Product Startup Podcast Episode 187: eCommerce Strategy for Hardware

00:00:00 Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn from the SVP of a major e-commerce data platform on best practices for

00:00:05 Kevin Mako: launching and scaling a new hardware product via direct-to-consumer online sales.

00:00:10 Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, a show to learn from top leaders in product development, prototyping, manufacturing, product selling, and everything in between.

00:00:18 Narrator: Hosted by Kevin Mako, the leading expert on product development for physical product startups, sponsored by PTC's two best-in-class 3D CAD product development software solutions,

00:00:26 Narrator: Onshape and Creo, and produced by Mako Design + Invent, the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored specifically to

00:00:34 Kevin Mako: startups, small manufacturers, and inventors.

00:00:37 Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today I'm very excited to introduce Lamees Butt to the show. Lamees is the senior vice president of Zoovu, a 250-person e-commerce

00:00:45 Kevin Mako: company that works with hardware startups all the way through to some of the leading hardware brands in the world.

00:00:50 Kevin Mako: She has spent over 15 years in the world of e-commerce tools, working with brands such as Mercedes-Benz, 3M, Microsoft, and more. Today, Lamees is going to share some valuable

00:01:00 Kevin Mako: knowledge from vendor startups and small manufacturers on what product discovery is for e-commerce products. How to get potential customers to find your product and how to maximize

00:01:08 Kevin Mako: the success of return on ad spend for scaling up e-commerce sales for your new hardware product invention. Now on to the episode.

00:01:16 Kevin Mako: Hi, Lamees, welcome to the show. Hey, Kevin. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited today to talk to you about perfecting e-commerce sales, especially for new hardware products.

00:01:26 Kevin Mako: You've been in the space for 15 years. You've worked a number of different You've got a really good insight to what works and what doesn't work when trying

00:01:35 Kevin Mako: to both discover a new innovative hardware product. How do people find your product? How do prospective customers discover your product that solves either

00:01:44 Kevin Mako: the pain point that they're having or the opportunity that they're looking to achieve?

00:01:49 Kevin Mako: And you've seen that from the discovery point all the way through to the customer interaction and then closing the sales.

00:01:54 Kevin Mako: And you've got some fantastic evidence and some fantastic data in and around building e-commerce sales to really.

00:02:00 Kevin Mako: convert better to sell more product online to customers, especially for new hardware products.

00:02:05 Kevin Mako: Before we get into all of that, just give us a quick backstory to how you got to be the success

00:02:10 Lamees Butt: story they are today. Sure. Well, I think it all started probably in my late teens. I was just a curious individual

00:02:16 Lamees Butt: and I'd probably say a good word to define me was a rebel in the nicest sense. I always was somebody that questioned things.

00:02:23 Lamees Butt: And so questioning the status quo, questioning how to do things better. And I fell into digital transformation very early on. And it was actually during my

00:02:31 Lamees Butt: university or college years, as you guys call it, that I wanted to do a bit of a side hustle,

00:02:36 Lamees Butt: recognized that I needed a bit more money and started to do a personal shopping side hustle.

00:02:41 Lamees Butt: I'm sure a lot of your listeners, I'm saying I'm probably sure you are too, shopping online as it pertains to fashion and clothes is incredibly hard.

00:02:49 Lamees Butt: How do you find the right outfit? That was something that personally I was doing one-to-one helping people. But actually, I realized I wanted to scale this,

00:02:58 Lamees Butt: started a company called My Manikin, which essentially was an app that you would come to be asked a series of questions and it would aggregate an outfit for you

00:03:06 Lamees Butt: from all of the top brands that you'd actually said that you'd liked and you could then purchase those products as an aggregated basket straight to your door.

00:03:14 Lamees Butt: And that was really kind of the genesis of me realizing I had such a huge passion for bridging that gap between brick and mortar and e-commerce.

00:03:22 Lamees Butt: And that kind of journey has taken me through to corporate working for Mercedes-Benz and helping

00:03:28 Lamees Butt: them digitize how they sell cars and then now on to Zubu where I've really been working with

00:03:33 Lamees Butt: the company to help brands, retailers and manufacturers supercharge their e-com experience

00:03:38 Kevin Mako: and help customers find the right products for them in the most streamlined way. That's amazing. What great experience.

00:03:44 Kevin Mako: So I want to talk about first things first, just describing what product discovery is because that's such a critical part, especially as a new hardware startup.

00:03:52 Kevin Mako: you've got something that the world has never seen before. You're also a new brand.

