Why Putting Yourself Out There Works

Although it can feel scary at first, putting yourself out there as a new business can be the key to success and avoiding the pitfalls that a lot of beginner businesses can fall into.

Today we’re meeting a rapidly expanding Irish start-up that has grown exponentially since it was founded at the beginning of 2023. Based in the e-commerce space, we’ll find out how they are revolutionizing online business with the use of AI, and how through angel investors they’ve rapidly expanded into 15 countries with plans to take on more staff.

Our guest today has a familial history with e-commerce and believes in bridging the gap between marketing and finance. It’s a pleasure to have Co-Founder of StoreHero, Thomas Gleeson.

Website: www.storehero.ai
Connect on LinkedIn

For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription.

Thomas Gleeson  0:00

E commerce businesses, they’re often using those Return on Ad Spend metrics from these platforms as a primary indicator of success. Now, when you talk to people and ask do you actually trust what these platforms are telling you, invariably, they will always say, no, we don’t trust them.

VO  0:16

No unicorns, no brands, just hard working people who built their business from the brand up sharing their experience so others can learn. Presented by Larissa Feeney from Kinore. This is Real Business Conversations.

Larissa Feeney  0:33

Hello. My name is Larissa Feeney. I am CEO and founder at Kinore Finance and Business Services. Today we’re meeting a rapidly expanding Irish startup that has grown exponentially since it was founded at the beginning of 2023 based in the e-commerce space. We’ll find out how they are revolutionizing online business with the use of AI, and how, through angel investors, they have rapidly expanded into 15 countries with plans to take on more staff. It’s a pleasure to welcome co- founder of StoreHero, Thomas Gleeson. Hi Thomas. It’s great to have you.

Thomas Gleeson  1:07

Hey, Larissa, thanks very, very much for having me on today. Really looking forward to getting into it. Kind of following up on the back of the I think, was the webinar we did a couple of weeks ago. So really looking forward to getting into it today.

Larissa Feeney  1:18

It’s great to have you, and thanks for joining us on that webinar as well. First of all, maybe Thomas, can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your background.

Thomas Gleeson  1:29

Yeah, my name is Thomas. I’m from Emerson, County, Clare. I’m co-founder at a company called StoreHero. Essentially, we help e commerce businesses centralize their e commerce marketing and finance operations in order to really help them, I suppose, cut through the noise every day and really start to understand their profitability in simple and really easy terms. I suppose the journey to StoreHero has been quite a long one. I suppose in a lot of ways. You know, e commerce is definitely something I’ve grown up with. My mother has had an E commerce business while we do IE, that E commerce business was actually set up in 2004 um, anyone listening to here today probably thinks Ireland 1004 E commerce, like, what are you talking about? And yes, it was clunky, it was painful. But look, there was a great, there’s a great learning curve for me to grow up in, I suppose, you know, yeah. And I think dash, I suppose, really led, in a lot of ways, to what we’re working here on StoreHero today, I had a couple of different e commerce brands myself, and I suppose, thrown into that mix, which is probably relevant to yourself, and a lot of your listeners is my dad is an accountant, and I was kind of stuck piggy in the middle between my mom, who was running the business, I was running the marketing side of things, and my dad was obviously running the finance side of things. So I was having to answer both to both parties. And really, I suppose, saw a challenge that was in my house between marketing trying to speak e commerce and marketing trying to speak finance, and both of those parties, you know, often being siloed. And as I kind of progressed throughout my career, I went to work at Shopify, actually, for three and a half years, started off in a customer support role, and spent maybe the last two years there working as a senior consultant, which is an incredible role, ended up speaking with the founders of, like, some of the largest e commerce businesses on the platform for over two years. And you know, there is a lot of the challenges I saw at home in my house, with these silos between marketing and finance, I quickly realized we’re definitely not confined to, you know, our sitting room or our kitchen. There were definitely massive problems that E commerce businesses of all shapes, sizes, geographies and industries were facing. And I think the challenge that we’re really helping to solve with store here was breaking down those barriers and giving, you know, marketers, e commerce people and finance people a shared language and a shared view of the world, I suppose, and how to actually grow their e commerce businesses profitably. I’m sure we can dive into all that a little bit more.

