Ep # 138: Founders Don’t Buy, They Partner ft. Jagath Narayan (CEO, Ordoro)

Adil Saleh 0:02 Hey, greetings, everybody. This is Adil Hyperengage podcast. And, you know, we are super excited to, you know, explore more and more and more industries, and seeing that how, you know, how people, founders, products, are making impact in different industries, the significant change that we had ever since this evolution of AI, in the last eight to 16 months, I would say, with these big llms and make an impact that is this, that is a support. And now, in the last four to five episodes, we spoke to products that are significantly, you know, tech heavy, AI powered, of course, as part they say that they're a power, but, you know, we dig in deep and see that, you know, is it really AI, or we just, you know, just trying to, you know, ride the wave. So today, we're going to be exploring the retail e commerce, how, Adil Saleh 0:54 you know, companies are basically transforming and automating the processes and workflow for merchants and retailers, and you know, even small business owners that are specifically relying on the E commerce shops, be it on Shopify or their own web shops that they have. So today we you we going to speak with the CEO and co founder or Dorot com. They've been there for more than almost 15 years from based out of us in Texas, and we were today, we are speaking with the CEO and co founder of Ordoro.com Adil Saleh 1:26 thank you very much for taking the time. Jagath Narayan 1:28 Awesome. Thank you, Adil. I'm excited to be here. I've seen some of your episodes, so I'm very excited to, like, have this conversation. Absolutely, absolutely, like, we always try to keep it free falling, concrete original, and that's why we, you know, we talk to people like you that to learn from you, from from your industry. And you know how this is changing the way that workflows are being operated, the way our missions are being set. So tell us a little bit about about your journey, how you started out back in 2010 I know that back then, e commerce was not as much tech enabled as much, you know, automated when it comes to inventory management, order management, you know, all of this. So looking at at what you've done in the past with with companies like you know more in the in the retail space, the experience that you have, what was the real inception of or Doro back in 2010 Yeah, awesome. So I'll tell you what or Doro does, and then I can kind of walk you through the history of it. So you can think of or Doro as like we are an order management, inventory management platform for direct to consumer businesses. So our typical customer is a direct to consumer business. Could be a retailer, a brand. They are selling a product either through a Shopify store or become a store or WooCommerce store, and they're usually also selling the same product through an amazon.com marketplace, walmart.com marketplace. It's a very common pattern for most of these businesses. They sell the product through their own website, and they also list the same product on Amazon and Walmart, because it's kind of like getting your product onto the supermarket shelves right and for and in terms of the size of these merchants, we are not going up to the large ones, like the the biggest brands that you know in the world. We are going up to the smaller brands. So our typical brand, in terms of their GMB, or like, the annual revenue, is anywhere from like a million dollars a year to like $50 million a year. That's our sweet spot. And so for these brands, we help them manage their order flow as the as the as customers are buying from them. How do you keep track of the orders? How do you ship them? Make sure that you're shipping the right product to the right consumer body from you? And so that's the order management side. We also help them manage the stock levels, the inventory management side. So if you're selling like, 1000 different products, we'll give them. We'll help them keep track of how much do you have in stock. Are you running low on stock? Do you need to reorder from your manufacturer and all of that? Right? So that's our typical sweet spot. It's all SaaS platform. Jagath Narayan 4:00 You pay month, month, monthly range anywhere from like 50 bucks a month, up to like 500 $600 a month, depending on your use case scenario. We are plugging into a lot of different platforms like Shopify, become as WooCommerce, like I said, and also Amazon and Walmart, and that's basically the way to get, get into this market. So since most of our customers, all of our customers, all of our customers, are selling through those platforms, we need to have direct integrations into those platforms to pull data and push information back into that so the history behind this is, I, like you said, I started this company about 15 years ago, and before doing this, my background is in supply chain management software. So I work for a very large company there. They're called blue yonder. When I was there, they were called IT technologies, which they got acquired by JDA, and then, then, I think they rebranded as blue yonder. It's supply chain management software for very large companies. So in ITU, we were, or in blue yonder, we were selling to companies like GM and Chrysler and. Jagath Narayan 5:00 Here and the corona Coupa Morillo, which is the Corona beer company, so I was there working at these client sites, understanding their how the orders are coming in, how they are like, planning to how they're fulfilling these orders. Obviously, these are, like massive companies shipping out of like several different warehouses across the world how they're planning for their products. Like, how do you produce like you're selling, like Jagath Narayan 5:29 you're selling like, 1000s and 1000s of bottles of beer every day, right? So how do you how do you plan your like beer prediction process, or, in GMs case, like, how do you plan your car prediction process? So that's the world that I kind of grew up, and that was basically, I was there at that company for about eight years, learned a lot about how these large corporations operate. What are their challenges, in terms of like, keeping track of their inventory levels and forecasting and and planning their manufacturing and all of that, and and then I kind of thought to Okay, all of these large companies have these problems, whether they're using, like, very expensive software, like it or SAP, is another big player. Oracle is another big player in that space. I want I was wondering whether two smaller brands, like a mom and pop shop or a company that's like 20 $30 million in like, annual revenue with like maybe 2030 employees, I'm pretty sure they have similar problems, but they cannot afford an SAP, they cannot afford an itu or a blue yarn, and some of them cannot even afford a NetSuite. So I thought, there's an opportunity there. So when I left that first job in ITU, I came back to business school, that's why I moved to Austin, I was very curious about the space, so I started researching into the space to see how do small brands operate, and what is their typical day to day looks like. So when I was in business school, it's a two year program, typically in the at the end of first year, what most of the business school students do is that they look for an internship. They go into large companies, like they're finding an internship at Google or like McKinsey or either Wall Street firms with the idea that they want to convert the full time job, right? I took a completely different path, and I decided that, okay, I'm not going to go after because I came from the big corporate world. I was like, Okay, I need