00:03:57 Lamees Butt: So how do people find out about your product? It's such a good question. And especially kind of in the hardware space as

00:04:03 Lamees Butt: well, because I can imagine, right, if it could be hardware where you have technical specifications around the product itself.

00:04:10 Lamees Butt: But how do you get those technical specifications to be human language? Like if you imagine, the best example I would give is when you go in the store, let's just say we're

00:04:19 Lamees Butt: looking for a laptop. When I go in store, I'm having a conversation. with a sales person and they're probably going to ask me a series of questions around what am I going

00:04:26 Lamees Butt: to use the laptop for, for school or for work, or am I studying with it? What are you going to be doing on the laptop? And I'd say, well, I like to blog a lot.

00:04:34 Lamees Butt: I travel a lot and I like to store everything on my laptop. And instantly, he'd be able to say, right, this is the laptop for you. But if I go

00:04:41 Lamees Butt: online and I go to Walmart or I go to New Egg, Best Buy, I have to know how much CPU I need, how much RAM I need. And I don't even know what those acronyms mean.

00:04:51 Lamees Butt: And so how do you get to a place as a hardware company to take that technical specification and turn it into a conversation online.

00:04:58 Lamees Butt: And that really is what product discovery and Zubu solves. It's being able to put that

00:05:04 Kevin Mako: conversation to the customer and really guide them to the right product for them based on their needs. That's a really amazing description.

00:05:12 Kevin Mako: I think it's something that's overlooked, especially for new people in the e-commerce space. You can't just simply put your product on the internet and sales

00:05:20 Kevin Mako: roll in. You have to figure out how do you actually attract the intent of the correct buyer so that they

00:05:27 Kevin Mako: come to your particular product through certain triggers, which I think is what you're really talking about here in terms of those human factor questions.

00:05:35 Kevin Mako: People aren't looking at your invention. If you've made the next greatest mouse trap, they're not simply typing in next greatest mouse trap into Google.

00:05:42 Kevin Mako: They're typing in either the problem that they're running into or the solution that they're looking for or simply other human oriented questions. So to get

00:05:50 Kevin Mako: really good at e-commerce, whether you're selling on Amazon or Walmart online or a number of other players, even your own website, could be even a crowdfunding campaign.

00:05:58 Kevin Mako: There's lots of mediums in which to sell online. But across all of them have this common threat. You need to have that

00:06:03 Kevin Mako: human factor in order to attract the people originally with the secondary questions or the

00:06:09 Lamees Butt: secondary intent behind the product, not just the name of the product or the product itself. I think you're absolutely right.

00:06:16 Lamees Butt: And also just to enhance what you're saying there is the power of having a connected customer experience. So understanding where and when your customers like

00:06:26 Lamees Butt: to shop, because in a world where, let's just say your product may have multiple personas,

00:06:31 Lamees Butt: what you're going to need to do is understand each of those personas deeply and target them in

00:06:36 Lamees Butt: the right area. So let's just say you have a persona for your mousetrap or whatever it is that we're using here. And let's say the first persona is from the ages of 16 to 25.

00:06:44 Lamees Butt: Those ages are typically going to be discovering on socials, whether that's TikTok or whether that's Instagram, they are going to be shopping and converting through that medium.

00:06:53 Lamees Butt: So you better make sure that whatever it is that you're doing kind of on your commerce platform, you're also doing on socials or you're at least driving the funnel up into that

00:07:01 Lamees Butt: point and pulling them through to the endpoint, which should be your website, which at the moment,

00:07:08 Lamees Butt: my view is websites and commerce instances are like indexes. They're just libraries of products.

00:07:14 Lamees Butt: And what we need to do to be successful in e-commerce is really provide the right navigation to help your customers get to their destination, which is the product for their need.

00:07:23 Lamees Butt: So how do we do that? I mean, I can sit here and brag about Zoovu all day long, but ultimately, you need to engage in a form of product discovery.

00:07:31 Lamees Butt: And so that could be a series of things. I'll break it down into two parts. So the first part is understanding of product data.

00:07:38 Lamees Butt: You will have a series of product data, whether that's kind of in an Excel file or it's stored and managed in a PIM platform, so a product information management platform.

00:07:48 Lamees Butt: You have an understanding of your product data. What we need to be able to do is take all of that and translate it into human language

00:07:54 Lamees Butt: so we can power these discovery conversations. And this is where the magic happens. So the discovery conversations can be digital assistance.

00:08:02 Lamees Butt: So having almost like clickable question and answers to help you drive to the right product. It could also be chat formats.

