Dr. Jeremy Weisz 16:44
Yeah. Shaun, it’s super interesting because it’s almost a lot of these things are SaaS-like, right? I remember when I had the founder of I had the founder of Jotform on, they have 25 million users, over 25 million users. And one of the things he talked about was the free, not just a free trial, but like a free version, right? Yeah. That people can use. And then obviously if you want more features and whatever you have to, you have to end up paying at some point. But I don’t know. So it’s really interesting how you do things differently as an agency. So obviously the onboarding is different, right? Obviously having a free trial is different. What are some of the other ways that you have kind of. Buck the norm?
Shaun Brandt 17:32
Yeah, I think the onboarding is a big one. Then we took a lot of the administrative stuff. Like I said, when the because our clients are purchasing through a website versus an administrator sending an invoice, getting all their wire details right, like 99 out of 100 payments that Oddit takes are via credit card. That’s a huge change from an agency, right? Where you’re billing 25% upfront.
Then you’re chasing the middle payment. Then you’re chasing the last payment after you’ve already delivered the work. We’re taking all money upfront. 99% of the time before we’ve even started. So the major shift from here for us is cash flow. We have a way different cash flow model than a traditional agency because at least in my experience with the two agencies that we ran, your cash flow is primarily with most clients, Net 90, right? You’re billing them a small amount upfront to get them in the door, get them under contract. Then you’re billing them 1 to 2 times, whether it’s in the middle and the end, or all at the end. And even if you say net 30, we all know the client is going to pay net 90 or more and you’re going to be chasing them and it’s going to cost you hours and time and stress. Charging upfront is almost a non-starter.
You either pay up front — in some cases if it’s a really big book. We have certain clients that have very big contracts with us for Oddits. We’ll let them pay 50-50. But one thing we do different than an agency in traditionally is if you decide to pay 50-50, you do not receive a single piece of work until the fifth. The final 50 is paid.
So let’s say it’s six weeks of work. You pay the 50 upfront before we send you anything, we give you a week notice. Hey, your Oddit report is going to be there in seven days. Eight days, whatever. Here’s the link to pay the 50% remaining. If it takes you 120 days to pay that, no problem. You just don’t see any work. And you won’t. We won’t send that email until you pay it. And again, a lot of these things, when we started, I was quite fearful that it was just going to be like, man, who the hell do these guys think they are, right?
Because that’s what I would have said if I was a client. But for some reason, we get no pushback on it. None. Three years we haven’t I haven’t. We’ve had maybe one customer who wasn’t a customer, just like a lead who was like, this doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t agree with this. One out of, like, tens of thousands. Everyone else was, like, interesting. This makes sense. It’s crazy to me because I thought it was going to be like half the people that were interested would be like, no, fuck this, but it’s not it.
It’s almost like it’s what customers wanted. Or at least our customers wanted. They wanted that. It’s almost like this commanding, ending. You know, you hear how I talk. Like we’re very straightforward, we’re very frank, and we’re very upfront, right? There’s nothing hidden. There’s nothing. There’s nothing like we’re not doing the calls. We’re not doing the feedback loops, we’re not bullshitting. But we also don’t charge you for it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 20:37
What’s interesting, Shaun, is I find about this process is that it makes it easy for people to do business with you. Obviously, you want to try it. Go ahead. There’s actually a free trial. You can go do it. And if you, like it even obviously we’re here on the free trial website. But like you can look and see. You have a page of check out the reports. Right. So if people want to go what do the reports look like.
You can kind of see the before and after. What was that? I’m curious. You know from the free trial, the free version, you get something. Was this a hard decision to do? Because like, you’re like, this does take time like this is an automated software, right? I mean, something comes in, it’s your team. And I’m curious if it evolved over time. Like, did you go well in your maybe in your mind or even on the site go, we’ll just mark it up and that will be the free trial. And then you change it to mark it up and give them a design, because I could see people that being valuable if you just mark it up, but you’re kind of going a step further here. How is this free trial evolved?
Shaun Brandt 21:47
You know it from day one till now. If you looked at it, it would. It’s evolved aesthetically, like our brand has evolved, but the actual free trial is almost identical, like word for word, asset for asset. And the reason is the reason is we’ve changed it multiple times. We launched an entire digital version where they get their free trial as a link, and they can review the designs.
