Bootstrapped Web

Brian Casel: 00:09

Hello. Welcome back to Bootstrapped Web. This is episode one zero nine. It's good to be back, Jordan. How's it going?

Jordan Gal: 00:15

Going pretty well. Nice to be back in the groove doing episodes every week.

Brian Casel: 00:18

That's right. That's right.

Jordan Gal: 00:21

Feel like this is the hot seat.

Brian Casel: 00:22

We've had we've had requests. I've had I've been getting emails. People are like, not only did they think that we took a break from the from the podcast, but I we really left a cliffhanger there a few weeks ago with you launching this new product and it was pretty secretive there for a while. Well, today we're well, that's my microphone goes crazy. Today, we're gonna get the whole story and finally figure out what's been going on with Cardhook, the launch of the second product, what's been going on behind the scenes.

Brian Casel: 00:50

A lot has been going on that, most of us don't know about. So we're gonna, get to the bottom of this. Jordan Yes. Where do you even start?

Jordan Gal: 00:58

Okay. You know, I think this story is worth, telling and hearing because there are a lot of lessons in here for for companies in our position. A lot of lessons about working for with bigger companies and APIs and integrations and depending on other people's platforms, and it's it's a story with too many details. So

Brian Casel: 01:21

Let me let alright. So let me let me As frame it up everyone knows, CartHook has been cart abandonment software. You plug it in, guys integrate with a with a whole bunch of different ecommerce shopping carts. You plug CartHook CartHook in, you guys send emails to people who have abandoned their cart to get them to come back and complete their purchase. That that is what you guys have established yourselves as since day one.

Brian Casel: 01:45

So now, this is like a major second product from the CarHook company. So like what is it like what would be the elevator pitch for the second product?

Jordan Gal: 01:54

Okay. So I I think it actually requires some context and I think, you know, it tells you about how how you reach this place of like, maybe we need to launch a new product where, you know, that kind of wasn't the original plan. So I'll take you back to December 2015. Okay. We are we're chugging along, we're adding MRR every month.

Jordan Gal: 02:16

We're in the low 5 figures. We're doing okay. We're not profitable yet. And here's what happens. We are a card abandonment software, like you said, for ecommerce stores.

Jordan Gal: 02:29

Shopify is like the hot chick at the bar that gets all the attention these days. We knew that we were going to build an integration for them eventually. The reason we hesitated is because Shopify has this funny quirk where it's an amazingly flexible platform, but your checkout page, you can't touch. It's on a shared shopify.com domain. You can't do anything with it.

Jordan Gal: 02:52

One of the things you can't do is you can't put JavaScript on that page and our whole technology works based on JavaScript. That's how we capture the email address as soon as someone types it in. So we look at Shopify and we're like, there are $9 abandoned cart apps on there because it's easy. You're just using the API. You're not doing JavaScript.

Jordan Gal: 03:08

You're not doing all this fancy stuff that our software does. So why would we want to go to Shopify and it kills off our competitive advantage in any secret sauce? Needless to say, at some point we knew, all right, it has too much pull. There are 250,000 stores on it. So we say, all right, fine.

Jordan Gal: 03:29

It's time to build a Shopify integration. It's the holidays, it's slowing down on the sales front. Now's the time to do it. So we do an integration with Shopify, we build the plug in all that. In the process there, we linked up with this really cool company called Recharge Apps.

Jordan Gal: 03:45

It's a company down in LA and they do recurring billing for Shopify. So we start talking with them, I get introduced to their founder, cool bunch of guys, and we do an integration with them. We're like, hey, we're doing Shopify. These guys work with Shopify also. The only difference is they have their own checkout page in order to enable the recurring billing.

Jordan Gal: 04:08

So we can get our JavaScript onto their page because they own it. So we do an integration with them, we start getting clients, everything's cool. At some point, we look at the data. We look at the recharge abandonment data and we look at the Shopify abandonment data. Now, one of things recharge apps did is they mimicked the Shopify checkout process.

Jordan Gal: 04:29

It looks exactly like the Shopify checkout process. The only difference is we have our JavaScript on it. All of sudden it dawns on us, we're the first company to ever see abandonment data with the ability to capture the email address as soon as it's typed. What we see is, holy shit, the abandonment rates are atrocious on the Shopify checkout process because they have multiple pages, whatever the hell.