00:08:08 Lamees Butt: So let's just say you know that your customers hit the search bar the moment they land on your website because they're searching for something.

00:08:14 Lamees Butt: But the moment we start to see that they're typing mouse trap, we know there's intent there to buy a mouse trap.

00:08:19 Lamees Butt: And we can power a question to say, what are you going to be using this for?

00:08:23 Lamees Butt: I mean, obviously they're going to be using it to catch mice, or it could even be, you know, a burglar, a burglar deterrent or whatever it is.

00:08:29 Lamees Butt: It doesn't want to understand what it is. We can start to drill down to get to the right product or series of products.

00:08:35 Lamees Butt: And then the third one that's also really powerful is visual configurators. This starts to get really powerful when you want to shift and not just think about increasing

00:08:43 Lamees Butt: conversions, but boosting your cart value. Why this is so powerful is if you think about the conversation,

00:08:49 Lamees Butt: that you have in store with a salesperson, by the end of that conversation, if they're a good salesperson, you will be buying that product.

00:08:56 Lamees Butt: But you've also developed a really important thing, which is trust. And so if that salesperson recommends the associated products with that,

00:09:03 Lamees Butt: so the accessories that are compatible with that laptop, the keyboard, the Bluetooth mouse,

00:09:07 Lamees Butt: I'm going to buy it because I don't want to spend my time researching, which is the right compatible accessories for that tool or that laptop. And the same premise exists online.

00:09:17 Lamees Butt: And so with visual configurators, what you're able to do is go through that series of questions,

00:09:21 Lamees Butt: be surfaced the right product for you, but then visually configure your bundle and then click

00:09:26 Kevin Mako: Add to Car and purchase. This is so powerful. I want to highlight something that you brought up in there, specifically around the features and specifications.

00:09:34 Kevin Mako: You refer to it as the PIM, so the product information manual or guide or whatever else. It's some basically series of specifications about your product, and especially as a

00:09:43 Kevin Mako: a hardware startup, you get very engaged with the features because you've been working on them.

00:09:48 Kevin Mako: Sometimes for over a year, many years, potentially depending on the type of product and the complexity. And you get really into the weeds of your own product.

00:09:55 Kevin Mako: You understand it explicitly. You really are so fascinated by all the technological feats that you were able to achieve with your

00:10:03 Kevin Mako: designers and engineers and manufacturers to be able to accomplish the vision you had for your product. But the end customer sees it very different.

00:10:10 Kevin Mako: As we mentioned before, they're looking to either solve a pain point or help with an opportunity. That's the human factors.

00:10:17 Kevin Mako: So one of the easiest things that you mentioned, especially that a hardware startup can do, is just write down your list of specifications.

00:10:24 Kevin Mako: And when you have that list of specifications, figure out how you're going to humanize them. How are you going to create those specs from being a quantified metric

00:10:32 Kevin Mako: to being something that's very interesting and captivating to the actual problem that the customer is trying to solve for?

00:10:39 Kevin Mako: And if you could do that, that creates that element of trust and all these other great things that you're talking about.

00:10:44 Kevin Mako: That will increase the conversion value because you're really. able to essentially translate and educate the customer on what your product is beyond the technical

00:10:54 Kevin Mako: specifications. And that's a big part of sales, whether it's e-commerce or face-to-face sales.

00:10:58 Kevin Mako: You have to bring the product off the page, get it out of the specifications, and really start

00:11:03 Lamees Butt: identifying and selling the value that your product is going to provide to that customer. It's absolutely right. And we see it a lot with some of the customers that we work with,

00:11:13 Lamees Butt: whether it is the consumer retail-type products of the laptops or the vacuums,

00:11:18 Lamees Butt: Dyson understand the exact same, that their customers are trying to find or trying to solve a problem that they're having.

00:11:24 Lamees Butt: And actually, bizarrely, I am in the market for a new vacuum right now. I don't know what's the right vacuum for the series of floors that I have in my

00:11:32 Lamees Butt: house. I have some wood flooring. I also have some carpet, but I also have some rugs and they're quite fluffy rugs.

00:11:37 Lamees Butt: And so I want to make sure that the vacuum that I'm buying is going to be appropriate for all of those needs because I wanted to pick up the dust and all of those things.

00:11:44 Lamees Butt: How do I ensure that me as the consumer wants to purchase is mapped to the right product in the most streamlined way?

00:11:54 Lamees Butt: Also a very important point. We're coming into a place now where most people, time is the most precious commodity.