And you know, we’re upselling and like way more of A sales pitch. And what I realized is the best part about the free trial is it felt so. It was just felt it. And it currently does. It’s so pure of, hey, this is going to help you. You’re welcome. We don’t hound them for a sales call after we don’t push them into a product. It’s just like. And it’s kind of like you said at the start, right? That your business is built on relationships.
It’s the same as mine. If I’m helping people, it’s amazing how much that builds into sales, right? And because we just say, hey, here’s a free design, you literally had to do nothing. I didn’t ask for your credit card. I didn’t ask where you were, I didn’t nothing, I don’t even know your name. Right. So I’m just emailing you a free piece of design. Yeah, a free piece of design. You know, like we get all the time, I get It. Whatever.
John at NYU. Like, I can’t imagine how many students use this free trial to just use it as work in their own education. I don’t really care. Right? Like the work is out there. And like I said, every time we do one, it’s educating my team. They’re getting to flex their design and creative muscles a little bit, and we’re using it for marketing. So I really don’t care if people come in and abuse it. We block every email address from doing two. So that’s, you know, a way to help with that.
But it’s because they’re just getting the output, they’re getting it explained really simply. And because it’s a PDF, that’s one of the key things that has found us success is keeping it really simple. That PDF that explains everything is so shareable across an organization. It’s, you know, that was our solution and our response to, okay, well, how do we pitch this? Right. There’s no calls, there’s no feedback loops. We don’t know a single person on the team. What they want. Whatever. How do we pitch it?
So the report was the pitch, right? Usually what happens in a pitch is we spend three months working on a design or a website. Then we show them v1. Then whoever’s on that call gives feedback, and then after that call, they go and they explain to their team what we said about the feedback. And then that feedback slowly gets diluted across this team, and we end up getting a bunch of feedback from the back row.
That just is totally irrelevant with the report. Everyone who gets to see the work only ever sees the report. So everyone on the team, whether it’s the CEO, the admin, the janitor, I don’t give a shit. They all have the exact same pitch, the exact same context of here’s the change that was made and here’s why it was made. That’s the biggest thing that most agencies don’t do is they just pitch their work like, isn’t this beautiful? Don’t you love this? Isn’t this pretty? We’re not. We don’t. We never say that.
It’s just this change was made functionally for this reason. Yes, it looks prettier, but when we explain it, it’s the function. What’s the result? Why is it this way? Why does your button need to be white? Or why does this type hierarchy need to be more clear? We explain exactly why. So it becomes very hard for customers to give us negative feedback. Because some of 99% of those recommendations, they’re so common sense. It’s like they would almost feel stupid saying, well, I don’t agree with this because it’s such common sense stuff in the way we explain it.
And I think that’s probably the biggest Oddit superpower. On why customers don’t push back much is because it all just makes sense, right? The way we explain it and the way that it’s laid out, it becomes really hard for their team to get confused or have different feedback from each other because they’re all seeing the same thing and they’re all understanding it the same. And the reports are very educational, right at the end of the day, if they actually digest the report the way we intend them to, they should never hire us again because we explain exactly why we’re doing everything. They don’t need they shouldn’t need to hire us again unless they really just need a design team. But from a conversion standpoint and understanding user experience, the goal is to educate in those reports so that their team can do it moving forward. And we don’t need to.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 26:31
We’ll get into that because I know we were chatting about you were saying before we hit record on identifying simple roadblocks, and we’ll talk about that and we’ll maybe go through some of these examples on here. But I do want to talk about the flow for a second and hear about, because I know you think as a company, well, what there’s some expansion of services. Right. And so I can see someone comes in, they’re like, oh, this sounds great. They can get the free trial.
They can get something, they get the value. They’re like, okay, this is awesome. Let me do more pages, right? And let me do more parts of the site. And so they can do more parts of the site. Right. So. What other services are you going to release? And maybe some that you have thought of, but you’re like, that’s not us and we’re not going to release. Yeah.