to find an internship at a really small company. And these companies are not obviously hiring, they don't have the money to pay, right? So I found a really small e commerce business in Austin. It was like they were, I think the revenue was like, they were selling like, less than a million dollar of goods, million dollars in revenue a year. They had a small warehouse with like, five people. They were getting orders, and they were picking and so I met with the owner and said that, okay, hey, I just want to, like, spend the summer in your warehouse. You don't need to pay me anything. I just want to see how you're operating. And maybe at the end of it, since I've seen how large companies operate, maybe I'll have some recommendations for you. It's all free. Of course, the only thing I want is, like, I just wanted to gain the experience. So I basically spend the entire hot summer in Austin. It gets to up 200 degrees in August here in this very hot warehouse, picking and packing orders for this like this tiny, tiny business, right? But that was like an eye opener. I saw how their processes work. They were using a very old Windows based desktop software to pull orders from this website, and they were keeping track of it there. They need to print out, pick lists and pack lists, and they need to log in into another software to type in their the address, to print out a USPS shipping level. And then they need to keep track of their inventory, all the stock levels in a spreadsheet. And on a daily basis, they need to go update and see, like, what they're running loan stock. So as I started seeing this, like Spark started flowing in my brain, right? I'm like, this is a massive opportunity. These guys don't have sophisticated software, like, like, what GM had or Chrysler had. These guys are just like, living in the world of spreadsheets, copying and pasting information. They were making mistakes. They were shipping the wrong products to the wrong customer. So I figured out, okay, this is a great opportunity. So for the second year of the program in business school, I paired up with like, couple of my other classmates, and we said that, okay, let's just do deep research into the space. We started cold calling a lot of these smaller merchants. We were just like Google for different products. And if a small brand, a small store, comes up, we will just call them and we'll just tell them that, okay, hey, we are students at UT, and we're doing a research about e commerce. Can you help us answer these some questions? So sometimes it's called calling there they just slam the phone. That was like a learning experience too. But a lot of them were, like, very, very friendly, because we said that your students, so they would help answer the questions. We started talking to a lot and lot of these merchants, and within like, a few months, we kind of realized that there is an opportunity here. A lot of these merchants, or a lot of these brands, do not have sophisticated software. They are managing with spreadsheets and copying and pasting and all of that. So if you could build something that can really solve this for them, that can keep track of all their orders and can keep track of all their stock levels, and how do. How the reordering works and communicates to their accounting system and has a barcode scanning to make sure that they are shipping accurately. There's an opportunity. We also did some price testing, and we kind of realized that people would probably pay 50 100, $200 depending on how big they are. That was huge validation for us, right? So when at the end of the program. So this was like 2010 is when I graduated, and me and my co founder, so the two other people who start, I started working with them, we all decided that, okay, we are going to launch this as a company full time. And we launched order officially in 2010 and we found, and there's a long journey there, and I don't know if you want to get into how the early days of like, we were all like, I kind of, I have, I have little I have some coding experience, and I even now I code, but I was not going to be the primary developer for a system like this, so we had to find developers, and we didn't have any money, and we were, like, trying to bootstrap it. So went through a huge journey there. And we can get into it if you're interested. But anyway, that's how the concept started. And then from there, we slowly started scaling. We started working with, I think, big commerce was, I think, the first channel that we built a connection into. Pretty soon we connected to Shopify. And this was very early days of Shopify. Shopify is like massive now, but this was back in 2010 2011 Shopify was still small, and I actually was, I did talk to Harley, the former one of the founders, because they were so small that Harley was directly talking to partners, so I was on phone calls to them, and then we're figuring out the partnership and all of that. But from there, we grew Shopify, obviously took out massively, and we started connecting a lot of these platforms. So that's in a nutshell, the the origin story for the role? Adil Saleh 11:42 Yeah, inspiring. Inspiring the way you, you know, you were absolutely prepared to get your hands ready and, you know, living in that, you know, warehouse, and learning all the processes and workflows, and, you know, then doing all the research, cold calling people, that's so inspiring. And how, like, how long did you all, like both of you, two co founders take throughout this inception, doing the research, validating calling people up, taking information, asking them questions, to figure out how to build, what to build, Jagath Narayan 12:09 yeah. So there were like three of us, three. There were like three co founders, right? So we spent almost a year while we were still in school because we knew that, okay, this requires, like, once you launch the company, it's a full time job, so we cannot do it as part time while we are in business school. So we spent about a year or maybe six months or so researching and cold calling, but then we decided that, okay, the best way to do this is that we obviously have to find someone to build the software for us, and that was its own journey. But we went through a lot of different like false starts, but eventually found someone, and we had no cash to pay them, right? So we found someone who would work purely for like equity. So that person came on board. He was like a contract developer, and we just helped we build the v1 of the software. But along while we were doing that, we also wanted, like one customer as beta to kind of build our flow around, right? So we would build for that customer, like design partner, something, yeah, almost like a design partner. But we whatever we build, the idea is that, okay, we should be able to roll it out to all the customers. So we're going, we're building it for scale, but we had this, like single focus of this one customer, so we had to find that first customer. And the way we found them was also interesting. So as we were cold calling and researching on some random forum, we saw a customer ask about a question about like eBay and Amazon orders. And we thought, okay, this is the question that they're asking the answer for that is exactly what the concept of order was. So we found them, we researched them, and we found their link, and we called them and we just started asking them questions. Luckily, they answered the phone, and during the call, we realized that they were in San Antonio, which is only like 45 minutes drive from Austin. But there was another thing that clicked. As we started talking to them, I realized that the owner of there was