Larissa Feeney  3:41

Okay, Thomas, can I take you then over from, from, from story, or in terms of what you actually do day to day, to the company itself, and maybe tell us a little bit about the journey so far, when the company started, the size you’re at now, and how many I was on the team, and that, that type of thing, please. So

Thomas Gleeson  3:58

the company was kind of co-founded by myself and Carl O’Brien, my business partner, back in, I think it was November of 2022, so we’re coming up on two years, which is kind of weird to say out loud, but it’s absolutely flown by. Yeah, it’s been a it’s been an incredible journey, like any business, kind of slow to kick things off at the very beginning, but, you know, at worsening, and I suppose a tougher e commerce environment is ultimately really playing into our hands in a positive sense, because the margin for error that businesses maybe had before to not understand what I kind of call the boring part of the business, which is the most important part of the business. You know that that marriage is kind of gone now, so brands need to have this front and centre if they are looking to kind of grow their ad spend budgets going forward. So, you know, it’s a tougher environment, but that’s actually played into our hands quite nicely. The team is up to about, I think, 13 or 14 people now, which is amazing. Some really, really great people on board, which is fantastic, definitely. You know, every every extra set of hands has been incredibly helpful and driving forward the products, the marketing, the customer success, and just fresh out. Years, even from a sales perspective, have been absolutely incredible. We have customers all over the world at this stage. You know, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, some around mainland Europe and obviously UK and Ireland is probably our two biggest markets right now. We have about three to 400 brands on the platform right now. They’re kind of a mix of multiple different types of customers. So obviously, selling directly to brands would be, you know, one of our primary channels. But we do also have a white labelled model that we do sell directly to digital marketing agencies. So for instance, they can put their own branding and logos in the platform and basically utilize StoreHero as that single source of truth as they start to, you know, bringing that conversation around, showcasing profitability directly to their clients, and that that’s been a huge success for us. It isn’t something that we had originally built the platform for, but it is working tremendously well.

Larissa Feeney  5:51

And to me, it is such it’s, it’s an obvious solution to an obvious pain, right? Like, I can really see how that, how your product can add value to a business. Me, having been in that position of a business owner, trying to figure out, you know, ad spend and contribution and all that stuff. So absolutely, I can see, I can see why, how it works and why would work. How do you get your customers, how do you get the name out there? How have you built it to three or 400 brands, which is amazing growth.

Thomas Gleeson  6:21

Yeah, it’s been a it’s been a wide, a wide mix of different strategies. I would say, you know, cold outbound has been quite difficult. I think anybody listening to this is probably getting peppered with hundreds of emails a day, all trying to sell them something. So that has been challenging. But, you know, I actually think the fact that we’ve been so innovative and finding other avenues has really stood so the test of time, and is definitely something that we can look to expand on. We’ve done a lot on LinkedIn, loads on LinkedIn. So the nature of our product, with StoreHero, the customer, needs to be educated to a certain extent to actually articulate the value as to what’s going on. So much of our LinkedIn content is really education focused, and it has resonated quite well. LinkedIn is probably one of our largest kind of sales channels. I would say we’ve also launched our own podcast. We drop a biannual kind of, you know, profit playbook. We get loads of really big industry contributors in there as well, which ultimately drives a lot of leads on the back of it as well. Obviously, partners and referrals from existing customers have been huge for us as well. So yeah, look, it’s been a multitude of different areas. I wouldn’t say there’s been one single source that probably has driven the lion’s share, but it’s been an even spread. And,

Larissa Feeney  7:27

you know, I hear a lot about LinkedIn and the value that it can bring to business in terms of new clients and new customers. Have you? Do you use paid advertising on LinkedIn, or is it very much you guys putting content on, putting your own, putting yourself out there as such?

Thomas Gleeson  7:40

Yeah, it’s putting yourself out there. We haven’t spent a cent on advertising on LinkedIn yet. Maybe that will change in the future. We’ve done a lot of it ourselves. Can be scary in the early days, honestly trying to, you know, I don’t want to be that person who’s posting on LinkedIn, but, you know, it’s paid dividends for us. You kind of just have to get over yourself. And once you start doing it, then it, then it, you know, it really starts showing results, which is really what you’re looking for.

Larissa Feeney  8:04

So, yeah, you do, but it’s like, it’s like traditional marketing, isn’t it? Or traditional networking in many ways, you know, it’s, it’s difficult to walk into a room full of strangers. It’s very difficult to put a post on LinkedIn to to a room full of strangers. Essentially, do you do any of that traditional networking at all, Thomas, or is it all all online?

Thomas Gleeson  8:22

No, we do. We do a lot of events as well. So we’ve ran probably four or five events in Dublin and in London in the last probably 12 months, which have all been tremendous. And we’ve gone to loads of expos. We’ve ran four or five events ourselves, and they’ve been amazing. So we kind of try and get a lot of our customers on board to, you know, feature in the panel, and then we kind of do a panel discussion, essentially, and try and get questions from the audience. They’ve worked exceptionally well, and it is something that we’re looking to really double down on and focus on into next year. I’m actually moving to New York myself in January, and a lot of that focus is going to be on running in person events across the states for 2025

Larissa Feeney  8:59

Okay, wow. So I’m definitely going to come back to that point before we finish, because I want to hear more about that. In terms of that rapid growth, though. So three or 400 brands, as you said, starting off slow, as you would expect it. I mean, that’s very natural. How did well for I have two questions on growth. The first one is, how do you find how did you finance this? And the second one is, how did you manage it in terms of internal capacity?