Shaun Brandt 27:23
We got pressured for three years to do development. We actually have more experience in development than this. But development, like when I say development, it’s basically we’re making all these design recommendations. Who can who’s going to build it right.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 27:40
So you got to go hand it to someone. They’ll build it and they’re like, hey Shaun, thanks for the recommendation. Can you actually go on our site and build this for me?
Shaun Brandt 27:49
Yeah. And we knew for three years we were leaving a ton of money on the table. The billings are higher. It’s, you know, it’s not even in my, like, skill set, right? So technically, for me, it’s kind of hands off if we find the right people.
But I knew from experience, from a decade of doing it, that that’s where the nightmares start, right? It’s super easy for me to be like, oh man, wouldn’t this look great? Wouldn’t this work great. Here’s the beautiful visual. The second that someone tries to build it and fails is where the design all of a sudden starts to suck in the customer’s mind, right?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 28:22
And so the workflow. Right. Okay. We need logins. We need to communicate. Yeah.
Shaun Brandt 28:26
No. Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 28:27
It changes the logistical things. You need changes.
Shaun Brandt 28:31
It changes everything. So we pushed back on it for a long time because you know I think we treated this very much like a lifestyle business. When we started it was three of us. We started during Covid and we were like, we got something here, rented a house in Mexico, lived there for a year, and we just kind of hung out and enjoyed the beach. And when a sale came in, we did.
We did it right. We sold one in our first three months, and as it scaled, we got more and more questions about development more and more, and we just didn’t want to do it. It was just more management. We knew the money was there, the profit was there. but lifestyle wise didn’t make sense. Now we’ve grown to a point where the question is getting kind of annoying. And so we did launch a development department. It’s separate from here. You can’t even find it on our site. So it’s completely siloed, but it’s run by a dev team that has been doing the same thing as we did on the UX side for over a decade.
And they manage the client. They. So it’s our intro from oh, you need help with development. No problem. Here’s Ryan. And so we do it now. But it’s not something that’s ever going to be off the shelf. Hey add your stuff on site type thing. It’s more of a traditional agency model where they’re dealing with the client. We’ve removed a lot of the clutter like we did with Oddit, but it’s not off the shelf.
Buy it with a credit card like it is here. It’s going extremely well. It’s very busy. The one thing that we’ve done that’s very similar to Oddit is we won’t touch secondary pages. So a lot of customers come in and they’re like, we need a brand new website. We’re like, okay, I don’t agree, but sure. And they’ll say, okay, we need all 50 pages redone. And it’s similar to Oddit. We don’t — we very rarely audit more than five pages, because most brands don’t have five templates that are more than five templates that are important, right? Most of them have two.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 30:28
It’s 80 over 20, right? I mean, if you look at a site, it’s like the 20% of pages on that site is producing 80% of the results. So do you really want to modify the other 80% of it’s not making a difference. Is that kind of mentality.
Shaun Brandt 30:43
That and similar to how we talk about kind of bucking that agency trend of just upsell, upsell, upsell, sell, sell, sell. It’d be very easy for me to say, okay, we did your three primary pages for 1750, a page in an Oddit. Let me do your about page for 500 and your blog template for 700 and all this shit. But. And that’s what we would have done in the agency, right?
Let’s find every page in that sitemap and design it. But what we tell customers is, well look, we’ve redesigned your three primary templates 98% of your traffic. Go take the CSS or whoever you’re working with and apply it to those pages because one they’re useless from a conversion standpoint, they’re basically SEO content. So they don’t matter. And I’m not going to bill you and try and convince you that they do matter.
So take everything we’ve given you and just apply it to them yourselves. And we do the same thing with development. We do the primary pages. It’s a per-price page. I don’t care what the page is. It’s just like this. If you’re if you submit for an Oddit Pro and the page is one section long, same price. If it’s 25 sections long — same price, it’s the same with development. It’s the per page price. Certain scenarios will get screwed over on it and certain ones will win.
But in the end over 10,000. It’s always come out pretty even. And the key there is just simplifying again that process for the customer where they’re so used to seeing these crazy quotes like we have incentive, an actual scope of work in the history of Oddit that gets an email being like, okay, here’s what you’re getting, here’s the price, here’s the link. And I think that’s part of what we’re trying to still keep in with the development side is that simplicity and straightforwardness that helps us keep costs down for them.