a it was a small, family owned business. It was just like a husband and wife, and I think they had like one part time employee, the owner, she actually worked at itu when the same company that I was at several years before, so that that was an instant click, because she she really liked the people who worked there. And she said, okay, yeah, we work together, so I'm happy to help you out. And then we just decided to drive down the next day. So three of us drove down there. We spent like couple of hours to them, and that was it. She said that I will be your better customer, and I will, I'll, I'll help you, like, test this and then actually use it and give you feedback. So we got the better customer, we got a contract developer, and we just, like, we're building it, like, spending like, late nights, building the stuff and so as as you can expect, it's the MVP. It was like, it was it was shit. It didn't, like, really work as we wanted it to, but it was good enough that it actually helped this customer solve their problems and help them automate a lot of their flow. So we got them using. System, and about four or five months into it, I have this rule of thumb, and this is kind of like a lot of entrepreneurs talk about it, and I've dread a lot about entrepreneurship is that people will tell you what they want, but ultimate validation is that, are they willing to actually open up their wallet and pay you money, right? So this customer, they use this for about like four or five months for free. But before we get to the next milestone, I told them, hey, we have to start making money for it. So are you willing to pay us? She's like, Yeah, this is saving me a lot of money. I'll absolutely pay you. So I'm trying to remember, I don't remember the exact amount. I think it was somewhere in the 200 to $300 a month range. So I came up with, like, I did some comparison analysis and all of that, and said that, okay, I think it was somewhere the two $50 range. I don't remember the exact amount. So it's going to cost you $250 a month. I ready to pay it. She said, Sure. How do I pay you? I was like, Okay, that's a good question. We had absolutely no way to keep track of we had no payment collection mechanism. We had nothing so, so I told him, like, don't, don't worry about it. I'll just send you a PayPal link, and then I'll just send you a PayPal link on a monthly basis, and you pay. And she said, Okay, that's fine. So we send her a PayPal link, and she actually made the payment. And I was the first revenue, right? That was huge. Because till then, it was all concept we had. We were really struggling. We built something. We got that first dollar coming into the business. And that was an amazing moment for us that now this is real. Someone actually paid for us. The fun side story is that at that time, I don't think PayPal had, like, a recurring revenue collection model. I don't know if they still they don't have it. So we were, like, the way we're going to solve it is very simple. So I printed out, I think we were using Google Calendar something. I set a reminder to say that, okay, once a month on this particular date, I need to send them the PayPal thing that was, that was a recurring payment model. It was basically like me keeping track of it. And I even had like a printout on my and as we, as we started scaling, we did not have a recurring payment collection system until we probably cost like 2030 customers. So my recurring payment system was that I had Google calendar reminders, and I had a printout on my on my wall, which is basically like a 30 days of the calendar. And then I would just write this customer needs to be charging this data amount, and then I would just remember to remember to do it. And that's how we scaled. And later on, obviously, we added recovery for a while. Stripe. Now, it's all like, obviously, very sophisticated. It's an automated system, but that's how we kind of started. But getting that first beta customer to agree and then make that payment was a huge milestone for us, Adil Saleh 17:39 absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, it's, it's like, tell us a little bit about your your your bone with your other two co founders, and how important this is, because a lot of these founders, they of course, fall of short with having the real relationship, and, you know, making sure everybody's complimenting their skills and making sure they're actually bought into into this, through thick and thin, and make sure that they're they're there for each other and know each other's strength and weaknesses. So how was your bone with with the other two co founders? And you know, how big of a big of a thing it is? Like, put some some light on this too. Jagath Narayan 18:14 Yeah. So those two co founders, they exited the business. They're no longer part of the company they left, I think was 2019 but that was still like, I mean, they were with me through the whole journey for, I would say, like, eight or nine years. So went through all we were. We all went through all the hardships together. And I would say it is, like, extremely important to have like, really good co founders. So I'm blessed to have, like, have been through that journey with them. So if you think about the hardships, right? So we were like, we were all in the MBA program together as a very expensive program. All of us had, like, student loans, and then we were jumping into this. Most of our like classmates were getting like, six, six figure jobs right after business school, and they were now, like, paying off these loans easily, whereas, like, we jumped into this with huge student loans and no income because we were bootstrapping it, so we had zero income coming from the traveling from the business. The business revenue at that point was like $250 a month, right? Which was like, we wouldn't even pay for our hosting. So in addition to that, yeah, that was around the time when, I don't know, like, 2000 day there was a financial crash in the US, so there was a lot of crazy stuff going on. So we were able to defer our student loans for a while, because there was a federal program which said that, okay, because of the crisis situation, and if you don't have like, a real paying job, we can, like, postpone the payment. So we all took that option. But then we kind of, as we started scaling, we realized that there was no way to really bootstrap this company, because we need to have an actual engineering team, and we need our customer support team. So we took a we could we took an angel investment. So I'm trying to remember it was probably 2011 to. 20 2011 and 2012 that we took some money, and then we took the angel investment. By then we already had, like a a small stream of revenue, which was not enough to pay our salaries. But after we took the age of investment, we hired like couple of people, and we all took, like a very small salary at least, to pay for our like rent and living expenses. So we all went through that, and then we are. We all focused on different areas of the business. So one of them focused on building partnerships, because the partnerships were a very was a key to us growing like talking to Shopify and become owners and agencies and all of that. And other person took over, like, how do you as you're getting inbound leads? How do you run sales? How do you close it? I focused a lot on product development and on customer support. So I was actually the first support person in the company. And when people would call, I'm answering the phone, and I'm not telling them that I'm the CEO, founder of the company, but I'm basically helping them. That was that was super helpful, because I kind of knew