Thomas Gleeson  9:22

We raised a pre seed round of funding in June of last year of 600k and then we got through to the NDRC accelerator, which was an amazing accelerator program that we went through in Dogpatch labs in Dublin in January of this year. So 700k in total raised so far, which is, you know, done really, really well. We’ve tried to, I suppose, follow our own advice and to be led Profit First, to a certain extent, so not trying to maybe fall into a lot of the traps that, you know, startups in the past have. We’re trying to be as frugal as possible. Is basically what I’m trying to say, in terms of how we actually spend. You know, every euro that we spend needs to deliver some kind of return, whether it’s directing products marketing. Customer Success or from a revenue perspective, obviously. So yeah, that’s been our funding journey to date, in terms of managing the internal capacity, definitely a challenging one. Even I suppose these are maybe interlinked in terms of where we got customers as well. I managed to actually get on a really large e commerce podcast in July or August of last year. Was called the unofficial Shopify podcast, and at the time, it was, you know, our developers, and myself and Carla were the only two people in the business who were not directly involved in developing the code. As soon as that product, we were fighting really hard at the time to get demos over the line of no problem saying that as soon as that product, that podcast went live, we probably had 50 to 55 demos dropped into our calendar, like in the 24 hours. And, yeah, I remember thinking like, Oh, my goodness, is this real or something broken here? And there was the calls are really interesting. I didn’t realize the reach of the podcast. Like, there was, there’s an American family who were listening to it to on a family trip going through Yosemite National Park in California. Then there was people listening to it in New Zealand, Finland, literally all over the world. Why I bring that up is from an internal managing capacity perspective, that happened in probably late August, you know? So September and October were essentially taken up with figuring out, how do we build a process to get all this managed correctly? How do we actually onboard this level of customers at once, because this is challenging, and we figured we learned loads there, often through like anything, you know, making mistakes along the way. How do we optimize this? How do we make this more efficient? How do we smooth, smooth out the onboarding process and all that kind of thing. Since then, obviously, you know, in probably February or March of this year, we were able to take on more people. We were able to grow our customer success team, bring on people to kind of help us in the sales process. And that has really just helped aid, I suppose, you know, process efficiency overall. And it’s something that, you know, we’re definitely not perfect right now. It’s always something that we’re looking to optimize and improve. For Bucha, where we’re at now, versus maybe 1213, months ago, is definitely pulls apart. I

Larissa Feeney  11:57

think it’s, it’s great learning, though, for others that are where you were almost two years ago, you know, and that even the first six months, the first year of your journey, that’s very common, those issues that you’ve experienced. So, I mean, others can learn massively from that. Thank you for that. It is a remote team that you have. Is that, right? I

Thomas Gleeson  12:13

am based in Galway, but there are developers aren’t actually in Ireland, but the rest of the team is based fully in person in Dublin.

Larissa Feeney  12:21

And how do you manage that kind of mix of remote and in person? Does it work well? For you?

Thomas Gleeson  12:28

It works fine, to be honest with you, like I’m over in the UK, a lot of different events and stuff like that. Anyway, I’m probably in Dublin once every maybe week and a half for a day or two. So it works fine. We can obviously do video calls, which are, you know, all good. So we have one or two of those, as it’s kind of different segments of the business, whether it’s sales, customer success or marketing, whether it’s a weekly or some of them are kind of shorter daily stand ups. The move to remote, kind of the hybrid model is it’s completely fine. I worked at Shopify for almost four years, and it was fully remote there as well. So I’m really used to that kind of remote hybrid, kind of, you know, work balance, I suppose. And have you had so

Larissa Feeney  13:07

you said I think that the team is up to 13 or 14 at the moment. Have you had any issues recruiting those people to the team? And have you found it difficult?

Thomas Gleeson  13:16

Yeah, being really hurt, yeah.

Larissa Feeney  13:18

What have you guys done to try to make that a success?

