Samir Balwani: 00:03
Hi, I'm Samir Balwani, host of Chief Advertiser and founder of QRY. Join me as I talk to industry leaders about their strategies, challenges, and successes in managing their advertising and marketing. On our episode today, I have Matt Bahr, the founder of Fairing here. He's awesome. I've chat with him all the time. We I'm always blown away by how much he knows and the things that he's working on. Thank you so much for joining us today, Matt.
Matt Bahr: 00:33
Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to dive deep here.
Samir Balwani: 00:36
Yeah. So let's get started with the easy stuff. Tell us a bit about your background. Who are you, how you got to where you are today?
Matt Bahr: 00:42
Yeah. So I've been in e-commerce since 2010, 2011. I was a merchant for the first call. It 6 or 7 years left that side of the table in 2016. Funny enough, enamored with same day delivery. No, not a ton of people know this, but at the company I was at prior to, I was leading all things digital, so I owned the digital piano plus logistics. So I had this like beautiful view of the business. And at the time, Uber, Uber, Rush and Postmates were like the future of e-commerce. So I left that company in 2016 to go build a company in the same day, delivery space, trying to generate top of funnel demand was the general kind of thesis around that company. We never found product market fit is a small friends and family rounds to support that. But what came out of that was one of those customers here in New York where we're located, called Cara Sport Handbag Company. Aaron, over there, we were working with a ton on kind of all things same day, but just like their business in general. And he came to me once and was like, hey, we're doing all this influencer gifting. He's like, bags are just like going out the door every day. We're giving influencers codes. But if we look in Shopify and we look in Google Analytics like nobody's using the codes. So like we pretty much don't think it's working. But every once in a while, like we have this hunch that it is so that that was kind of the founding conversation to Fairing. I suggested to him to go at a Google form. So this is in 2017. So a bit ago, kind of before the whole post-purchase survey craze, and he had to use a different app to add the embed for the Google form. And he had that live for a few months and then came back to me and was like, hey, like, this is like my source of truth. Like I open this all the time. It's been super helpful, but it doesn't give me any order level information. So that was that was the catalyst on our side. That was like, hey, we're I think emotionally we were like, we haven't found product market fit with this other product. We could take a couple weeks and build a post-purchase survey app that kind of joins these two data sets. So that's how we got started. We launched in May of 2018. And yeah, a lot of other founders always ask me, it's like, hey, how do I know when I have product market fit? And for me, I saw kind of the contrast of not having it and having it. And my answer to that question is always like, there's there's no metrics. You'll just know when you have it. And it was just like big cluster after big Cluster that summer would install our post-purchase survey app. And that's really where we got started. So I owe a lot of gratitude to Aaron and Cara. Some other things that happened like iOS 14 that have certainly helped, but he definitely was the initial the initial push or spark that really surfaced the problem to us.
Samir Balwani: 03:20
You know, it's I love that you talk about product market fit because to tie it back to like consumer goods too, there is still product market fit in the consumer goods standpoint too. Right. Like that is not a concept that is wholly unique or tied only to SaaS. And I, you know, working with brands from, you know, just starting out to, you know, very established and, and, and very clearly have product market fit. It is really interesting to see the difference between the two. Right. Like, yeah, you know, advertising side when we see really low click through rates, really low conversion rates. And just like people not caring, it's you know it's step one of maybe it's a product market fit thing and not a marketing issue always, you know, 100%.
Matt Bahr: 04:04
Yeah I always look at brands in two categories. One of them is brand led and the other is more problem solution type products. I can't imagine doing the brand led side of things just with how my brain works. But like apparel like product market fit, it's kind of like brand market fit. Maybe there's a little bit of product there from a quality perspective and whatnot, but it's really about building that brand that gets people excited and wanting to purchase the product where we have all these like supplement companies, which is a huge a huge vertical now. And it's like, okay, here's a problem here. We're the solution. And it's just like two totally different vectors into marketing.
Samir Balwani: 04:37
It's actually really interesting too, because I would I would say that there there is this element of brand market fit regardless. Right. Because even on the vitamin side, there's so many people solving that problem. You kind of need that brand element too, of course. Then there's communities being built, right? Like, I am aligned with this brand because of this. And, you know, I always find that to be fascinating. The the brand market fit. I've never heard it positioned that way, but it's probably the best way to actually position it of like, do people care to be a part of that community? And is there a big enough community to actually run a store or like run a brand? Yeah, build a business. Right. So I always I think anyway, that slight tangent from our series of questions, but the last one.