exactly what these customers need, what kind of questions are coming in. So when I hired my first support employee, I think we hired her in 2012 and by at 2013 she's still there with the company. Now she's my head of customer support. She has been with me for like, 1213, years. It was really helpful that I actually did her job for a year before I hired her, because I knew exactly what kind of person would do well in this business, in that role, and how they would treat customers and everything. So so we were able to hire the perfect person, and the result is that if you just Google for or donor reviews, you'll see that everyone praises our customer support. That's what we are known for, and I give all the credit to her. Name is Kristen. She runs an amazing support team. She knows exactly the kind of people to hire, and I would say that me actually playing that role really laid the foundation for me to hire the right kind of person, that's Kristen, and set the culture of customer support team. And then she could, like, continue that culture, and then our support people, like, stay around for like, I think the average tenure in our support team as of now it's like six years. You almost never hear like customer support is a place that, like, people turn over because the high stress job, whereas our people, they have been around for six years. And that's actually, that's the number is actually not even it's actually even higher than that, because couple of them, they move, they've shifted roles. So my product manager today, she actually, she first started as a customer support rep, and she did that for like, three, four, I don't know, maybe, like, five, six years, and then there was an opening for, like, I was doing the product management function too, but as the company started growing, I kind of wanted to, like, get delegated to someone else, and she was really interested in it, and we realized that she was a great fit for it. So she moved from the customer support role into QA testing and the product management role, and then she runs that. And I still work closely with her, but she runs that. So anyway, I think my point is like, yeah, so doing all those roles, getting the hands dirty, was super helpful in figuring out the kind of people to hire. So yeah, the two, two of the things that I'm very proud of. One is our reviews. It's really great, and I think that's because of our support and the quality of the product. Second thing is, like, employee retention. The first employee that I hired when we in, like, 2012 he's still with me. He's our, like, head of he's our design director. He's responsible for the look and feel of everything, the app, the website, and all our branding and everything is still with me. And the the another employee that we had, Kristen in 2012 2013 she says we saw employee retention is very high. We are a happy company with, like, happy employees. So that's something that I'm very proud of. Adil Saleh 23:36 Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I was also thinking, like you mentioned previously that you have this sweet spot when it comes to customer segments, you got to make sure that they're not too small, or they're not like, too huge. So how did you figure that out? Like I do the customer profile, and you know, how you how did you started going up market, from SMB to mid market to, you know, small enterprise like, how was that journey and how it is now? What is your focus in terms of go to market and how you're expanding, what's your acquisition channel? And then we'll talk about a little bit about customer success. Jagath Narayan 24:11 Yeah, so that graduation, I think, is normal for many companies. As your platform evolves and becomes stronger and stronger, you have to, you will the you can charge higher prices. And when you're charging higher prices, naturally the customers are willing to pay for it are bigger. So that is one reason. The second reason is that in SMB, and this is the common problem, churn is very high. And the pattern that you see in churn is that the smallest customers are the ones that you that churn. And the reason for that is a very small customer. Let's say you're just launching a Shopify store. The likelihood of you, you your store, going out of business in the next six months is extremely high. A lot of if you look at Shopify itself, at the low end, they have a lot of people who are who want to be entrepreneurs, who want to get into E commerce. They let us just launch a store, and then think that. Okay, they can go big, but six months later, they realize that it's like, really hard, and they're not able to do it, and they just shut down the store, right? So when we initially launched our price points, I'm trying to remember, I think we had like a $25 price point, or a 3025 $39 per month price point, and then we had, like, based on features that you need, we were charging like, $100 $99 a month. 190, $9 a month. So those are the price points. Pretty soon we realized that the lowest segment, the 25 $39 segment, is where we are getting these smaller customers, and they are churning. They're leaving us in six months. And the number one reason for the churn is that they themselves went out of business. They're not getting any orders. So but at the same time, we it's costing us to host them and to support them, and it's just, it's just a painful experience to have get a customer and then lose them in six months. Whereas at the higher end, we realize that these customers are like, once they cross, once they if they're paying us, like, 200 $300 a month, they tend to stay for a very long time. I think some of these customers have been we have, I have customers who have been with me for like 1112, years. But at the high end, the retention is extremely high. They on average, I think it's like four or five years, they stay with us so and the reason, there are a couple of reasons for that, one is they are a stable business, right? Because they these are bigger customers, and the reason why they're paying us more money is because they make more money, and they're happy to pay us more money. They are stable businesses and and the likelihood of them going out of business is low, so we don't lose them because of churn. And there are a lot of side benefits of it. Now we can focus on those bigger businesses and then figure out what are the problems that they have, and then we keep building features heavily biased towards their needs. And as we build the features bias towards their needs, our platform becomes more and more robust. It becomes more capable for like larger customers, and we attract more customers and we can retain them. Another thing that I noticed is that these larger customers are actually easier to support than smaller customers, because these larger customers, the business owners, are like more level headed because they've been through the pains they can relate to how we operate. They ask for things that are reasonable and the right things, whereas the smaller customers sometimes have very crazy demands, which make no sense because they don't know any better. So over time, we kind of kept increasing our price points. We add more features, we give the price points, and we kind of like filter out the smaller ones who cannot afford to pay, and we've we bring in the customers who can afford to pay, which is good for us, because we make more money, and we can drive our product road maps towards these bigger customers, and we can go up market. Adil Saleh 27:46 Okay, so the fact that you mentioned that these smaller customers, there's a there's very strong chance that they're not going to expand in the next one