Brian Casel: 04:53

Just so I'm clear, this recharge apps that they basically take the customer as the customer is checking out on Shopify, they redirect you to a different like domain.

Jordan Gal: 05:04

Different domain that enables recurring billing through their system, but it looks exactly like the Shopify checkout process.

Brennan Dunn: 05:11

But is it still pages.

Brian Casel: 05:12

Is it still billed through Shopify or through recharge apps?

Jordan Gal: 05:15

Through theirs. Through their their system. And that allows you to, you know, to manage subscriptions and stuff like that. It's for like of the month type ecommerce stores or like if you wanna do recurring billing on a on a product. The important part is that it looks exactly like the Shopify checkout process.

Jordan Gal: 05:32

So all of a sudden we realized we're the first company to ever see abandonment data on a Shopify checkout because everyone else, you can't touch it, you can't put anything on it, you have to wait for the stuff to come through the API. This is what we obsess about, abandonment and conversion rates and all that. I started thinking to myself, when I ran my store, I would have killed somebody if I didn't have a one page checkout. If I couldn't change anything on my checkout page, it's unimaginable. Half the work I did in optimization is on the cart and the checkout page.

Jordan Gal: 06:03

That's where you have to optimize. I think to myself, you know what would be the killer idea? You know what the million dollar app is? It's a fucking one page checkout for Shopify. So I'm like, okay, let me dig into this.

Jordan Gal: 06:19

Turns out not possible, not legal, not against their against their terms of service, whatever else. So I'm like, fuck it. Let's do it anyway. So I talked to the guys and they're like, alright, this is a technical challenge. Let's see what we can do.

Jordan Gal: 06:32

So we start hustling. We start thinking of how do we do this? How do we get around this? Basically, we talk to Shopify and they're like, no, you can't do that against the terms of service.

Brian Casel: 06:42

Is it against the terms of service or are there literal technical barriers to getting it done?

Jordan Gal: 06:47

Oh, it literally says we do not accept checkout replacements. It's like No.

Brian Casel: 06:51

But I mean, like, have they have they structured Shopify in a way that you cannot create a plugin that that creates a one page checkout?

Jordan Gal: 06:58

You you can't ish. Kind of can, kind of can't. So basically, we just do it anyway. We're like, let's just let's just do it. It doesn't matter if it if it works perfectly, let's just do it and see what happens.

Jordan Gal: 07:14

So we build a one page checkout for Shopify and I'm like, all right, this is a checkout page. This isn't like an email marketing app. We can't move forward with this unless we have blessing from Shopify because you can't start selling something that processes people's payments and then have it shut down. That's just a disaster for you and for your customers. So we approach Shopify expecting them to say, Go take a hike, you can't do this.

Jordan Gal: 07:42

Instead, they say, You can't do that yet. But soon, there's an API coming out that nobody knows about and you will be able to do this. I say, Holy shit, I'm going to be rich. Effectively, relationship with recharge apps and this whole journey and then just doing it anyway, it led us to the fact that there is an API coming out that will allow you to do this and we are the first people to know about it. Now you've got a management decision.

Jordan Gal: 08:19

Are we really going to build a second product in stealth waiting for a big public company to release this API on time and all this other stuff? The decision we made was, that's worth the risk. We are going to continue to push on sales for CartHook, but we're not gonna we're not gonna add features and all this other stuff. And so we can continue to grow At

Brian Casel: 08:46

this point, and this is what, like four or five months ago, you made the decision to devote basically all of your company's resources towards building this new Shopify one page checkout.

Jordan Gal: 08:55

Pro blown taking your Living.

Brian Casel: 08:58

Taking your your resources off of Kartik. Exactly.

Jordan Gal: 09:02

But keep the sales

Brian Casel: 09:03

And obviously, still maintaining and yeah.

Jordan Gal: 09:04

Right. So we we have grown by 50% since January. So we were able to accomplish that. Obviously, we would have grown more if we had gone 100% all in on it, but we managed to do a little bit of both, which in theory, that's not, it's a scary, whatever it was, it was a very risky decision. So we're trying to minimize the risk.

