How Shoppable CEO Heather Udo grew Shoppable to $10.5M revenue and 438 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest is heather marie she is the founder and ceo of a company called shopable a technology company that helps media companies brands and retailers bring the checkout experience to anywhere a consumer discovers or engages with their products while the shoppable sorry while with shopable she won the 2013 women in digital award from l'oreal and was named one of the 10 most powerful millennials in manhattan i love that title by gotham magazine and one of the 11 tech gurus changing the luxury game by refinery29 the company was a 2014 webby award honoree for online shopping a 2016 webinary for technical achievement and named one of the 100 brilliant companies by entrepreneur magazine heather are you ready to take us to the top yep absolutely my gosh you're winning awards all over the place so do you own new york city yet not yet just a small part of it it's a small goal right small goal exactly so tell us about the company tell us you know what it does specifically yeah so we um you know uh kind of taking it from from the top here we created a technology that essentially lets you purchase anything that you see anywhere online so if you think about e-commerce in general you can of course purchase things directly on any retailer's website but if you think about everything else that exists from social media to blogs to publishing content to ads videos everything else you see as consumers were discovering products so many other places and prior to shoppable there was no way to really make anything shoppable unless it was a shop itself so what we're doing is we've created patent pending technology that we're bringing to all these different locations outside of traditional retail shops to create shoppable experiences so like you have this beautiful chicken and egg problem right like it won't work unless you get a lot of these retailers actually using it so as a consumer like me when i go and see my friend wearing a pair of jeans on facebook i can click it and buy it from whatever the gene company is right how do you solve that yep yeah um great question so we um when i first started the company in in 20 um 2011 um have to go way back but when i first started that was definitely a huge problem which was how do we you know decide who to go which one to get first and um you know of it was we found we kind of pitched the concept um to a number of different retailers got their um kind of loose buy-in enough to say you know these brands are coming on board and then bring them to find our launch partner and we actually launched the technology with the wall street journal um during the holidays and by having them on board they actually you know as someone with the wall street journal that caliber of um branding and that that type of company was able to bring in a bunch of retailers and advertisers that they already work with and then that kind of helped fulfill the need of the products out of the gate for that particular partnership and it really created this amazing flywheel type of experience where once they were onboarded in general for them they were onboarded for the next company and the next company and the next company so you have to start somewhere and start small but we've grown tremendously since since then so in last year 2016 how many just individual transactions were processed through your platform would you estimate uh we don't share specific transaction um level but as far as like on the the product catalog side of things we um have grown to um just under 30 million um products across the whole platform yeah but see heather i'm gonna ask this question again because like that doesn't necessarily mean anything like like here's what i mean i go to your website and i see the marketplace with most popular stuff listed here but then i look at your your alexa ranking and it's super low which means people necessarily aren't seeing these like the key to making your thing work is they have to see this ralph lauren black and white striped scarf like on somebody on instagram or on facebook like you have to make the sale happen there like which is maybe why you don't share you know you know transaction numbers like how do you solve that problem uh well so we solve it by so we actually are not about um bringing people to shoppable.com it's about bringing the technology to where consumers already are so integrating the technology across a number of other different websites can you give me an example i would love to actually see that yeah sure so like going to um like going to let's go to um like dove.com it isn't easy yeah d-o-v-e and then um if you click the product tab yep and then just click on anything okay okay got it well it might take you a second to load but once you get um get into product detail pages um everything you see here is powered through shoppable so without shoppable um an incredible brand like like dove didn't have the ability to sell products um from walmart and walgreens and target and all their favorite retailers on their own website they had to redirect consumers off their site and weren't able to make that final make that connection uh directly for their for their customers so they've integrated shoppable technology and if you click through um i can't see what you're looking at i'm buying i'm buying i'm buying the white beauty bar right now because this face needs more beauty baby that is a very popular product so you go go through that and you'll see all the way through to the checkout experience you're able to stay directly within that experience where you're getting all that product information where you you've um seen that product so on the back end this is like less yeah this is like less about sorry i had this misplaced in my brain this is less about influencer marketing right buying stuff you see on facebook and social and more about letting these brands that didn't have sophisticated backends to even have their own merchandise on their website and you giving them the tool set to be able to do that yep yeah it's well it's um we bring the technology to uh a number of different types of companies one um you know big category for us are um major um fortune 100 brands and cpg companies like like the dub example we're looking at um but yeah we've done stuff um shoppable things with other types of publishers like i mentioned the wall street journal and conde nast and time bank what would wall street journal sell like their digital publication or their print publication um digital okay it's all digital interesting and and so what's your business model how do you make money so we um we uh charge it it's basically sas so we charge an annual license fee for access to the the technology and creating a shoppable experience on on someone's site or app or um video ad etc and do you is that license i imagine you have all kinds of cohorts big and small so i'll just ask a generic question what's the average shoppable customer paying you um we don't share that out outside well give me give me a big range it stays vague as vegas you want to have it um it's typically i mean it's an annual license so it's it's typically in the five figures okay got it and is the is it being you know way more than five figures or way less than five figures dependent on like what specific metrics is it is it number of skus is it number of average checkouts what are the levers that you pull there uh so it depends upon a few different things part of it is excuse part of it um is the size of the site an api call so you know some are obviously significantly bigger than others and then other things you know like service tiers things like that got it okay now that we kind of know more about how the business operates tell us the juicy stuff the story so 2011 was launch date huh uh well we started in 2011 we launched in 2012. so what were you doing before 2011 before 2011 um i was so i was post acquisition at monster.com just before that so i had been on the founding team of um a digital media company called affinity labs and uh there i was there i was the ceo's chris michael and um you know it was his idea and his um genius behind everything but um you were at monster no at uh affinity labs at affinity okay it was pre-monster yeah and then um but i was there from the time it was a powerpoint and um led sales and business development and account management and sales ops you know was it kind of a team of one for a while then monster.com acquired that company in um well don't quote me but um a couple years like what are we talking like 2008 2005. yeah i want to say 2008 2009 around around that time okay so just to be clear you were in the did you do the agency right out of college uh no it wasn't an agency it was digital media it was a digital sorry sorry i keep saying agency yeah digital media that was called affinity did you do that right out of college i did yes okay so college affinity digital media you're bought by monster is there an earn out do you guys have to all stay on um so it was it was all cash but then additional incentives afterwards so i stayed um i um i made it two years after the acquisition that's pretty good most don't make it that long i think of the original i'm trying to think of like the five people that were there at the beginning i there may have been one other person still there when i left but they may have all gone too i may have been the last one of the five so i stayed there until i was ready to to leave and um had been um...