Matt Bahr: 05:24
The last point I want to make on that is I, I find it fascinating because the consumer has to identify with the brand.
Samir Balwani: 05:30
Yes.
Matt Bahr: 05:31
And sometimes that is not clear. So it's like the example I always give is like if you were starting a coffee company, maybe it's like coffee for firefighters and it's just like it's in the name if it's for you or not. And so there's always this. I just see some brands sometimes going to market with messaging, where it's like it makes it difficult for the customer to say, hey, is this for me or is this not. like, do I have to keep reading to figure this out? And how do you make that kind of synergy happen as instantly as possible?
Samir Balwani: 05:57
I mean, I think so many brands are afraid to say who they are not, for I think that that is it. And when you don't, we when we do the brand exercise with our clients, we literally will ask them, so who is this product not for? We don't ask for who it is because if you ask for who it is, it's oh, it's, you know, women between the ages of 25 and 65 and they might be urban or they might be suburban, actually. And it's like, yeah, no. But then like, who shouldn't use your product and who shouldn't engage with you? And then it forces you to be really, like very specific because you start it. So I always I, I would challenge people to do that and make sure that you are actually have honed in on things.
Matt Bahr: 06:37
It's probably a difficult exercise.
Samir Balwani: 06:39
Yeah, yeah. No one wants to give up a potential customer, right?
Matt Bahr: 06:43
Yeah, exactly.
Samir Balwani: 06:45
But Matt, you have this perspective into so many different brands and how people are finding brands and and really helping them understand, like the impact of their advertising. Right. Like the reason why I love pairing is it makes it really easy to measure difficult channels, you know, things like CTV and influencer and direct mail, all of those kinds of things, even word of mouth, just word of mouth as a whole, which is key for a good brand that's scaling. What are the challenges you're seeing that these advertising leaders and brands are seeing right now?
Matt Bahr: 07:26
Yeah, it goes back to kind of what you were just alluding to. It's all measurement related challenges. And we we've really started to use the word measurement over attribution just because, like, we don't want everyone to kind of pigeonhole themselves into some clickstream MTA model, when in reality it's really about just measuring whether it's measuring Roas or measuring CTR or anything there. There's a multitude of ways to think about it. So the biggest challenges that we're seeing are when brands try and want to make the leap out of kind of single channel or like dual channel dependency. So it's like, hey, we're advertising with Google Ads and meta. We want to go lean into another channel. How do we do so with a level of confidence that allows us to like actually lean in, not get a false negative or a false positive. We have to allocate enough budget. And that's that's that last point is usually what it comes down to is for meta, you're probably not gonna have a ton of success, but you can get started with a credit card in $20. For a lot of these other channels, you need a bit more scale to lean in. And that's where a lot of the hesitation comes from. And it makes our job exciting because we're the guardrails are always changing. So we think about whether it's privacy regulations or new channels. Hey, game AD and Applovin is now a new channel for e-commerce advertisers. So it's this never it's always moving target that marketers have to essentially adapt to every quarter or every couple of years to think about how their measurement stack can change. And the beauty of Fairing is like, we're very resilient to privacy regulation, to clickstream data, like we're just asking customers at scale, which is just a totally kind of our goal is to get survey data to be analogous to like, pixel data and like, how do we get the level of deterministic confidence in a survey response that someone would get from somebody clicking on an ad and then buying?
Samir Balwani: 09:13
Yeah, it's interesting because you say meta is really easy to get started on. I think there's also this element of everyone knows meta is going to work, at least at some level. It's going to work for you. And so when when you are trying, you know, on the agency side, we see this all the time around. Like if we're trying to prove out a positive expectation, it's a lot easier to prove out that than it is to prove out a negative expectation. And so every you know, people are always, oh, Pinterest will never work for me or Reddit will never work for me. Oh, you know, CTV, we don't have enough money for that, so it's not going to work. Trying to convince someone otherwise is requires a lot more planning and a lot more, you know, green sprouts. We need to show along the way all of these things. We might run incrementality test over a 90 day period, but we won't even get to the end of 90 days if we can't show something along the way. Right? Yeah. And so that's where I think post-purchase survey ends up being really helpful because it's like, okay. Yeah, great. You know, we spend X amount of dollars and we saw a handful of people say they found it on. That's enough for us to say we're going to continue on on this route.
Matt Bahr: 10:19
We're getting enough signal. Yeah.
