like we here's how we think about measuring that thing right. Like you and me were in this together, yeah? And here is where, and here's the traction on that thing, and you will get, like, my conversion rate to second meetings is, like, close to 100% basically,

William Harris 1:09:55

it's so simple, like you said, it's so so so simple. But I think similar. To what we talked about before. It's easy for us to want to work with the hack. It's easier for us to go to the shiny thing and say, I'm going to spend my time here instead of spending the time on the thing that actually matters. Your cogs have doubled. Spend the time there. Or, you know who the audience is you're talking to, spend the time getting to know what do they actually care about and go through this very, very simple framework, but I think that that feels daunting. And so we end up going towards the stuff that we maybe feel a little bit more comfortable doing, but it's not as effective.

Rishabh Jain 1:10:32

I think we feel comfortable doing it because it's like, oh, other people told me to do it, sure. And so now when you fail, you have something to blame. And the problem with my approach is like, when I fail, I have nobody, I have nobody to blame. So I'm actually totally fine failing without anybody or anything to blame. And I think that's what has to be true if you're going to be a founder, is you cannot be seeking something to allocate the failure too. You just have to be fine with like that didn't work. What do, you know, I gotta do something else now

William Harris 1:11:07

that is so good, but that is so hard. I you there's been some times where we, it's been us against, you know, element of against, uh, VaynerMedia. And so there was a contract that we won. It was, it was just between the two of us for, for, who's gonna win the contract we won against that. So, you know, take that Gary V. Love Gary V. I think he's great. But it's, you know, it's very easy for a lot of companies to say, Yeah, but it's VaynerMedia. And so here's the thing, if I go with them, it's the safe bet. If they don't grow me, if we fail, my job is protected, going back to job protection, right? Like, my job is a little bit more safe because, well, you made the smart bet or the bet that seems make sense. Hey, I used the pitch deck that everybody told me to use, so I failed. But you know what I did? What was, versus owning your choices and saying, Yeah, that might be the quote, unquote safe bet. But why don't I take a chance and do what my gut actually tells me is right in this moment here, I'm going to go ahead and choose Elumynt. I'm going to go ahead and put together the right pitch the way that Rishabh has told me to. And now I have nobody else to fall back on for the blame but myself. But I can likely, hopefully live with myself better knowing that I gave it a better shot,

Rishabh Jain 1:12:20

and hopefully also it makes your learning cycles faster, which is the bigger thing, because, by the way, like, my failure rate is also insanely high, right? But sure, this is like true for most, like, most successful people have a very high failure rate. It just turns out that when they're right, it makes up for all the failures. And the only reason that that can be true is because the way that you have set the stage is such that when you're right, it actually works really well, right?

William Harris 1:12:48

What are some of the other things that you're just personally passionate about, like, when you're not building this incredible company? What do you like to do?

Rishabh Jain 1:12:59

Well, right now, I would say that my time is pretty occupied between the company and my kids, and so that's like, that's a huge part of my life. But the two things that I do for just like my own, I guess, like maintenance you would call it, is I work out with a trainer three, two to three times a week, and then I listen to, actually, a lot of podcast content. And the reason for both of those is, I think that is the highest density way for either getting, like, physical training or idea generation. And so, like, I like listening to podcasts because it's like, there's a lot of people on podcasts who otherwise the cost of me getting what they think is so ridiculously high, sure, but it has, like, basically come down to zero. Like, the cost is just, yeah, me discovering that podcast and their content on that podcast, and that's like, a ridiculously low cost, like, I almost can't believe it. Yeah,

William Harris 1:14:10

both of those are incredible, working the body, working the mind. They both work together. When you're listening to podcasts, I assume a lot of these are probably business podcasts. Do you still have a passion for physics? Is it something that you're still studying a little bit for? Studying a little bit for fun? Do you find yourself? No, you're like, No, moved on to economics and building and growing business. Yeah,

Rishabh Jain 1:14:29

yeah. I find that, like, it's like, totally fine to, like, live life in chapters. You know what I mean? A lot of people are like, Oh, you got your PhD. Like, isn't it weird that you don't use it anymore? And I'm like, my, like, almost instant response when people say that is like, wow, you must be horrible with some cost fallacy. Like, sure. Like, the fact that you even think that I should be doing something related to my degree suggests that you don't believe in the idea of like, you. I wanted to do it then, and I wanted to do something else, and then tomorrow, I may want to do something else, and then so on and so forth. And like, I want to live a life of interesting chapters. And so far, I have done that, which is like the total opposite of like, what most people, most people are like, Oh, I invested this time, like, I need to take advantage of it, I mean. And at the same time, if you ask them what some cost is, they will, like, tell you the worst, sure, but they, like, have no way of, like, actually living that reality. Yeah,

William Harris 1:15:34

again, that's another thing that I feel like is hard for us to break out of. I don't know what. There's something in us that wants to stay within that framework of mind, and it's hard to break out of Rishabh, I have thoroughly enjoyed talking to you today, learning from you, if people want to work with you, if they want to follow you, what's the best way for them to stay in touch?

Rishabh Jain 1:15:57

Yeah. I mean, honestly, I'm very active on X, on LinkedIn, and I'm just Rishabh M Jain on both of those. So that's like, actually the best way to get in touch.

William Harris 1:16:06

Cool. I love it. Thank you so much for your time, sharing your knowledge, sharing your wisdom with us for free. For free, everybody you get to listen to this brilliant mind for free. It's been a lot of fun.

Rishabh Jain 1:16:17

Thanks, man. I really appreciate it. Amazing questions, yeah, and I and again, the best intro I've ever had. So I'm gonna have to, like, get that clip and, like, play it in the office when I walk in or something.

William Harris 1:16:27

Yeah, that's your that's your walk on music, exactly. Well, thanks everyone for listening. Hope you have a great rest of your day.

Outro 1:16:35

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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