Thomas Gleeson  13:23

Yeah, I think just being really clear with what’s expected of the person coming into the role, just for context, we put out a role back in April. I think we had 600 applicants for it, which is crazy, and you’re trying to, like, Give everyone as much time as possible to make sure that you could find the right candidate. One thing that we did, I think quite well actually, was we created like a 10-minute loom video and put on loads of resources so anyone that we kind of considered that may be a fit, we sent them all the generic loom video and loads of information on the company. And then we did kind of IV calls, which initial vetting calls for 15 minutes. Essentially, what that was able to do is kind of help whittle down anyone who we thought was a fit from the 600 into a 15 minute IV call Reeve, from that call you were trying to get a gage as if to issue, if they had actually consumed the information you had sent across, and was there a genuine interest, and if you kind of felt there was an initial fit from there, if we felt there was you bring them through to a second, second stage interview, which we would do, comes kind of, you know, stage play, or Whatever you want to call it through there, but that’s kind of the process that we had. It just kind of caught out the first 15 minutes of most interviews. We were trying to give a bit of information on the company and tell a bit more about what you do. Everybody had that coming into that initial vetting call, and it just meant that we were able to kind of get through a lot more people a lot quicker. And I suppose, you know, once people have got in the door, we really look to improve the onboarding process. Our onboarding training for these people once they have come on board, because, you know, all the information was living in Carl and I’s head for a long time, and all of a sudden, you’ve new people are coming into the business who haven’t been privy to the last, you know, 12 to 15 months of the business. So they need to be trained up properly, and you need to make sure that that’s a repeatable. Process for new more and new and new people coming into the business. So we put a lot of work into just making sure that we have proper training in place for all new hires that come in, irrespective of the function that they’re arriving into, and

Larissa Feeney  15:10

the 600 people that that’s that’s amazing, actually, because it sounds like you had no difficulty attracting people, obviously, then the challenge is attracting the right person and onboarding the right person to make sure that they settle in well, and that they add value to the company. The 600 people, you managed to whittle them down, did you have to in the end? How many was in the mix?

Thomas Gleeson  15:35

Yeah, we’ve got it down to about, I think it was hiring for two roles at the time. So I think I whittled it down to about, I can’t remember exactly now, but it was somewhere where somewhere between 30 and 40 people that I would have brought for an initial vetting call. And then after the initial vetting call, kind of brought that down to maybe 10, and they made, made two hires from there. Okay,

Larissa Feeney  15:52

so that’s fascinating. You mentioned that the company has raised about 700,000 so far pre seed. I think you said, what’s the plan for future fundraising, or have you guys set I had made a decision on that yet?

Thomas Gleeson  16:08

Yeah. I mean, we’ve seen some really good growth. We want to hit kind of certain revenue milestones by middle of next year, and upon hitting those milestones, we’d probably be going out to do a larger seed round. It’s not an immediate, you know, need or concern for us to do this right now, but we do want to kind of delay it, get to a certain revenue figure before we think about potentially doing a larger fundraising round, just to make sure that we kind of, you know, set ourselves up correctly and get the kind of different valuations that we’re looking

Larissa Feeney  16:36

for. Can I ask why the decision to raise money? A question that I get asked all the time is, you know, should I Bootstrap? Should I raise? What? What made you go out to the market for investment?

Thomas Gleeson  16:47

You know, there’s, there’s a huge problem here. Honestly, there’s a massive problem in terms of E commerce, businesses struggling. Um, it’s a problem I’ve lived with, I’ve seen with, I feel like we have our solid, really, really solid solution for a market that’s really crying out for it, and it’s a huge market. Shopify alone has over four and a half million e commerce stores live on the platform. WooCommerce is a pretty similar amount. Then you have things like Salesforce, commerce, cloud, Magento, it’s a really, really, really large tam that we’re looking to serve. And I feel, you know, we built a fantastic product. We were, everyone on the team is incredibly excited about it. And most importantly, I suppose, looking at our existing crop of customers over the last 12 to 18 months, we fundamentally, massively shift the trajectory of a lot of these businesses in a way that, you know, leads me to believe, you know, we have a real opportunity here to put a massive blast radius on StoreHero, and try and bring it to the US in a much more substantive way, to the UK, all these really, really large markets. And, you know, to do that, we will need a lot more funding to to make that happen and make it a reality. You know, we do have competitors. They are, you know, there are, there are iterations and maybe different focuses of those competitors. They are still out there. Some of them have quite deep pockets. So to be able to compete and to kind of compete at the level that we need to compete, we will need additional funding to make that happen.

Larissa Feeney  18:07

And that brings me, then to the question on New York, so that’s obviously part of your future plan. So you mentioned you’re moving to New York, and are you starting the US in New York? Is that your strategy?

Thomas Gleeson  18:20

Yeah, I mean, just for context, like the US is the largest Shopify largest concentration of Shopify stores by about a factor of 10. The next largest market will be the UK. So you’ve a massive cohort of huge stores. And even within that, the size of stores within the US is infinitely bigger than what we would have here in Europe. Once you even get into the US, the majority of these stores are probably in three states, California, Texas or New York. For me, I feel like I have the most connections in New York. It’s where the majority of our current crop of US customers are based. It’s where the most of these events are happening. So I will definitely base myself in New York. We’re looking to run a lot of in person events. Get to every event that’s kind of happening on the ground. And just really kind of network my way through that that you know, network, network my way through as much of the New York e commerce ecosystem as I possibly can. But certainly be traveling to the likes of Austin in in Texas, where there’s a huge cohort or concentration of E commerce. And also to like Los Angeles, San Francisco, where, again, e commerce is huge

Larissa Feeney  19:23

now. And a very accountancy question, and you’ve been accountant for a dad, so you’ll understand this question. Do you the two? So the two co founders in the business, do you to have targets, projections, budgets going into next year? You mentioned that you’ve got key targets you want to hit. How do you work it between the two of you in terms of looking at your numbers to understand where you’re at versus where you want to be at. Yeah.