to two years. It's harder for your sales team to increase the lifetime value of those customers, because they either they're so small, that is one fact. The other fact is, the likelihood of, you know, staying in the business in the next expense is too low, and that that means that is the expansion opportunities for you, for those smaller customers, is not like it's it's not of any use for you to invest into the expansion and into the resources, or maybe post sale their customer support. Success? Is that right? Jagath Narayan 28:28 It is true that likelihood so for us to expand our revenue, our revenue is not like, contractually tied to the revenue of the customer, because we don't charge a percentage of revenue or anything we tie to the primary factor we look at is like, how many orders are they processing, right? So if they are not, if their order volume per month is flat, that means they're not making any more money, and they're not going to pay us any more money. So we don't try to, like, force upsell them into other plans for us. A lot of the upsell is natural inbound. As they grow their business, they realize that they need more and more things, and then we can detect those opportunities and reach out to them, or sometimes they reach out to reach out to us. So our success is really dependent on are the is our customer growing? So at the lower end, I think your question is like, is it cost effective for us Adil Saleh 29:17 to Yes, keep them in bed, yeah, wait for their expansion. Maybe one day they'll just grow. Maybe they'll use it for inventory when they get slightly bigger. How long do you guys fish? Jagath Narayan 29:30 Yeah, so we so we don't. So if you look at our plan plans, our minimum plan is kind of designed in such a way that it's cost effective for us to offer support. So we offer, like, phone support, email support for every paid plan. We also have a premium plan where, obviously we cannot afford to do phone support. That's that's an entry point for someone who just wants to kick their tires. We do have a lot of customers who are like, if you look at Shopify, store. Lot of them are like, what usually call is, like lifestyle businesses owned by like, a small family, or like husband and wife, and they're not really keen on, like, hyper growth, or, like, expanding as long as the profitable business for them, they're making steady income from them. They're fine. They don't need they don't care about growth. So So and lot of our customers are like that, right? So they're happy to pay us the same revenue stream, and we typically don't increase the price on them. And if their order volume goes we'll charge them more. If the order volume is flat, we keep them around. They are all profitable customers for us, because we are we. I think over time, the platform has evolved in such a way that the cost of support is not very high, and areas where the cost of support is high, there they may be customers who are already paying us. And then we do lifetime values. Lifetime value is very high. And then we internally in our product roadmap, we focus a lot on automating things and building things in such a way that our customer support cost is low. So if there's a particular area or a feature where it's painful, our support team has a huge say on our product roadmap. In fact, there are two things that we do and this this kind of related to that question. I think so, the way our product roadmap decision made, I told you that our product manager came from our QA, our support team, right? Support so she has a deep insight into how the support team operates, and she's always talking to the support team. And we have this internal mechanism on prioritizing issues where, like, every team gets to vote based on, based on how much MRR is being impacted on every single issue, which we use Git for Git GitHub for tracking. So support teams weightage matters a lot. And if we realize that, okay, there's this particular issue that's causing a lot of customer support pain, we prioritize that goes into the product roadmap, the engineering team fixes it, and then and then that support pain goes down. So that is one that's one way we kind of like get their feedback into the support process, into the product roadmap, to to improve the product, and also to keep our support cost low. The second thing that we do is the support team is is ultimate gatekeeper of what feature can be launched in the production. So the engineering team builds it, and our QA team, our support team, doubles as a QA team, so they will like test every feature that's being built, and they need to give an approval before the agent, the dev team, can push it into prod. The reason for that is there's the incentives are aligned, right? If we push a bug into prod, the first team that's going to get hit is the support team. They'll get phone calls and they'll get emails. So they they they basically are the key. They have to give the green flag that this feature is up to my satisfaction. Only then we can release it to prod, and that has really helped contain like fires. And we generally operate in like we don't operate in like fire mode occasionally. I mean, everyone makes mistakes. Sometimes we we break things, but that's very rare, and that's because the support team has a lot of control on it. So I think that's kind of like, different ways of like, how do we control our support costs is by ensuring that we are finding the right kind of customers and also by quality? Yeah, that's an area that I'm I'm super passionate about. I spent a lot of time thinking through this and looking at how different companies do it, and we build this feedback loop, which has been operating in our for us, at least for like, the last six, seven years, has been operating that way, and that makes sure that we are focusing our engineering efforts on the right features and keeping keeping support costs under control. Adil Saleh 33:34 Okay, so this is something that we discussed with lot of B to B code, like B to B SAS products that have, like, so much of interactions within the app, like on the web app, opposed to, like, you don't have a lot of interactions, like, like merchants, they don't like, do a lot of actions inside a Doro platform. Or if they do, we just pre shared like, how you are sitting on top of your top features, like, I would say, power features, and how you are tracking the interactions and indicating risk opportunities for, let's say, if they're good for fit for inventory or drop shipping plans. Of course, there is a class cross sale and usage and interactions, and how they're leveraging the platform, how they're engaging with the support team. All of this data is super important for for post sales team, to indicate whether there is an opportunity for expansion or is there any risk for, you know, for churn. So we need to mitigate that. Need to Talk to the product team. Whatever is, is, is the next section, course. So what do you do? It at a door internally. Yeah. Jagath Narayan 34:38 So the way our customers interact with our app. It is. They are interacting all the time. In fact, once someone uses Ordoro, signs up into signs up for Ordoro, right? They are pretty much in the app. I mean, it's not, I wouldn't say 24/7 because it's like people are shipping stuff during the daytime. So let's say like 8am in the morning till like 6pm in the evening. They're all. Was looking at the screen and like taking actions on it. So the typical actions are orders are coming in automatically. They're selecting orders, a bunch of orders, one order at a time, or 100 of them, putting them into batches, clicking buttons, printing out shipping labels, looking