Jeremy Weisz 32:27
Yeah, I mean, listen when and someone’s ordering something. Me, you do have, even though you know if you’re going to someone’s going to order, there is a, there is page, kind of pretty comprehensive page explaining exactly what they get and everything like that. So everything’s kind of on here for them. I know we talked about identifying simple roadblocks, right? Let’s talk. Can we talk about some of those? What are some of the common mistakes? What are some of those roadblocks you find that sites are making on their pages?
Shaun Brandt 33:03
Yeah, I think a lot of brands, what they miss out on is just a very common sense approach to marketing or to sales. And I always, I always reference retail, and I’ll come back to that. But the main thing that we kind of learn from running a larger agency, when I say larger doesn’t necessarily mean like this big agency, but larger client projects and larger dealing with larger platforms, right? Like we some cases, we would spend six to 12 months designing off flow, one flow, like it had 400 steps right? Like, think, think a massive booking platform with 600 different scenarios and paths. Right? Like, a whole year of designing that and finding, how can we optimize it, and all you’re doing in that process, whether it’s that big of a flow or adding white sox to cart and checkout, both have the exact same issues. Is it clear? Do they understand what they’re doing at this stage and the next stage? And are you being clear? Are you being clever? Right? A lot of brands get into that pitfall of like, one, they think they’re personally funny, and they inject that into it. But two, they want their brand to be funny. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all. But when you’re trying to convert someone or trying to convince them or explain to them what you do, what you’re selling, what’s good about it, it’s just not the place for it.
And time after time, clarity wins when it comes to actually, like, getting someone through a flow. And so one of the biggest things that we’re always fixing is just like, instead of telling them something clever, or, you know, a marketing tag you’d have on a billboard, for instance, let’s just tell them what, what the hell this is, and what makes it great. And that doesn’t need a copywriter that. I really just need the founder to explain to me what makes it great, and then you just, you know, verbatim write that that’s what works. And so copywriting is one of the biggest things that’s completely unrelated to the actual design and UX that we see. And then the other part of it is a lot of them, because the Shopify ecosystem, at least in e-comm in particular, has become so robust, right? There’s so many apps, there’s so many things you can do for upsells, pop-ups, card experiences like there’s so many opportunities to add clutter that that’s what they do, right? It’s a $20-a-month app, so they add the app, and they end up with this crazy ecosystem of clutter that takes away from the primary experience, which is, what are you selling, and why is it great? And generally, what happens is they end up with a lot of stuff that’s just and the bigger issue with Shopify ecosystem is they don’t do much education, right? So when you install an app that does upsells, let’s say they don’t tell you, Hey, make sure you do upsells for these types of products, right? Don’t. Don’t sell them a bike and then upsell another bike. That’s not how upsells work, right? If I’m at Target and I’m buying whatever, a mini fridge I don’t get to check out. And there’s freaking fridges there. There’s gum and chocolate bars and maybe a book, right?
You’re trying to get them to make impulse purchases at the end, not, oh, man, do I need two fridges? Should I go back? What? No, they’re in checkout. You’ve got them with their credit card in their hand. Don’t push them away. And that’s what these tools do, is they’re just like, oh, plug and play. And now I’m buying a snowboard, and they’re upselling me a snowboard. It’s like, you’re never selling me another snowboard. Man. Sell me gloves. So there’s no education in these tools, and a lot of customers just plug them in, let them run. And they don’t do any curation. They don’t do any like, adaptation to what should actually be being surfaced. And so that’s another big issue, and that’s just that upsells is an example, but there’s hundreds of apps that these you can plug in that’s doing the same thing. And then the other thing that we see happening that is one of the biggest barriers, and a lot of it doesn’t have to do the website, is they’re driving, like I said, they’re driving all that traffic, spending all that money, and the ads are great, right? The ads do whatever type of communication.