Thomas Gleeson  19:45

I mean, we’re just trying to follow our own advice, really, in terms of what we’re actually working with our customers as well. Like we try and put forward a best target and worst case scenario, and just re evaluate them on at the end of every month and every quarter, and just make sure that you know, are we on track? Which one are we on track? Off track for and within that really trying to find where all the positive and negative indicators within the business are. You know, maybe we’ve hit our revenue target this month. Bush, you know, operation costs have skyrocketed, or maybe we’ve hit our revenue target, but for some reason, our gross margin has plummeted dramatically. Is it a pricing issue? Is it a discounting issue? You know, there’s so many different facets to it, but absolutely, we do have clear targets, cash flow forecasts, everything built out for the next, probably 18 to 24 months, and it is something that we would look at on a monthly and quarterly basis. And just again, trying to dive into the detail and figure out, you know, where are all those positive and negative indicators? And just instead of just saying, like, you know, September was a great month, September was a terrible month, trying to break it down, line by line of the business and say, you know, what was actually good and bad within that month, because that will help us, you know, double down on what’s working and to do more of it, and also to kind of pull back or assess any potential problems that could be arising from a situation where things aren’t going well. And look, being honest, in every business, there’s going to be plenty of both, and you’re just trying to double down on what’s working and maybe stop the rod, or maybe some of the issues that could be kind of raising their heads,

Larissa Feeney  21:02

yeah, and, and you’re really in the thick of it now, which, which, which is so fascinating. So the question is, with the rapid growth that you guys have experienced, two co founders and a team of 13 or 14, who does that side of the business for you? The numbers? Is it internal, or do you outsource it?

Thomas Gleeson  21:18

We do outsource it like we have our own kind of gage that we’re doing every month, but for our monthly management accounts, we wouldn’t do that, the official ones ourselves there, outsourced. Yeah,

Larissa Feeney  21:28

okay, so everything goes with the system. Okay, very good. So you took the learnings from your mama’s business, and as you said, the differences, I suppose, between your dad’s outlook and your mom’s outlook, which is fascinating, by the way. So talk to us about StoreHero and the problems that you guys are looking to solve for E commerce businesses.

Thomas Gleeson  21:48

Cool. I might even just dive into the the challenges that my dad had with you know what I was currently doing, because the process that I was doing years ago is definitely one that I see resonating and is often common practice in a lot of E commerce businesses, and how we’re looking to make the shift. So I was running the ads. I started running them in maybe 2016 17 for my parents business. And the primary indicator of success for me, from a paid marketing standpoint, was looking at return on ad spend. Many of your clients listening here would probably know that as a ROAs figure. So as I put one euro into the Facebook machine. I’ve made a sale for 10 Euro. I have a 10 return on ad spend. The problem with that was that I was going to my dad and saying, Look, you know, I’ve spent 500 quid this week. I have a four or five ROAs, whatever that is, please give me more money to spend on Facebook. Pretty legitimate requests. I thought, however, he’s an accountant. He doesn’t look at ROAs e metrics. He wants to understand true impacts on profitability, which was nothing I could actually get from meta. It wasn’t information I could get within Shopify. And that actually prevented me from making a really solid, grounded case as to why I actually needed more budget to spend. I could see it was working. I actually just struggled to articulate the value to somebody who was more finance orientated, so that was a problem. So what I essentially had to do was build out really complex spreadsheets at the time where I would bring in all of the E commerce information, all of the marketing information on a weekly basis, and most importantly, from his perspective, bringing in divided costs to go along with fulfilling that those orders and actually running the business in general. That’s really formed the backbone of what we’re building at store? Hero today,

Larissa Feeney  23:23

sorry. I was just going to sorry for interrupting. I was just going to ask you, because that’s I understand completely. Obviously, been an accountant. I understand completely where your dad was coming from, and I’ve had that exact challenge in the business in the past where the marketing team would give me, would give me numbers, just as you’ve described. And I’ve thought, okay, are they the right numbers? So I think any of the listeners who are listening to this podcast will really resonate with that, because as a business owner, we have to now, your dad obviously knew to question you or to ask for more information, or so sometimes, a lot of the time, business owners aren’t coming from a financial background, so they don’t have the knowledge to ask. So they take what the marketing team gives them as been real. So the logic is, give me more money and I’ll get you more revenue. But I think it’s really important just to question that and to maybe to ask more. And your platform, as you’ve said, is set up to do just that.