00:12:00 Lamees Butt: And if we can help our consumers find those products in a way that's easy that they don't have to then drop off and do the research and all of those

00:12:08 Lamees Butt: things, you're going to have retention. So the lifetime value of your customers, they're going to

00:12:12 Lamees Butt: keep coming back to you because of the service and the customer centricity that you've given them by wanting to understand them better, which kind of takes me onto a

00:12:21 Lamees Butt: thought about insights, which I think is really powerful as well. Understanding your customer, even post-purchase, how did that conversation perform as it pertains to conversion?

00:12:30 Lamees Butt: And how often did that specific digital conversation lead to a conversion or lead to a growth in basket size and how how can we optimize that?

00:12:40 Lamees Butt: And so AI is obviously a very spoken about term. Everybody talking about it, claims to know what it is. But I think what to be really careful of is think about applied AI.

00:12:49 Lamees Butt: When you're speaking to companies and they say that they do AI, ask the question,

00:12:53 Lamees Butt: what is your applied AI? How do you actually use AI within your platform and see the answer?

00:12:58 Lamees Butt: Because the way that Zoovu engages with AI is weaved in throughout our platform. But one of the most powerful ways is being able to build kind of the machine

00:13:07 Lamees Butt: learning models because each time these digital experiences are used, we're constantly learning. We're learning and then guess what?

00:13:14 Lamees Butt: We can recommend the best sequence of questions to drive a conversion. And that becomes incredibly

00:13:20 Kevin Mako: powerful when you want to take all of that data at scale and plug that into a marketing system in order to retarget.

00:13:26 Kevin Mako: I think this is a really great use of relevant AI, even to a hardware startup that can utilize these sorts of tools because when customers purchase your product

00:13:36 Kevin Mako: online, they go through a whole series of different things in order to get to that purchase button and then subsequently actually make the purchase.

00:13:44 Kevin Mako: It's too difficult, especially as an early stage company or as somebody who's relatively new to e-commerce to truly be able to

00:13:50 Kevin Mako: data map out all of those points and start finding common threads. And I think this is exactly what's happening with these AI platforms.

00:13:57 Kevin Mako: They can look at thousands of data points and say, hey, look, we've recognized that like this particular type of messaging is yielding a higher conversion than anything else.

00:14:05 Kevin Mako: You may not have seen that, even if you have relatively good tracking in terms of where your e-commerce information is coming from, you don't know the whole series of

00:14:12 Kevin Mako: touch points that occurred leading up to that. So what a great application of AI to basically look at

00:14:17 Kevin Mako: all these various data points to say, hey, do you see any common threads? The AI is going to say,

00:14:20 Kevin Mako: yeah, look, there's these three elements that I think are best to accelerate the next versions of your product. And then as you roll those out, it's continuing to learn an AB test.

00:14:29 Kevin Mako: and whatever else, all these fairly advanced marketing tactics for traditional e -commerce advertising that can now be wrapped up into a fairly simple package for the end

00:14:39 Kevin Mako: user being the actual hardware startups selling the product by these are e-commerce platforms. So I appreciate they

00:14:44 Kevin Mako: bringing AI into the conversation around that space because it is very practical and it's doable right now. Absolutely. So you talk a lot about the customer-first methodology.

00:14:53 Kevin Mako: I want to end here because this is some fairly advanced understanding of e-commerce and how it really applies to getting

00:15:00 Kevin Mako: your highest and best use out of your marketing materials in order to get essentially the best return on ads been.

00:15:06 Lamees Butt: Just talk a bit about the customer-first methodology and how that applies to emerging and scaling hardware startups on e-commerce platforms.

00:15:13 Lamees Butt: So I think we touched on it a little bit before, but I'll kind of go a bit deeper, which is really understanding and segmenting your persona.

00:15:19 Lamees Butt: I think as an early stage company, probably what you need to be able to do is you understand the value of why you've created the product. That's obviously Nirvana, your core.

00:15:27 Lamees Butt: But you really then need to understand who this is servicing. So who has those problems? And there's probably going to be a plethora of people that have those problems,

00:15:33 Lamees Butt: but in different ways and in different forms. So by understanding who those people are, where they sit kind of on that spectrum,

00:15:40 Lamees Butt: and then thinking about how to target them quite specifically is going to be a key ingredient to your success.

00:15:46 Lamees Butt: I think that concept of spray and pray, it just doesn't work in the saturated market that exists today.

00:15:53 Lamees Butt: So really creating concrete strategies for how you're going to target your target audience and customers is going to be the differentiated

00:16:02 Lamees Butt: between success and failure. And then really leaning into once you've captured the eyeballs of your audience and your target market, how do you keep them?