They’re communicating whatever benefit. But whenever they drive them to the page, it’s not finishing the story. It’s almost like they’re using the ad to just get people interested in the brand, and then whatever page they land on, it’s just whatever the site is, whatever that there’s no like connection, right? It’s not like I started a sentence and then I finished it on the page which sells really well, right? If there’s this common thread, versus just, Hey, do you have, you know, do you need this product? And they push you to a collections page, and now I’m hunting for the product. And the product. And so that connection between the ad and the site is usually pretty unclear. Now, a lot of that isn’t on us. A lot of that like, we don’t manage their ads, so there’s not much I can do about that, but we do try and provide education around how do you how do you create a better thread there, so that the page that you’re pushing to, or the content you’re pushing to is finishing that story, it is finishing that sales pitch, or just reiterating it, like just being really clear about it.
And so I think regardless of who we’re working with, a lot of those things, you know, some of some of them are out of our hands, but when we’re looking at websites, it’s, unfortunately, a lot of the same issues, just because they’re all using the Shopify ecosystem, you know, 90% of our customers, so they’re all using the same templates, the same apps, the same and, you know, we’re just looking at different sites with different images. And so like any design space, a lot of people look to their competitors or their idols, and they say, Okay, well, they did this, so I should do this. And so like any design field, you just see a lot of the same stuff, because people assume, Oh, they I think they’re successful. So that must be working. I’m going to do that. And that’s really just not the case at all. I gave you that example site that is a good example of this. But like very successful brand, you know, whether, let’s say, brands like Yeti, or these aspirational brands, where people can launch a drink, where company through an Amazon reseller and try and build a brand, and they look and like, I want to be like Yeti, and so they look to the Yeti site and they say, Okay, well, they do this, so it must work.
They’re huge. What they don’t account for is that, you know, brands like Nike and supreme and Yeti, they could launch a 404 page, and their customers will find the freaking product and they will buy it. They have so much like, lower barrier to entry for customers to go in, and there’s just so much trust in their brand they don’t need to follow all the stuff that we recommend, because they’ve earned it. They’ve earned the right to not do the norm. Most brands have not. 99.9% of Shopify brands. You have not earned the right to do whatever the hell you want. You’ve earned the right to use a template and make things really clear. That’s it. And I think that’s probably the biggest thing that we see when brands come to us and when we say no, is they say, We really love this site, and it’s a huge brand, and they say we want that. And I’m like, yeah, we can do that. That’s easy, but you’re gonna your sales are going to tank because you’re not that you’re not that brand.
You can’t communicate less. You can’t have this beautiful, minimalist site that shows nothing and doesn’t show pricing and the size selector is a nightmare. And yeah, Zara can do that. Zara can do that because they have such a global brand. You cannot do that because you don’t, and I think that’s a huge pitfall that a lot of brands fall into, is they look to big brands and say they have they’re making money, or they’re successful, that this must be the right way to do it. And unfortunately, that’s just not right.
Jeremy Weisz 41:17
Shaun, I know we have a few minutes left. I do, one of my favorite parts of your page is at the top, I’m gonna, I’ll share my screen for a second, is the Oddit reports. And people can get a feel for kind of what it looks like, but also kind of what you in the team have seen are identifying those simple roadblocks. And we’re right here in the middle of the page here, right you can see Royal Caribbean. You can see chomp. So you can see surreal. So we’ll maybe choose a few and just go through kind of what you see here. But I do have a quick question, very quickly, do you have agencies use you?
I don’t know, maybe as a white label or not white label, because I could see people who work with CPG companies, maybe they run ads, and they’re they basically like, hey, we want, you, know, to get this designed, and they go to your site on behalf of the client. Do you have that use case, or usually brands going directly to you?
Shaun Brandt 42:19
We do. We have quite a few partnerships with agencies in different spaces and in different purposes. So we have quite a few VC firms that use us as a part of their acquisition process. So they’ll acquire a brand they’re, you know, let’s say they have 50, 60 brands in their portfolio. Every time they acquire one, getting an Oddit is part of their process. Their process that’s white-labeled, and they just inject it in as part of their like recommendations when they onboard them. We have agencies that buy mini Oddits, so they’ll charge them for like, three or four free trial sections, and then they use that as part of their pitch when they’re trying to land a client.
We have agencies that, just like you said, they’re running their ads and they want to increase conversion, and they want to increase CAC and all the metrics that are important to them and likely drive their retainer higher if they’re up and they’ll white label a report and give it to the client and help the client implement it. So yeah, quite a few different scenarios. A lot of agencies just buy them for their clients, almost like as part of their retainer, and it’s totally open that it’s Oddit. And then the other half, we charge a small fee to create a white-labeled version of our reports. And then you can order as many as you want, and we just put it in your template.