Thomas Gleeson  24:24

Yes. And the challenge with that is, like, you know, if you are an E commerce business, which a lot of people listening will be today, you are likely running ads on two different platforms, meta and Google, usually, in most cases, maybe you’re on others as well, but they’re the main two. The challenge with running, you know, ads on both of those platforms is say, for instance, I’m running an ad for you know, these AirPods, and I click on the ad on Google, and then tomorrow I see it pop up on my Instagram feed, and I’m going to purchase it through that link. The challenge is, meta and Google are both going to claim that sale. So when we’re looking at our return from both of these platforms, it’s heavily inflated. So to a point in that a lot of businesses that we’re working with will actually log into meta and just ballpark, they’ll have 100 euro attributed to meta today and 100 euro attributed from Google. And when they actually look into Shopify, They’ve only done 150 quid worth of sales. So you’re essentially, you know, that’s that’s a real challenge, because what’s happened in the last few years is that marketing has become so expensive for E commerce businesses that it’s often the heaviest line of the entire P and L is going to this paid marketing budget. And when you dig into it with a lot of E commerce businesses, they’re often using those Return on Ad Spend metrics from these platforms as that primary indicator of success, telling you if what you’re doing on these platforms is worthwhile. Now when you dig into that, and you talk to people, and you look and do you actually trust what these platforms are telling you? And invariably, they will always say, No, we don’t trust them. There’s definitely double attribution going on. So you’re in this weird predicament where, you know, marketing has grown as a line item in every e commerce business across the board, it’s a really large cost for E commerce businesses, their cost to acquire customers has risen. They’re spending more than they ever have on marketing as a line item, and on top of that, they’re using a metric that they actually don’t trust as their primary indicator of success. And what we’re saying with StoreHero is, you know, yes, you can look at that information in StoreHero, but instead of actually relying on what these platforms are telling you, let’s just look at your real data, because we’re hooking into your Shopify. We’re bringing in all of your marketing costs. We’re bringing in your products, your packing, your shipping, your transaction fulfillment and return fees. And irrespective of what the platforms are telling you, we can basically say, you know, you’ve spent 10% more on ads this week. I’m not as concerned about your revenue. I’m more interested in understanding what your profit after that increase in marketing spend looks like, and that’s what you’re looking to maximize as an E commerce business. We kind of term that, that definition as contribution margin, profit after marketing spend, gross margin after marketing costs, whatever way you want to spin it, and that’s a much better and truer reflection of how effective has your marketing spend been

Larissa Feeney  27:02

okay? So I find this really interesting, because, as I said, I’ve been this business owner, and whenever I’m presented with return and ad spend, I don’t think I fully understood what exactly I was looking at, because I understood Yes, to ask more questions, and I understood that it’s of it’s obviously revenue. I don’t think I fully understood that point that you made there, that it possibly could be inflated, that different platforms are claiming the same revenue and and for us, there was different aspects as well, in relation to recurring income, showing in return on ad spend, because, you know, some technical reason. Why is that typical of a business owner that they’re presented with information and they don’t get it, and does your platform present it in a way that makes it easier for them to understand? Do you think,

Thomas Gleeson  27:53

yeah, you mentioned a really interesting point earlier that you were speaking to marketers and they’re asking for more money. You typically, you kind of get in a situation where the E commerce business owner has outsourced their marketing to somebody who is really good at marketing. The problem is that, you know, no more than accounting, no more than E commerce, marketing has its own language. There’s tons of acronyms, and the business owner is doing 101 things a day. They don’t have time to get up to speed with all what all of these acronyms mean. So they’re typically in a place with just often trusting what the agency is saying, without fundamentally understanding the nuances of everything that’s actually been said to them. So we’re trying to kind of flip that on its head and also just kind of speak to you in clear English. So when you log into the platform, we have this piece called a spend advisor, which is going to crunch the four main numbers that I see any e commerce brand should be looking at every day, it’s your net sales, your your marketing spend, the efficiency of that spend, and essentially that contribution margin profit after marketing spend, depending on the fluctuations of those numbers, it will give you a clear indication of like if I look at last month, it might say, okay, you know, your reduced marketing spend led to more profit, assuming that A profit maximization is the end goal of the business, and not simply just revenue maximization, it will give you a clear indication as to what happened last week in English and maybe what you should do about it and the reasons for it. So instead of having you to understand what you know, 50 different acronyms actually mean, the platform will speak clear English back to you and give you a clear framework as of to maybe what you should do to improve your business that bit further as well. One other piece, I think that you just touched on there, which was interesting, and I usually don’t go into this, but just given the context of the domain expertise of this podcast, and I suppose the audience is primarily European or Irish based, another challenge with ROAs, from an accounting standpoint, is that if you’re looking at return on ad spend, the challenge with that is, is that we’re comparing apples with pears. Now you’re probably saying, Thomas, what are you talking about? Explain that. So you know, if you are running Facebook ads, and you spend one euro on a Facebook ads, if you got a bill from Facebook for that ad in the morning, it would be 123 because your VAT is added onto it. However. Right? When you know you make a sale in Shopify, for you spent one euro, you’ve generated a sale for five euro. You’re seeing a five ROAs in Facebook. However, that five euro that you’ve made a sale on in Shopify is fully inclusive of your VAT, so you’re getting the double attribution happening from both platforms. And then, because we’re in the EU, sales tax works a little bit different in the States. Facebook, purposefully, I feel, probably haven’t made an effort to articulate this clearly. You’re getting double attribution from multiple platforms, but then you’re also getting multiple, you know, inflations, I suppose, happening from the fact that you haven’t properly considered the cost of a tax implication of your Return on Ad Spend figures. So just all those, all those things combined, you know, just make it a really difficult metric to be confident on as as you’re looking to scale.