Jordan Gal: 09:30

We're talking to Shopify. We are showing their engineers stuff. We are asking for advice. We're getting introductions to people. Everyone's so pumped.

Brian Casel: 09:40

Let me stop you there real quick.

Jordan Gal: 09:41

Okay.

Brian Casel: 09:41

What's the relationship like with Shopify and what does Shopify actually look like from the inside? Like, everybody knows the big brand Shopify, but are they like a huge company and who are you dealing with inside Shopify?

Jordan Gal: 09:52

It feels like like one of our friends is startups that just blew the fuck up. So it's like a bunch of young talented people, most of which have been at the company for less than a year to eighteen months. And they're kind of just rocking and trying to figure things out as they grow very, very, very quickly. Right? So it is the people are accessible and they're cool and they're just like you and me.

Brian Casel: 10:21

And how did you I guess a lot of people are probably wondering, how did you even make first contact with with somebody who somebody who has enough influence within Shopify, not not like a low level. Like, how did how did you get on the phone with

Jordan Gal: 10:33

Politics, baby. Everyone I knew, anyone I knew favors someone's friend's girlfriend work there. She introduced me to the right guy, the app store guy or do we just I just did everything to get to the right people. That was like, that was the hustle part

Brian Casel: 10:52

and you Who was the person who ultimately said like, hey, we've got this API coming out?

Jordan Gal: 10:58

That was one of the guys that I reached through the political entanglement of, hey, my friend's sister, girlfriend, I know someone and then got introduced to someone else and they said, you should talk to this person. And then finally got ahold of like a developer advocate.

Brian Casel: 11:15

I I wanna hit because I know what's coming in the story. Yeah.

Brennan Dunn: 11:18

So I wanna ask at this point,

Brian Casel: 11:22

if they're giving you this information like, hey, we've got this API coming out, is this a person in Shopify who is just a technical person or or are they looking at this like, this thing with Carthook could be a good business partnership. This could be an opportunity for us, Shopify. What what's their stance at this point?

Jordan Gal: 11:40

So it's it's hard to tell. It's there's there's always a cloud between you and them and what's really happening. So there's limited insight into what exactly the motivations are and what so we tried our best to kind of just be a 100% above board and show everything and ask for advice and get introduced to right people. We basically just tried to show as many people as possible what we're working on to make sure we kept hearing back the same thing And we did.

Brian Casel: 12:14

And everyone's just giving you the thumbs up all the way through.

Jordan Gal: 12:16

Thumbs up. We can't wait to recommend this to our big clients just like 100% positive. And in our minds, it made sense. The whole thing with the API that they released, Shopify, big public company, you look at their S1, you look at their filings, they make about 40% of the revenue on transaction fees. It makes sense.

Jordan Gal: 12:40

We're not going to build this platform and then you're going to replace our checkout page and just walk away with 40% of the money. Right? Because that's effectively what you're doing. You're just saying, I'll take those transaction fees. Thank you very much.

Jordan Gal: 12:52

Or someone else with will. Whereas if they stayed within Shopify, they get those transaction fees. It makes sense to them, you can't build a checkout replacement because you've taken our money away, that's how we built the platform. This new API that they came out with allows you to put in a charge into the Shopify system from outside of the Shopify store. So in our minds, it's like, of course it's going to be possible because they're going to be able to continue to keep that transaction fee.

Jordan Gal: 13:21

They should be able to say, do whatever you want to just put the charge through us and literally do whatever you want. It made sense in that way in our assumptions. We'll fast forward a little bit. Are Internally, we're working hard, man. We are building a second big product while keeping the ship afloat and moving forward and signing up our biggest customers ever and this is just a lot going on.

Jordan Gal: 13:50

But we have this thing, it's in the background and we're like, wait till people get a load of this, wait where this is going to blow up. So let's fast forward. Shopify has a conference, their first ever conference called Unite. It's for their partners and developers. I can't go to the conference because my daughter's due date is the day of the conference.

Jordan Gal: 14:10

Of course it is. So Ben goes down there and kills it. Just does an amazing job networking, meeting people. At the conference, we're working with their developers, showing them the product, asking for technical help, and it's coming close. The conference is where the API is announced and we're like, we're going to give it few days.