Samir Balwani: 10:20
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I think measurement is and continues to be a challenge. I guess my question for you, and this is going to be a little bit of a loaded question, is when is it too much measurement. Like when when is it that the marketer is just so wholly focused on measurement they forget to go do something?
Matt Bahr: 10:38
Yeah, yeah. No, I, I'd say that happens quite often. I was chatting with a friend of mine last week. I had lunch with him, and he recently ran a whole campaign for this large CPG company, and the creative that they created received a ton of awards because it was, like, actually creative in the sense of how they thought about the campaign. And it went viral and like all these things. And I think that that's where a lot of brands kind of forget. They just lean so far into optimizing. And I see like there's companies that are creating ad units with AI. It's like here, record one and create 100 others. And it's like you're totally removing kind of the art of, of advertising from this, which again, might that might garner you a positive result. But I do think most brands get hung up in optimizing everything. And that's like, we're fair. Like we've we take what one could argue is an more Occam's Razor approach at Fairing, where it's like we look at survey data and last click data and join those two. And it kind of tells a story of like first touch where discovery is happening and then what's happening at the very bottom of the funnel. And arguably that's what you need for the majority of channels at least to understand directionally or even further. Like is this working or is this not?
Samir Balwani: 11:48
Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because you said this, you know, the AI driven creative and you're making like hundreds of them and that you'll get results. And I will always preface this by saying you will get results in the short term. And then, you know, at the risk of a long term expectation and, you know, the impact of brand and how brand works together into things even in your performance, marketing is really valuable and important. Again, going back to the brand market fit. Like once you have brand market fit, you know, that's great. And we always will tell clients when media is driving too much of the revenue. You have a brand marketing issue right now and we are winning on performance marketing, but we are stuck where we are, and you're not going to be able to scale beyond this until we get brand marketing in place. And I'll give a shout out to our friends at tracksuit, because we work with them pretty regularly to help with the brain measurement and brain thinking because, you know, we were talking about this before, but product attributes and what people think about your product matters just as much. So how are you guys helping? You know, brands really think through what people think about their products because, you know, post-purchase survey part of it is marketing and advertising measurement. But also there's there's so much more you can do there.
Matt Bahr: 13:05
Yeah. So we group everything into four key categories. The first one measurement attribution. How did you hear about us. When did you hear about us type questions. The next one is I might hit this light in a second because my room just went dark. The second one here. Hold on one second. There we go. The. Yeah, the first one is attribution and measurement. The second one is personalization and segmentation. So this is kind of a layup. You can use this downstream in Klaviyo and your ESP. But also just like pivot all your other data on it. It's questions like how would you describe yourself.
Samir Balwani: 13:37
Like oh yeah.
Matt Bahr: 13:39
Marketers spend so much time. Maybe a subset of marketers spend a lot of time on building personas of like, who their customers, who they think their customers will be, and they don't spend a lot of time thereafter, then taking customers and breaking and bringing those customers back into those personas. And that's where that question gets super valuable.
Samir Balwani: 14:00
Even validating their customer set. Right. Like you made all these assumptions. How do you validate that? That's actually who it is.
Matt Bahr: 14:06
Yeah, exactly. So that's that's why I love the how would you describe yourself? It definitely gets a little bit more difficult in like the apparel realms versus a product that's maybe like used for a specific reason. Yeah. But that's definitely the the second question or type of question that we recommend customers tackling after that main attribution one. And then the third is kind of two others. The third one is just general research. And so it's demographics psychographic. There's a ton of other ways to get that data. You can enrich it with third party data sets and whatnot. But if you're a smaller brand or just trying to get a quick like, what's the age of my average customer? You could do so very easily with Fairing. And then the last opportunity with post-purchase surveys is around conversion rate optimization. So interesting. This is this is also like a layup in the sense of how do you operationalize it. It's questions like how was your shopping experience. If somebody says not great and we have templates for this, you can then push that data to a sheet we're now using like Shopify Flow and ChatGPT to categorize all of that for a couple brands. And then you can build dashboards. Hey, it's checkout, it's discount codes, it's so-and-so. And it'll give your team digital product team, whoever's managing the website, kind of almost like a to do list of like, this is where I should focus. These are the biggest problems that are hanging up customers. And then for the customers who have a really bad experience, you could then pipe that data to your CX platform and automate an outbound that says, I'm so sorry you had a bad experience. Here's 10% off. So that's how that's how we think about grouping. kind of the ways in which to extract value out of post-purchase surveys.