Larissa Feeney  30:45

Yeah, and that’s a great point. And I remember you mentioned that whenever you did the webinar with us a couple of weeks ago, and I picked up on it, because it’s something that I see a lot with business owners, you know, the gross versus net. And if the platforms are presenting the information in certain way, the business owner is going to assume it’s net, you know, it’s, they’re going to assume it’s all the same, or you’re comparing apples with apples, generally speaking, net, whenever we talk in business. But that just means your margin is squeezed even further. And, you know, without, without that data. So using stair StoreHero, then, does the platform present the data to me in a way that’s, that’s, I’m comparing apples with apples. Am I comparing net with NET or Gross? Gross? Yeah,

Thomas Gleeson  31:25

it’s net with net. You can see the gross as well. But all of our emerging calculations are done on a net basis. All of your efficiencies are done purely on a net basis as well. So, yeah, it’s a really true reflection, I suppose, as of to what’s actually happening within your business. And we’re not incentivized to tell anyone to spend more money. You know, other platforms that you will be advertising on probably would be so our true main KPI that we’re looking to help business owners improve is their profitability. So it’s definitely within our interest to be as transparent around what’s actually happening within your business as possible.

Larissa Feeney  31:56

And have you seen the results in businesses? You know, have you got case studies or examples of how that contribution can be increased using story air

Thomas Gleeson  32:07

massively? Honestly, uh, loads. We have a lot of case studies up on the website. We’re just actually about to release one with an Irish retailer this week. So I suppose backstory to this is that we probably started working with the brand or the retailer back in June, and they had come to us, and, you know, they said, We’re struggling to grow the business profitably. We have a certain amount of fixed costs each month, and we’re not really hitting that from a contribution standpoint. And therefore the business is in a loss. I plugged in StoreHero into the business, and I could immediately see that the underlying fundamentals of the business were incredibly strong. They were apprehensive to continue spending on ads because they just didn’t have the confidence to connect what was going on in the finance side of things with the marketing and how that actually, you know, looked how did that actually kind of translate into increased profitability on a very small incremental basis? I kind of touched them and put a plan together and said, you know, month on month, I think you should increase spend by x, because I think that you’re really actually starving yourself of budget, which is a strange predicament for brands to find yourself in, you know, I actually want you to spend more to make more money, whereas they’re kind of saying, you know, we’re already losing money. Why would I spend more? You kind of need to spend to make it kind of thing. So broad strokes, overall, we kind of started increasing that spend from May June, but for September, year on year, ad spend was up 60% but profit after marketing spend was up by 110% year over year, which was massive. On top of that, we use the platform to identify that the brand had potentially been over discounting, and actually the gross profit margin, which obviously helped what we were doing here, was increased by 13% year over year as well, by reducing discounting, and we used our orders page to find out that there was actually tons of really profitable orders that were getting through the system. And when we dug into the products that were in those orders, some of these products were just kind of buried on page four or five of different categories and collections. So we kind of started to re merchandise the site, bring those products front and center, use them in our email marketing campaigns, and it’s been tremendously effective. And we said are running ads for a whole new plethora of products that kind of had been forgotten about because maybe we had considered them too high of a price point, or whatever you want to call it, but we’ve been really able to just pick apart the business, just dive straight into the margins, and I suppose, get away from the noisiness of meta and Google every day, which is ultimately a trap I just see so many businesses falling into. Yeah,

Larissa Feeney  34:22

that’s fascinating. And there’s more StoreHeroes on the site, if any of the listeners want to go and and have a read. Is that right? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay, fantastic. Tell me. Would what would you say to somebody who was where you were two years ago that had an idea, had identified a pain and a solution to the pain. Is there anything that you’ve learned over the last two years that in terms of wisdom that you’d like to pass on?