Brian Casel: 14:33

This is what April?

Jordan Gal: 14:34

March.

Brian Casel: 14:35

March.

Jordan Gal: 14:36

Very March. So we're getting everything ready. We are putting together marketing site. We're getting a list of people who are interested in it. We're having conversations.

Jordan Gal: 14:45

We're raking ourselves over the coals about pricing and what should we do if another competitor comes out at the same time, like we're just, you know, we're worrying about all these hypothetical things.

Brian Casel: 14:57

At this point you're planning to launch and you like you were gonna launch at the conference or

Jordan Gal: 15:03

We were gonna get we were gonna give it a few days and then and then launch.

Brian Casel: 15:07

Okay. So so like, what was your basically your launch plan at this point?

Jordan Gal: 15:12

So we expected to get into the App Store and a new category in the app store was going to be created called checkout. And we were going to be the first people in

Brian Casel: 15:23

there. Like the only one.

Jordan Gal: 15:24

The only one.

Brian Casel: 15:25

Right.

Jordan Gal: 15:25

Look, and it's still the same way. A one page checkout app in the Shopify app store is going to be overwhelmed. You know, we did all the research before we decided to take on this risk. It's just there's a lot of demand. People love Shopify, but it drives them out of their minds that they can't customize the checkout page.

Jordan Gal: 15:48

So we knew, hey, we've got the right product, we've got the right time, we're gonna be first. This is gonna be So

Brian Casel: 15:53

your plan at this point was, okay, launch in the Shopify app store, release a blog post on your blog and Shopify will also do a blog post and

Jordan Gal: 16:04

Blog posts, running ads, we talked to the Shopify blog, we were going to put a guest blog on the Shopify blog itself, they were going to help us promote it, We were going to go on a webinar tour like mean, excuse me, on a podcast tour. We were just going to blitz the whole market so that we got established as like that's the only choice. Comes time we submit the app to the App Store. In my mind, I'm like, I'm not rich right now, but I'm I'm I might as well be. Like, all my dreams, all that like, this is what I want for the company.

Jordan Gal: 16:35

We're gonna be at a 100 k in MRR in, sixty days. We're gonna absolutely hit this thing out of the park. Everything says all good baby, all good. We've got people. We released the app on Product Hunt.

Jordan Gal: 16:49

We get a bunch of signups. We get people on the Shopify team signing up saying, Oh my God, I can't wait to recommend this to my Shopify Plus is the higher level. The people who work at Shopify Plus are effectively consultants for their Shopify Plus customers. This is the Kanye West store, the Formula One store, the Red Bull store on Shopify. And they're like, I cannot wait to recommend.

Brian Casel: 17:18

This is super premium level and they've got account managers there that just kind of

Jordan Gal: 17:23

Exactly. Those guys, head of the plus, they're like, send me a PDF that I can share with the entire team so we can all recommend it. I'm like, oh my God, this is, you know, this is this is it. I I this is it.

Brian Casel: 17:35

What's the what's the pricing of of the product at this point when when you released it?

Jordan Gal: 17:40

So we wanted to do a percentage of revenue, but for the Shopify market, you need to price a little lower to capture. This this is what we're worrying about. If we priced it too high, we're gonna let someone else come in and take out the bottom. So how do we take on the bottom but not screw ourselves? You know, we basically decided to charge a flat amount but based on revenue.

Jordan Gal: 18:04

So it's a it's it's an effective percentage of revenue. So it's $50 if you make up to $10,000 a month. So depending on if you make $500 a month or 10,000, the percentage changes, but it's still based. The the metric is how much money you make and it goes up from there. So it's between 50 and and $200 a month and then and then a custom plan.

Brian Casel: 18:25

Alright. So it's out. It's it's on the on the Shopify store. People at Shopify, people are buying it. Like, how how many sales right off the bat, like in the first couple days?

Jordan Gal: 18:34

We had like 50 people sign up in the first like forty eight hours.

Brian Casel: 18:38

And those are purchases?

Jordan Gal: 18:41

No, those just sign up for an account because you launch it yet. We were waiting on their API to get finished up, that sort of thing. So we just we didn't want to wait any longer. We were literally worried about competitors doing the same thing and launching it quickly. So we want to get out there.