Samir Balwani: 15:40
Yeah. We one of the questions that I yeah, because there's questions that you put in there because you might have general broad questions. And then I think that sometimes you'll get these very specific questions that you want to have answered. Right. So two that we wanted to get answered were who was a competitive set. So when you were purchasing this, who else did you consider before you chose us? And then and then why? Right. Like it's always kind of curious to understand why. And then the other one was who are you purchasing for? Is it for myself? For my friend, for a cousin? Just to help understand, like how giftable a business is great because that helped the logistics team understand that. All right, well, should we prioritize gift messaging and gift wrapping ahead of Q4 holiday, or do we not need to do that? You're like, oh, well, that gets 20% of our product is gifted. So maybe, maybe this is a huge opportunity. And we didn't realize that. So yeah, I, I love just the kind of amount of information that we're able to glean so easily. And I think the thing that surprised me the most was just how happy people are to answer the question. Like, I think one of the biggest assumptions a lot of people make and a lot of marketers make is no one's going to fill that out. Like, why? Like as soon as you're done purchasing, you're going to you're going to be done. And yet that's that's not the truth at all.
Matt Bahr: 16:58
Yeah, I think that's I think that is beyond kind of the driving forces of difficulty, measurement difficulty to track turn channels with iOS 14. The other perception thing that has changed is the high response rates with post-purchase surveys versus what people are typically used to, which is a 3 to 6% when they're sending these via email. Yeah. And that perception is, I think what's really catalyzed this whole space into post-purchase surveys like, oh, I could actually start to treat this like a stream of data, not just a quarterly PDF. We throw together that we email to 10,000 people and we get 200 responses.
Samir Balwani: 17:33
Yeah. Yeah. Especially because it's top of mind then. Right? Like it's also the timing element of it is really interesting. So, you know, I'd love to pivot and talk a little bit more about just the future of e-commerce and honestly advertising and marketing as a whole. So as we kind of look ahead, there's a lot of change. Obviously, you know, marketing has gone through the gamut over the last 18 months, and I think the next 18 months are going to be very similar. What are you seeing? What are you thinking? What are you guys kind of getting prepared for?
Matt Bahr: 18:04
Yeah, we're definitely seeing that. At least we're expecting the introduction of new channels. I feel like there's a little bit of a kind of renaissance happening. Applovin definitely opened the door to a new one no one was thinking of. There's. Yeah, a few others that we're talking to that definitely have some scale. So definitely, I think for the average marketer, the media mix or the distribution of channels will continue to grow. It's it's not going to shrink. Yeah. Which arguably it could have if something like TikTok did go away. So I just think there's this massive everyone is seeing, at least in the public markets, what happens when you, like, have an audience and can monetize it, especially if we're seeing like all these retail media networks like kayak, Delta, like everyone has a retail media network. So definitely seeing more of that. So I think the average consumer will be exposed to more and more advertisements. So definitely expecting more challenges when it comes to complexity of measurement. But with that all the measurement solutions arguably are getting better. So hopefully we all meet in a in this kind of beautiful, beautiful middle where people start to understand these things. And I think a big part of that is moving further away from something like MTA, like multi-touch attribution, and something that's more causal based is really where a lot of the bigger brands are going. How do the smaller brands start to do that? So that's probably what we're most excited for. On the on the advertising side, on the Fairing side, like where we come into play, like I alluded to this before, we're definitely most excited about continuing to iterate and think of ways that we could turn survey data into something that's more deterministic. And that's kind of that's really what we're focused on. There's a ton of different opportunities for using post-purchase surveys. In. One path we could take as a company is to just go super wide with our product. Like just think of a normal survey solution and go wide and implement everything there. Or we can go super deep in this and we've we've chose the latter arguably because it's we think the it ultimately will deliver ten x more value than anything we could build if we could start to provide more accurate and deeper insights by asking questions intelligently. So those two things are how we're thinking about the world as far as more opportunities for advertising and how Ferran could fit in in the future.