at inventory levels, and then sometimes updating it, creating purchase orders, receiving it. So they are constantly in the app. In fact, the screen is always if you go, if you walk into one of our customers, offices or warehouses, you will see that the Ordoro screen is all the time. Like for me, my Gmail screen is all on the time. Right is I'm always I never close my Gmail window. Similarly, for our customers, they never close the Ordoro window. It's always open all the time, so they're constantly interacting with it. So and we have mechanism to track all these interactions. So for example, I have a dashboard I can use to see, for every given customers, how many orders did they get today, how many labels did they print today, which user is interacting with it. All of this information can be tracked, and these are all like behind the scenes. I mean, all this information is obviously residing in our database. We have reports coming out of it, which we have internally built, which will tell us clarity, visibility into what's the usage of this customer. So going to your upsell question, we can easily run analytics and metrics against our internal dashboard to see which customers are doing well, which customers are growing, and then, based on usage patterns, we can identify these are the customers we should reach out to, because they are today only using our shipping module they should. They're great candidates for upselling inventory module. So we can then target them using email campaigns or like account managers can reach out to them. So all of that is like, we have internal tools that we have built over time to handle all that, that's what you're asking, right? Adil Saleh 36:42 And all of this tooling is built around the CRM, like, you have a CRM where, you know, you record, like, it's a source of record for all this customization, yeah, okay. Jagath Narayan 36:50 We have, yeah, we have internal CRM, and we have, like, homegrown dashboards that can extract all this information. And our account managers have AX, support team, product manager, even sales team, they all have access into what's happening. So, yeah, we have a we have a we have a homegrown system that functions as a CRM, okay, Adil Saleh 37:08 perfect. And because a lot of these companies, they are basically building their own co pilots and agents within their their systems and their tech stack, taking data from all the sources and give you alerts and triggers for like, of course, best expansion opportunities and, of course, risk return and all of that. So how do you see all of this like, I think you're you guys are more relevant because your business is more support heavy, because support is the most critical and the center of of your your go to market. So how do you see AI like agentic, AI that has impacted the most is the support. Like, you know, tier one, tier two support has completely been replaced, like, I would say, 80 to 85% been replaced by AI. So how do you see this agent take AI, and the vertical agents that are that are being built internally, and they're like, loads of tools for support, success and sales, Jagath Narayan 37:59 yeah. So I think there are different areas where, when it comes to customer support, right? I'll tell you the obvious month, and I can get into like, which other areas I think this is going to go so the obvious trend that I saw and started probably about a year ago, is that people replacing real human support with chat bots. So you can just, like, there are several, like intercom, does it we use? Yeah, I think we used one called user flow. We experimented with it. So the way, it did not work out for us, and I can kind of walk you through the journey. So we use this bot, and we trained it. We have a support site, support dot Order, order.com which has a lot of articles and which are, like, usually up to date. My support team also keeps them up to date. And we just like started building a YouTube channel with, like, lot of videos showing how different functions work each like, one minute videos. So we fed all of this information into an LLM agent, and then we, we just like opened it up. So inside the order of screen, when you logged in, you will see the chat board at the bottom right. You click on it, and if you have a question, you can ask it, right? So we tried that, but it did not work for us. And the reason for that is it was not giving in many cases, it wasn't the LLM was not giving the correct answer. It was extrapolating based on so the specific use case that I remember when I was chatting with it is so we connect to different channels like Shopify, Amazon, Etsy, Bigcommerce, and all of it, and each one has a different integration, and they all have nuances. Like, for example, Etsy may not allow you to do one particular thing, like pushing a tracking number back. It does not allow whereas Amazon allows it and Shopify allows it, and we have support articles that clearly describe what's supported where. So the question I asked was, Can I do this, this specific thing with Etsy? And it came back with answer as Yes. In reality, the answer was no. And the reason it said yes is it just extrapolated. It said that okay. It thought that, okay, hey, we can do this with Shopify and become as Amazon. Therefore the answer with Etsy must have been. Yes, it was a wrong answer. And I was like, This is not acceptable. Like, I don't want this is a poor customer support experience, because it's kind of like, and I'm sure you have had this experience where, like, you call a company and then you talk to talk to a human, and then you kind of know that this person doesn't know what they're talking about, right? And it's just like, a huge turn off, I absolutely do not. Yeah, we see it on your on the place. Yeah, exactly. And I do not want that at all. So that's why, just going back to the thing I said earlier, we have a very rigorous policy on hiring support people. We we do not hire it's not a call center model. We hire only people who fit a certain, uh, certain parameters and characteristics, and we trained them for almost, like, six months to a year before they get on the phone, because we do not want a person giving the wrong answer, right? And this went counter to all of that, I'm asking a question and it's giving me this bullshit answer. I'm like, this is not going to fly, so we just put the plug on it. We may try it later, and I'm sure, like, I know that AI is getting better and better. So maybe we'll revisit it, but that was like a big no go for us. So we pull the plug on it. So we do not use, like, chat based support. We just went back to it's all human based support. So we get emails, we use, we have an internal case tracking system. It goes in there, and they respond to that. And we get phone calls, and we have, like, a phone routing system we respond to that. So, anytime you interact with Aldo row, it's actually a human, and our entire support team is based here in they're all privately based in Austin, primarily based in the US. I think we have one person Chicago, and then one in LA now. So it's all based in the US. So time zones are taken care of. It's actually a human that you're talking to, but they do use AI tools behind the scenes. So there's always a human in the loop. The human is interface with the customer, but the human itself is using AI tools. They use chat GPT heavily for like, drafting responses so that they don't need to spend like wordsmithing responses. They use other AI tools for researching. We use AI tools for creating videos. So the approach so far that we have taken is that we have not released or we don't have any AI freezing tools that the customer interacts