Jordan Gal: 18:55

Now this is not on the App Store. This is just on our site on product hunt with no ads. This is just people hearing about it and signing up.

Brennan Dunn: 19:02

So we're

Nathan Barry: 19:03

like, when

Jordan Gal: 19:03

we get some of the App Store, to do a 100 signups a day. So we submit, we get an email back from this saying, hey, you missed this URL and can you change this? Then we'll publish it to the App Store. So I'm like, I'm flying. I am high.

Jordan Gal: 19:20

My wife knows about it. I'm like, honey, I cannot believe what's about to happen. And then we get the email. We're very sorry, but this is not gonna be possible, on Shopify and we are revoking your API access. What?

Jordan Gal: 19:35

And

Brian Casel: 19:36

Alright. Who who is this email coming from?

Jordan Gal: 19:39

This email is coming from our main man, our advocate, who was God bless him. He was freaking amazing. So he emails us and it's like, guys, I cannot believe what's happening internally. And I'm going to keep this PG 13 because, you know, the relationship is hugely important still to to what we're doing now. So basically, internal politics in the company dictated that it didn't make sense.

Jordan Gal: 20:07

It didn't make sense to them for a of reasons. Whole One of the big reasons is that there's I don't even know how much to get into this side of things. Let's leave it at no one is happy about telling us we can't do it, but they're telling us you can't do it. So our guy is like

Brian Casel: 20:24

Because they have other business interests.

Jordan Gal: 20:26

They have a they yeah. They've got things that we nobody could have taken into account, But but that happened. I don't wanna get into that side of things because they I don't think anyone was at fault. No one's like being like jerks. This is business, man.

Jordan Gal: 20:41

Yeah. You know?

Brian Casel: 20:42

So The the the painful part about it is just the fact that you guys have sunk so much of your resources into this, and you're still a small company and and growing and it's

Jordan Gal: 20:53

And you make a mistake like that with the you know, you're not that much money in the bank, that'll kill you. So but but it's not it's not that it'll kill you. It's from going it's going from, oh my god, we are about to explode to then being like, we're gonna die.

Brian Casel: 21:11

Alright. So It

Jordan Gal: 21:12

was so extreme.

Brian Casel: 21:13

I I don't know how much of this you can get into, but You you received this email from your main contact at at Shopify who you've been working with directly over the last couple months and and it's like, hey, guys.

Jordan Gal: 21:25

I can't believe what's happening.

Brian Casel: 21:26

It it turns out we can't do this after all. Right. What is your response? I mean, like, what's your immediate next step?

Jordan Gal: 21:34

I mean, heartbreak, devastation, literally walking the dog like like, I'm in a zombie apocalypse. Like, what just happened? What am I gonna tell our investors? How am Did I gonna

Brian Casel: 21:49

you did you reply or did you you were like, let me wait and we'll figure it out and then

Jordan Gal: 21:54

was like, what in the world are you talking about, man? We we you guys have known about this for months. You know? It was it was incredulous. It was like, but if this isn't a surprise, if we can't if we can't do this, tell me that three months ago when I brought it to you.

Jordan Gal: 22:11

Right? So that was that was the frustrating part of, like, we did everything we could. We got help from them. We got technical help. People's like, it's not like we kept it secret and then we're shocked that we weren't able to launch it.

Jordan Gal: 22:22

We like knew we needed buy in from them. That was like a week of just being in a daze of like, what in the world? How do we what? What do we do now? That was the lowest I have been in business.

Jordan Gal: 22:39

Not because it it sucks and it's a disappointment. It was just that we it we felt so high and then so low.

Brian Casel: 22:47

Yeah. It's not like you the shitty part about it is that you were not taking you know, yeah, there's some risk involved in this, but it's not like you're just throwing something at the wall to see what happens and and you it's not like you you knew like, alright, chances are this is not even gonna pan out, but let's just see what happens. No. You did everything right.

Jordan Gal: 23:07

Right. That was months You you went

Brian Casel: 23:09

you went above and beyond. You you bent over backwards to make sure that you had the blessing and the thumbs up every step of the way to minimize that risk as much as possible and then they went ahead of that.