Samir Balwani: 20:11
Yeah, I always, you know, I think your conversation around your point, around just the more channels mix, right? I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think that the mix of how we engage with advertising and where is going to be more and more complicated. And then both how you spread out budget, where budget goes and the implementation of it is going to get really complicated as well as the creative. Right? Because to your point, the Delta retail network is very different in terms of the creative and the expectation of what you want to do versus what you put on Facebook. And so there's going to be this need for creative lift. And, you know, tying that back might be, hey, how did you hear about us? But it also might be what what did you what what did you hear about us first? Right. And that may be how we get to the different locations because transparently, no one's going to be like Delta retail media network, right? Like so. So it's how do you how do you kind of help people as, as advertising gets more complicated as, you know, people don't even know what an ad is sometimes. Yeah, right. Or where they saw the brand in the first place. So and I am excited about the tools coming out to help solve that and the questions and just what it's going to take.
Matt Bahr: 21:34
Yeah, our biggest learning at Fairing is maybe not learning, but change of thinking is not everyone needs to be asked the same question. And so we can actually get really good at predicting what someone is going to answer a certain question based on specific parameters that we have around the order or the landing page, which allows us to ask other questions. So it might not be, how did you hear about us? It might be like, did you see us in the Delta app? Because like we think they did and we're just trying to confirm, confirm something that we're trying to predict. So that's how we're thinking about the problem more wholeheartedly is less hard coded questions post-purchase and something that's a little bit more probabilistic with how we think about asking these, that fills all these measurement gaps in the stack, because we keep going back to if someone's just advertising on meta, it's like Fairing is probably not the best tool. Like we're just we're marginal. I'd say we add value, but it's on the margin. But when your medium starts to expand. That's where we get more and more and more valuable. And as that expansion happens, it's like, well, you probably don't need crazy more signal on meta. Like, it's probably already working if you've gotten it to a certain place of scale. So how do we help you with those other channels without introducing maybe another bias or something that could kind of steer you in the wrong direction?
Samir Balwani: 22:44
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think influencer is like a perfect example of does this work or does this not work? How did you hear about us all the time? Yeah. We always we're always trying to figure that one out, especially as, you know, we're at this moment in time on the influencer world where there is this concept of influencer versus creator. And so, you know, on our end, we'll start you as an influencer. And if we don't see you actually influencing anything, you know, we'll transition you into, okay, you're a creator. Interesting. Yeah. Creativity for ads. So things like this help us make that decision of do we want to pay, you know, a higher rate because you are actually influential and you're driving some kind of drive for us or, you know, is it? We think you have really nice aesthetic and creative that we want to use and we're going to use it's a licensing. Right. So there's this like tactical element of using this data. And then of course there's this overarching strategic element of using the data to.
Matt Bahr: 23:39
Yeah totally. Yeah. Influencers is a hard one. Yeah. We found a little tidbit here. We found last summer that consumers. So we essentially ran an external panel. And so not even using Fairing but using a methodologist with the goal of how to consumers think of like product discovery. And the learning out of that was that they think channel first, not influencer first. And so if they discovered a brand through Kim Kardashian, it's not like their immediate thought isn't Kim Kardashian, it's actually Instagram and then Kim Kardashian as the channel. So we're we're working on something within Fairing that will allow essentially a more flexible question asking user experience that will help us get to that as well. So but that was a a big learning. We're probably going to do that every summer, hopefully even more often than that. Just like even with mobile advertising, like game gaming advertising starting to looks like be not going away anytime soon. It's like, how do we best ask these questions? How do consumers think about these things? And yeah, polling is actually a phenomenal way to do that.
Samir Balwani: 24:43
Yeah. That's interesting. You you spoke to something that has been top of mind for us is this concept of product discovery. Right. Because you used to go to the mall and that was your product discovery because you'd walk around a, you know, a retail location and that's shifted so much. And luckily it's like shifting back a little. But still, with the total amount of products out there, Shopify democratized access to starting a store and starting a brand, and so did Amazon. The question becomes, how do I even get introduced to a new brand? How do I how do you, as a brand owner, get introduce yourself to other people? And optimizing that is really hard because for the most part, that's not your last click channel.
Matt Bahr: 25:23
Yeah, no, it's the top of the funnel.
Samir Balwani: 25:25
Yeah, yeah. So Matt, thank you so much for joining us today. I always love our conversations. I always learn so much from you. So if someone wants to find you online, where can people learn more about you? More about Fairing?
Matt Bahr: 25:37
Yeah, probably LinkedIn or Twitter is best. Just Matt Bahr. Feel free to email me. Mattbahr@fairing.co always happy to dive in to existing measurement models. Anything that's a big push we're doing now is how do we join Fairing data with other methodologies? So yeah, always happy to chat and don't hesitate to reach out.
Outro: 25:57
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