with, but our internal teams use AI. Heavier. Support team uses AI for a lot of different things. Dev team uses AI for like code generation and like testing generation, all that. Marketing team uses AI for all kinds of things, right? Like content creation and and research Adil Saleh 42:28 is a big customer research, like for all your bigger accounts, for all the cadences and QBRs, business reviews, all of this you can use like, we use that, yeah, yeah. Jagath Narayan 42:38 Sales team uses it heavily for, like, sales calls, recording and then figuring out the next steps. So we as a company are using AI heavily, but we don't have an AI facing tool for the customer just, just going back to, I mean, I see a lot of companies slapping on the AI label, right? Because that's a hard thing, right? And if you're raising money and investors value higher and and that's a pattern, like, four or five years ago, everyone was talking about, like, everyone wanted to slap on what the web three and whatever the crypto. Yeah, crypto before that, I remember there was this space where, like, I there was bots. Like, Facebook had made bots very popular, so everyone was like, we support bots. So I hate that, because it's, it's all just like Bs, and I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to slap on a label for the sake of it. If we, and we are actually doing like, we are doing some research, and we had a hackathon last week where we were experimenting with AI to look at. So for a given customer, how do we look at, can we feed that into an AI model, and they can look at the entire order history of that customer and then give them predictions, say, or Adil Saleh 43:52 training, training and fine tuning your LLM for you, use cases are super important. The prompt is super important. You know, co pilots and agents. They're all for real, but it's, it takes a lot of time for you to do the right engineering to fine tune them, because they're, like, they're operating wide, you know, talk about customer success, like, there, there's like, like, five or six different models within Customer Success organizations and across different journeys, different segments, based on the size, based on the industry. So for them to understand customer success, and data is so wide. So for like, what we're working on, quite honestly, is, like, we have this one agent that we are training, and we're making sure that they, you know, has all the ins and outs of customer success organization, from one organization to another, one industry, like 1516, different industry we are training or not, and then we are training smaller agents that are more specific. Let's say CS agent for only, SMBs, like digital touch. They're not, like, going to be, like, hands on, or white lab, and then they're like, four or five different agents. So it is taken, like, it's already been, like, more than five months. We're doing, like, all the fine tuning engineering we. Hired a couple of people full time onto this because experimentation at Pace takes a lot of resources. So previously, we were like thinking that we, two co founders, will do it all ourselves, but there's so many use cases that you you only get to know once you experiment. So for that, you need to have a bandwidth. So doing it at Pace internally, I know that you you're also, you know, thinking about like how you can do it support at scale, not just to, you know, save the bandwidth, but do it at scale for even the smaller customers, they feel urban, when you you have this system, this, if AI is something that you guys can train, or you can train a Finn is one example, like, I personally used intercom. And the way they have, they've approached, you know, the support they, I think they're the first movers into Jagath Narayan 45:50 they were the first movers. Yeah, I did. So I was evaluating them while they were still in beta, and I have not looked at them in a while. I'll take another look at it. But the, I think they were like, one of the first, first to move into the space. As soon as chat GPT came out, and everyone started talking about it, these guys started building their own version, which is Finn. Adil Saleh 46:07 I was, I was just listening to the cc of GitHub. She was talking about Finn and how they've, like, resolved, like, 85% of their tickets in no time. And like, she was giving the comparison and all of that, there was so inspiring love that. So, Jagad, one last thing I wanted to talk touch a little bit about, about your culture. You mentioned that you, all of your team is, is mostly in the in the US, and, of course, in the in this, in the same time zone, in the in the central so what kind of culture that you're looking at, like, what kind of DNA you guys have, like, any kind of operating principles that you have, like, you need to make sure that everybody lives it every single day. I know that it's there's like, there's some written on the wall, but you got to make sure that you as leaders. You got to make sure that you instill those with and people that are that are growing with you as as humans and, you know, and then becoming leaders. So yeah, what is that culture at all? Yeah, Jagath Narayan 46:59 it's not. So I don't have anything written on the wall, and it's kind of very difficult to define the characteristics you're looking for, because if I were to write down, it will come up with the usual things, like, they need to be, like, curious and hungry to learn and all of that stuff, right? So the way we actually do this process is, as we interview, we can see, I think, do they how much do they care about quality? Quality is extremely important for us. So in fact, the way we measure our customer support team, we don't measure them based on how fast did you respond, or how many minutes did you spend on the phone and all of that. We actually measure them based on the quality of the response. And the proxy for that is, was this customer ultimately happy, right? And if a customer writes a review for it, that's a huge testament that they really like the interaction. So I would say we care a lot about the quality of the interaction, tan about hitting a particular deadline or like getting this tongue done within a certain space. So a lot of it is about the very human aspect and can this person so that's why we we don't hire, like pretty much all of our support people, they did not come from a customer support background. And what I've seen is that anytime we interview someone who comes from a support team of another company, there are lot of bad habits that they bring in which they have to be willing to unlearn, because our support team does not operate like most of the other teams that you have seen. So I would say that's the characteristic on the support side, on the sales side, we have, I have had, like, lot of Miss hires. There you were, the typical image that you think of when you think of a sales person, like a high pressure, pushy sales person who's like, constantly on your case that doesn't that hasn't really worked for us, because for a lot of our customers, right? They are making these are, we are selling directly to the founder or the owner of a business. So they are writing the check, it's their money, and they are super careful, and they need to do a thorough evaluation, and they take their own time, and they can founders have this unique ability of, like, detecting where the bullshit detector is very high, right? So you can't just be AC aware, like, try to sell them. So we the kind of, in fact, my number one sales person who's been with me for six years. He came, He did not come from a sales background. He came from an accounting background. And the