Thomas Gleeson  34:50

Yeah, I think it’s basic, but actually, really understanding the actual problem you’re solving like, you know, there’s a certain feature that you could. Created. But what’s the true problem that you’re solving within a business like for us, we kind of go through like a problem agitation solution framework, almost, and that the problem isn’t the fact that their customer acquisition costs are going up, but that they’re spending more. The problem, from our perspective, is that they’re using a metric like return on ad spend, which is, you know, very much open to interpretation, to put it mildly. So we want to agitate that problem by helping them understand, okay, like you know, this is, this is the problem I perceive you to have. How much of a problem is this for you? So you’re trying to dig in and say, You’re spending more, you’re worried about the spend, and yet you as a business owner, are putting your primary gage of success in a metric that you yourself don’t trust, and then bring in the solution. So trying to work through kind of problem agitation, solution, and does that align with the actual problem that you as a business are looking to solve? That’s worked really, really well for us in trying to get problem identification on calls, or problem yeah, yeah. Problem identification, I suppose the best way to put it. A lot of the brands that we speak to don’t yet realize that they have a problem, until we can clearly articulate the problems with the current structure that they have. So really, really getting deep and understanding what the problem that you have is, is probably one second will be setting up your CRM correctly from day one. You know, we set up HubSpot, but I can see the HubSpot kind of setup that we would have today is a million miles away from what it would have been probably 18 months ago. So setting that up early doors is so, so important to just help you stay on track of every conversation that you’ve had, who said what? When do they say it? Where are they, who’s talking to them, that kind of thing. And the last piece will probably be just the distribution of the product. Is its own product in itself. You know, you can build the best tool in the world, but unless you have a proper distribution engine built in behind us, you know, nobody’s going to hear about it. So how do your sales and marketing actually speak to your product? Because that’s so, so important, and it’s definitely, you know, we knew that was going to be challenging, but it has been. It’s definitely been a huge, huge, huge focus for us in the last 12 to 24 months, and it’s definitely been, as at the, I suppose, the core of why we’ve done okay, but yeah, distribution is its own product in itself, aside from the product that you’re actually building. So just think about them independently, because they definitely are two separate components completely. The

Larissa Feeney  37:10

idea being that, you know, you can build the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, then it’s no good for anyone. And you, you obviously are a big part of that sales process. You’re the one that’s going to New York, but you do have, or do you have professional salespeople on the team as well?

Thomas Gleeson  37:24

Yeah, we have a team of three business development reps who are kind of following up on they’re still doing cold outbound, but they’re following up on the kind of demand led outbound, so trying to identify where conversations are happening online that we can potentially get involved in, and also following up on a lot of the leads or engagement that’s happening through the likes of our LinkedIn, through the likes of various, you know, events that we’re running, webinars, that we’re running webinars that we’re presenting on, or podcasts that we’re presenting on, that kind of thing. So basically, just trying to follow up on any engagement that’s happening within the story hero sphere or externally by a byproduct of us participating in external events. And

Larissa Feeney  38:02

Thomas, final question that that’s all. I think what the information you’ve given has been so helpful to businesses that will be exactly where you’re at now, but also educating e commerce businesses around challenges that they may not even know that they have. So thank you for that. Where would you like to see soar hero be in five years time?

Thomas Gleeson  38:21

Cool. Okay, it’s the toughest question you’re going to ask me today. Yeah. I mean, going back to, I suppose, the Challenger and why are we raising more money? I really, really believe, and just from the conversations that we’re consistently having with many of our clients, we’re delivering a level of clarity to e commerce business owners, for the first time that they really have lacked for a long time. And what I mean by that is, you know, often the E commerce business owner has outsourced their marketing to an external agency. If they’re being truthful with you, a lot of the time, they’re semi bamboozled by what the agency is saying, but they go along with it. Oh, completely, yeah, the marketing is, what is the fuel that’s going to drive your E commerce business, we’re giving you a place to drive, bring everything under one roof and help you focus on what really matters for growing your business, growing profit. It sounds extremely basic and extremely fundamental, and that’s why I ultimately think that we’re going to be really, really successful. So I would love a situation in like five years, where StoreHero is the default way in which e commerce businesses evaluate their paid marketing spend on a daily basis. We’re making great inroads into making that happen, but we certainly have a lot more, a lot more, a long way more to go as well. So definitely an exciting few years coming up.

Larissa Feeney  39:30

Absolutely. Thomas, thank you very much. That’s Thomas Gleeson, co-founder of StoreHero. I really appreciate having you on the podcast today. Thanks. Tom, thanks.

Thomas Gleeson  39:39

Thanks very much. Larissa, really, really enjoyed that.

VO  39:41

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