Jordan Gal: 23:21

Right. That happened basically very March. So it we are now in May 18. So it's been, you know, a month and a half and we just concluded our negotiations with them and are now able to move forward after all with a few requirements and a few adjustments and all that. But what a roller coaster, man.

Brian Casel: 23:46

Oh, so I actually didn't know this this last part of it. So you are in in the app store now?

Jordan Gal: 23:51

We are not in the app store. That's one of the conditions.

Brian Casel: 23:54

Oh, but but you but it is a fully functional one page for Shopify. Exactly.

Jordan Gal: 23:59

So it is so now so here's the crazy thing. I don't feel the same way about it as I did on March, you know, twenty first. You know, on March 21, was like, this is going to be so big. And now because of the insane experience of the past six weeks, you you, I have to remind myself to be super optimistic because I know this is the right product at the right time for the right market.

Brian Casel: 24:26

So just again, don't know how much you can talk about here, but okay. So we're a month and a half since the the original launch date. Now now you have launched, you you have the blessing from Shopify, but you're not in the App Store. So like what was the negotiation there? Like what were the points?

Brian Casel: 24:41

Like what what did you agree on?

Jordan Gal: 24:44

API. So that new that new API that came out, we can't use that. Our logic was like, Oh, they care about the revenue because we would be taking the revenue away, that's why we need to use the new API because that allows us to keep the revenue in their system. It turns out they don't care about that at all. It's a different thing entirely and the technical team got involved and people have ownership battles over APIs and stuff.

Jordan Gal: 25:13

We just had no idea about that. So we just have to use a different API and we can't be in the app store. But other than that, we can we can go off and do do what we want.

Brian Casel: 25:24

So you're using a different API, but it can still do the same thing? Like you could still have a one page and and use Shopify's?

Jordan Gal: 25:30

Yes. It it accomplishes the same thing at the end of the day. Yeah. It doesn't get billed through Shopify system, it gets billed through our system. So that's why the past few weeks, we have been making changes to the product.

Brian Casel: 25:43

Got it. I wonder how much this the Shopify app store would even really like how how big of an impact would that have?

Jordan Gal: 25:50

Gigantic. That would

Brennan Dunn: 25:51

be huge.

Jordan Gal: 25:52

Gigantic. Huge huge huge. Which is why so we we've had to adjust. You know, we can't go low priced expecting built in distribution. We have to charge more and expect to have a lot fewer customers, but try to make the same money with fewer customers.

Jordan Gal: 26:08

So basically repel a lot of the lower end and Shopify is mostly, you know, it's 80% people at the lower end who don't make that much money. You're kind of doing a DIY e commerce site and they love apps and we would love to work with them. We just don't have the distribution. So the App Store allows for that. A lot of this a lot of the successful companies that have Shopify apps have no distribution or marketing other than the App Store.

Brian Casel: 26:38

Well, you know, look, you're you're still in a pretty good position here because it's not like another another person on the App Store, I mean, far as we know, is is gonna be able to come out with a one page Yeah. Checkout.

Jordan Gal: 26:49

Oh, yeah. Like, you're you're still competitors, good luck.

Brian Casel: 26:53

As of today, you're you're still, like, the only option if you want a one page.

Jordan Gal: 26:57

It will be for months and months. I mean, anyone don't care. Someone listen listening to this wants to get try to get it done. I mean, good luck.

Brian Casel: 27:05

And and I'm not even an ecommerce store owner, but I know how important a one page checkout is for ecommerce. And just the thought that, like, you can't I I when you first told me about this, I was like, you can't do a one page checkout on Shopify? And, I mean, I think that's that's painful enough of a problem that if any any serious ecommerce store owner on Shopify will will have to give you a look because you're the only option out there right

Jordan Gal: 27:29

now Right.

Brian Casel: 27:30

If you wanna do that.

Jordan Gal: 27:31

Right. And and so so so what's effectively happened in the company, right, the company doesn't care about the drama. The company doesn't care about how I feel after something like that happens. What's happened to the company is that we started off with a solution to a problem. The problem is how do you convert as many people as possible?