00:16:11 Lamees Butt: Because you go through the funnel, right? It's the awareness, it's the consideration and then it's obviously the purchase and post purchase.

00:16:16 Lamees Butt: How do you weave in kind of that connected customer experience throughout and how do you use tools and platforms to help you,

00:16:23 Lamees Butt: as an organization, be better because you can't do everything. You know, you can create the strategies, but then your role as a leader in an organization

00:16:32 Lamees Butt: is to understand what are going to be the best platforms or the best tools

00:16:36 Kevin Mako: to help me and grow this company and serve my customers in the best way possible. That's amazing.

00:16:42 Kevin Mako: I appreciate those two key nuggets into how to really be the best at this as you scale, because the more efficient that you can be, the quicker your scale, the better the return

00:16:50 Kevin Mako: on ad spend, which is essentially the amount of money you put, out how many paying customers are actually purchasing your product. Once you crack that

00:16:57 Kevin Mako: nut, then you can continue to grow and grow and grow because the more money you put in, the exponentially more profits that are coming back out of it. And that's really the key for

00:17:05 Kevin Mako: e-commerce is figuring out, doing those A-B testings, understanding of the data, segmenting,

00:17:10 Kevin Mako: using some of these best practices so that you can eventually find those audience and really efficiently advertise to them to continue to grow that sales base worldwide.

00:17:19 Kevin Mako: It's a huge market and I love niche products. We talk a lot about it on the show about the value and the power of

00:17:25 Kevin Mako: niche products, especially in 2023 because of the global marketplace. The more specific, the more

00:17:30 Kevin Mako: targeted your product is, the more you can identify those key customer groups, the easier,

00:17:35 Kevin Mako: cheaper, faster is going to be to market to them and convert them into paying customers. So if you have a product that isn't mainstream, that is okay.

00:17:43 Kevin Mako: In fact, that's preferred for a hardware startup up on limited budget because you can efficiently target a niche group far easier than it

00:17:51 Kevin Mako: is to capture a large group we're competing against bigger corporations, start where they're

00:17:55 Kevin Mako: not looking and then grow and learn from there and you'll have a great product and continue

00:17:59 Kevin Mako: to scale and you'll continue to grow into other markets from feedback, which is kind of the final loop to all this, something that you addressed as well.

00:18:07 Kevin Mako: Don't just focus on what's selling customers. Figure out how those customers got sold. So what does your post customer feedback loop

00:18:14 Kevin Mako: look like because there's a tremendous amount of data. Before I let you go, talk just a bit about Zulu. I know you've mentioned a couple of things about it.

00:18:20 Lamees Butt: Let folks know where they can go to learn more about the platform and how it might be able to apply to their e-commerce brand.

00:18:27 Lamees Butt: Sure. So we, as an organization, it's a discovery SaaS platform, right? And we work with the B2C folks, kind of SMEs, but also large enterprises as well.

00:18:36 Lamees Butt: And so we would be keen to speak to any organization that's really looking to supercharge their e-commerce experience. We have a number of tools and

00:18:44 Lamees Butt: experiences and we work with, you know, some of the greatest brands on the planet. And so if you're

00:18:49 Lamees Butt: looking to find us or want to know a bit more, Zoovu.com is the best place to come. Request a demo with us

00:18:54 Kevin Mako: and one of our team will be in touch. Or you can hit me up directly on LinkedIn. I'm very active over there. So feel free to just drop me a note. Much appreciated.

00:19:02 Kevin Mako: And I'll throw all those links into the show notes below so anybody who wants can just click through. Levisa really appreciate you

00:19:07 Kevin Mako: being on the show and sharing your words of wisdom on how to scale up e-commerce brands. Thanks for having me, Kevin. Thanks and take care.

00:19:16 Narrator: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast. If you found some value in the show, please do us a huge favor and leave us a quick five-star review.

00:19:23 Narrator: If you have any questions, guest suggestions, or anything else, feel free to reach out to us anytime at our email, podcast at MakoDesign.com. That's podcast at MakoDesign.com.

00:19:32 Narrator: This show is hosted by Kevin Mako. North America is a leading expert on product development for physical product startups. Huge thanks to our sponsors, PTC,

00:19:40 Narrator: and their two best-in-class 3D CAD product development software solutions Onshape and creo and macro design and invent the original firm providing world-class

00:19:48 Narrator: consumer product development services tailored specifically to startups small manufacturers and inventors thanks for joining and see you next time