Jeremy Weisz 43:41
That’s cool. I know we probably only have time for one, because we have one minute here. I don’t know which one would be the best one to just to talk briefly about and what we’re seeing. I see super food nutrition, Kevin Hart. We see fat head. We see, I don’t know, Royal Caribbean. Which one do you want to make? Just a few kind of point out a few things and the changes that were made.
Shaun Brandt 44:07
Let’s look at that. Chomps one. I don’t even know if you can stop this. I think you can. Yeah, I got it. Okay, I just been on the site in a while. So this one like Chomps. I mean, I love Chomps, but I think this isn’t a good this is a good example of brands that have a little bit of cool factor, right the packaging, the brand is kind of playful, and so they try and inject that into the UX, and usually that’s where things get a little bit mucky. And you can’t see here, because these are just images, but each one of those Chomps in that carousel, in their before version.
Jeremy Weisz 44:43
In the before, you can’t. It is clickable. Okay.
Shaun Brandt 44:48
It’s clickable, but that’s the issue, right? I wouldn’t you know just kind of looks like a carousel of images. And so the main thing that we’re getting across here is one make it clear that they’re clickable, right? That what we’ve done is just added a bounding. Box and added what you know would be construed as a button or a call to action. That’s not that complex, but when you see it like this, and I’ve explained that that was clickable, it makes a lot more sense. Yeah. The other thing is.
Jeremy Weisz 45:12
My user behavior on the before would not to click that, because it doesn’t seem like No, no, no.
Shaun Brandt 45:17
And then, like we were talking about before, they’ve injected this long paragraph of, I mean, I’m just reading it quickly.
Jeremy Weisz 45:26
A lot of the snacks need to be complicated. Stick to the basics, zero sugar, plenty of protein and a range of chunkable flavors, yeah.
Shaun Brandt 45:33
Like great, not terrible content. But if we were gonna keep that, it would be six words, zero sugar, whatever. That’s it. I don’t need the marketing fluff. I’m here to shop. And this is this section. Is not the story section. This is where I shop. So if we were to keep that to be one line, Max, probably 10 words, Max. The other thing that we do is you never want to give them an action to take before you’ve given them a reason to take it, right? So in this case, they give the headline, they explain what they do, but I haven’t actually seen the products yet, and so the shop all being up at the top is really weird to me. It’s also in the least accessible location, right? So like, if I’m holding my phone, I mean, unless I’m an alien, my thumbs are at the bottom. So every action on every website, if, if you have a section of the same content, right? When I say section, it’s the same theme, right?
So it’s about us, or whatever. It’s a section of content, the action is always at the bottom, because that’s where it’s most accessible. If you did nothing else in this design but move the button to the bottom, those clicks will go up, just sit, even if it’s accidental clicks, it’ll go up because it’s where their thumbs are. They’re not reaching. And it sounds stupid and lazy, but that’s what happens, right? People don’t click it because it’s not as accessible. And then the third thing that we do, fourth thing maybe, is, we use the action as a communication tool. So they said, shop all we’re saying, Okay, well, you can only see three flavors here. Maybe they didn’t swipe. Maybe they have no idea what you do. Let’s just use it as a communication tool. Shop all nine flavors. So now I’m looking at this section saying, Oh, I’ve seen these three at Costco. And then you get to that button, you’re like, oh, there’s six more. I didn’t know they had six more. And now I’m really interested. I want to click. I’m exploring that there’s a bigger catalog behind this when I can only see three. So there’s a lot of things happening here for all those little, minor changes, but that’s kind of the mentality behind those simple tweaks and why we would recommend them.
Jeremy Weisz 47:41
Yeah, I love it. First of all, thank you, Shaun, thanks for sharing your journey, your story. Everyone. Check out Oddit.co, if you’re interested, they do have a free trial. You could just, you know, check it out, send it around to other companies that you think would be interested. And we will see everyone next time. Shaun, thanks so much.
Shaun Brandt 48:05
Thanks. Jeremy, appreciate it.