Jordan Gal: 27:51

What we were doing was we were helping recover people that dropped off and putting them back into the converted column. We're saying these people didn't convert and we're helping them convert. What we're doing now is we have essentially moved up the value chain. We're saying instead of addressing the abandonment, we are going to reduce abandonment in general by having a better converting checkout page. You can see, okay, the company is more valuable.

Jordan Gal: 28:19

The company is doing more valuable work. The company needs to charge more, and that's the direction we are heading. We have some other cool things that I can't talk about yet coming out on top of that, but that's trying to accomplish. We're trying to move up in significance and importance into an e commerce store's existence. We used to be this one little thing and we were getting people to pay us a 100 to $500 a month for this one little thing off to the side for people who had dropped out to send them emails.

Jordan Gal: 28:52

Now we're saying, no, no, no. We are going to give you a better converting checkout page entirely. So with that, we need to charge more, we need to expect more, work with bigger companies. So it's been insane and exhausting and dangerous, and it was very painful. But I think at the end of the day, we are a lot better off today than we were back in December.

Brian Casel: 29:22

Yeah. So what'd you learn?

Jordan Gal: 29:26

I learned that you want to be the platform. You do not want to build on top of the platform. Yes. So there is a reason that those companies are worth so much money because if you create an ecosystem where people want to build onto your platform, you have all the power. And so that lesson is being used all over the place in terms of our we are not going to rely on exclusively.

Jordan Gal: 29:56

Shopify will be one of our integrations, most likely our most important integration because that's where the demand and the pain is, but we will integrate with Magento and WooCommerce and all these other platforms because we do not want reliance on one, That was a very painful lesson to learn. And we will do our best to build an ecosystem of consultants and people building apps for us and and to get into that that position.

Brian Casel: 30:24

I like it.

Jordan Gal: 30:25

That and explained everything to your investors, every detail along the entire way. So the second we had this idea, I wrote an email, I say, guys, we're thinking about doing something risky. Here's the reasoning. Because we did that back then, when we had the trauma of being what we thought about being shut down, people were like, dude, I hear you. I think it was worth the risk.

Jordan Gal: 30:51

Now that we're coming out of it like guys, we're back. They're on board and they're cheering for us. So that was that was very, very important.

Brian Casel: 31:01

That's really good. So I guess just a quick question on that before we wrap up here. What's the rhythm there in terms of your your communication with investors? Is it like a monthly update and has that changed throughout this launch of this product?

Jordan Gal: 31:15

Yeah. We've always done monthly updates and I have like a format. I have a PDF where I just give all the KPIs and then I send an email. And in the PDF, try to just tell a story. Here's what we're working on.

Jordan Gal: 31:28

Here's what's going well. Here's what's not going well. Here's the situation. Then back in December, I started having a second section saying checkout. The new checkout product, the reasoning behind it, the feedback we're getting, what's happening with our communication with Shopify, all that.

Jordan Gal: 31:42

And that has become a larger and larger percentage of the update and drama and the attention. So it's just it's just every month. I'm a little late. It's the eighteenth. I'm supposed to send on the fifteenth, I gotta I gotta bang one out today and kinda give the latest update.

Jordan Gal: 31:58

Yep.

Brian Casel: 31:59

Cool. Good update here for sure. I I mean, you know, congratulations on on the launch of the of the products. And I I mean that sincerely, you know, I I think I think you you are turning an important corner here. And I think, you know, the the idea of launching additional products from CartHook has always been in in the long term game plan for you.

Brian Casel: 32:18

I think it makes sense to, you know, build more and more value for for ecommerce store owners. I think this is like the first probably of many steps of of doing that.

Jordan Gal: 32:27

So Yeah. Thanks, man. Yeah. We we the product will go live next week. So all the people that have signed up are now being notified that, hey, we're back you'll be able to start doing it next week.

Jordan Gal: 32:38

So hopefully, you know, I'll have a good update on how many users we have actually live with the product.

Brian Casel: 32:44

Very cool.

Jordan Gal: 32:45

Feels good to get off my chest.

Brian Casel: 32:48

Cool. Well, we'll be, back at it next week.

Jordan Gal: 32:50

Alright. Cool, man.

Brian Casel: 32:51

Alright. See you, dude. See you.