reason, the reason why he's so successful is that he was an accountant at another smaller e commerce brand, so he can relate to the person on the other side of the screen right. He knows exactly what the paints are, and that's how we sell. So we sell a lot based on understanding their needs and then seeing the problem, solution fit. And then if you can solve the problem, our price point is like, it's totally affordable for them. So prices never a concern. If you can they they really care about like, and that's the way even I operate too, right? When I'm buying software, I am my price elasticity is like, I'm well, tolerant. If you can really solve the problem for me, I. And I'm willing to pay for it, so I don't. I almost never sign up for, like, Adil Saleh 50:03 Zen. Price is never a question. Yeah, if the problem is big enough, solving price is never a question. Yeah, exactly. My Jagath Narayan 50:08 one of my favorite quotes there is, like, I cannot afford free software because I need, I care. My time is more valuable than using something for free, so I actually need to pay for something. So yeah, I think that culture, it's a difficult thing to answer. I don't have, like, a canned answer for it. We have ways to extract it out during our interview process. Our interview process is very elaborate. At the end of it, we know exactly what we're getting into. And then we we, is Adil Saleh 50:32 it like? My meaning was, like, is it more like very much closed or like very much jelling, like you do events, you'd like internal team events. Or how do you conduct it? Like different activities, and outside of the work, what is, you know the Yeah. Jagath Narayan 50:50 So we were fortunate with that, because we had till COVID. Our entire team was based in Austin. We were all in one office, right? And so from around what 2011 till 2020, almost like nine years or so. Everybody was sitting in the same office and the like, very tight relationships. And these people have known each other for like five, six years on average. After COVID, we went fully remote. So everyone works from home. Lot of us are still in Austin, so we can actually meet up in like a we work or something. So we still do like so for example, last week, when we did the hackathon, we flew in some of the people who were remote into Austin, and we all hung out after that on Friday, they all went and did some activity together. So yeah, we keep doing those kind of events, and we have, like, still, like, Zoom birthday lunches for people. So yeah, we focus a lot on internal culture and team building. Because to me, ultimately, the relationship between team members is extremely important. And put that too for a small team like us, if there's friction there, it's super obvious for everyone, and the whole thing breaks down. So I do spend a lot of mental energy to make sure that the team is operating in unison, and all these feedback loops are in place, and they are working really well. And I spent a lot of energy, I would say 90% of my energy in the very early days. But I still, like think about it. This is the, I think that's the reason for our success, that the team has to operate really well. And then I focus a lot on that, Adil Saleh 52:11 yeah, making them, you know, feel comfortable and ambitious and motivated to get the best work out of them. That's, that's, that's, been the job, obviously, you 100 years back, exactly today, exactly, Jagath Narayan 52:23 yeah, yeah, okay, maybe building the right environment for them all to thrive. That's basically the way I think about it. Yeah, Adil Saleh 52:29 perfect. So you got, like, you've already gone into year 2025, of course, a lot of people that have like ambitions in their like targets and goals, revenue, goals and what makes you excited this year, product wise, only, like, I know that. I mean, I have this notion, because I've spoke to more than 130 you know, products in like 50 plus different industries with this AI evolution, the gap in the tech enable e commerce, retail, like inventory and drop shipping being one of those alongside like oil and gas and other industries. So for innovators, for entrepreneurs, it's slightly, I would say, tricky, but it's easiest and smartest to, you know, make it happenable And make innovation and make a billion dollar unicorn business. I'm not saying, per se for the tag. I'm not saying for the tech, but, but, but for the success of it as a business. So how do you see this opportunity when it comes okay, you know, applies the AI applies all the, you know, other things that are getting tech enabled, like account is accounting is getting big time technical. My brother is a charger corner in Deloitte. Deloitte, and they are now transforming entire internal portal, tooling. ERP, all of this is they're trying to, you know, of course, save their costs, optimize their costs, and make the processes efficient. So there is an opportunity in retail. How do you see it as a CEO? Yeah, Jagath Narayan 53:50 so just as a time check, I need to be on another call at like 10, which is in about a minute. I can probably stay for a couple more minutes, and you can wrap it up, and you can just make a question out from the interview, she want Sure, so, so to answer that question. So the way I see this market is, I'm an E commerce, which is a very fast growing market, right? Shopify is leading the space. They don't done amazingly well. Amazon is, like, doing great. Walmart's Like, seriously competing with them. And I see a lot of growth coming into this Amazon. I think, I think 50% of their revenue on the marketplace comes from third party sellers, as a statistic like that. So these smaller brands, particularly in the US, fueling the E commerce system, is continuing to grow, and that's what we're plugged into. So I foresee that we are in the market that's going to continue to grow at least for the next 10 years. And AI is going to simplify a lot of things for people. They're still like my philosophy is that there's always going to be human in the loop, but AI is going to make the humans in the loop super efficient, and we will see those efficiency drive into the growth that E commerce is facing, either through on the marketing side or product. Innovation and all of that. So I think the space is going to continue to evolve really fast, and I feel like we are well poised to grow in that obviously we have as, just like any company, we have our own those challenges, or how do we create more awareness within our customer base and find the right channels to to market and reach our customers. So those are the usual challenges, and then we internally use AI as a tool to figure out how to be solved that on the marketing side, yeah, I think I expect to see continued growth over the next 10 years. And then if we hit the right notes there, I think we can see, like a pivot, like a step function improvement in the rate which you enjoy. Truly Jagat, Adil Saleh 55:43 really appreciate. Sorry for being late. We're pretty much on time. Thank you very much for all this conversation and all this concrete knowledge and being so genuine about it. We've learned a lot, and lot of people going out and listening to this episode when it's live in a week time, we'll learn more awesome. Jagath Narayan 56:00 Yeah, it was a lot of fun talking to you and talking to you, and I really enjoyed it. And I've done some of these shows, but I think this one has been like it was really good. So thanks for great questions and allowing me to just Adil Saleh 56:10 share, share my story. It's my pleasure only. Thank you very much. Awesome. Thank you Jagath Narayan 56:15 so much. All right, take care, later. Bye.