Sam Hager from MixShift, formerly Dash Applications, sits down with Rob Stanley from Feedback Whiz to discuss how Agencies can succeed in a shifting Amazon landscape.
Summary
Sam Hager from MixShift (formerly Dash Applications) discussed their new product, the – data subscription, which is built to empower Amazon agencies in building scalable reporting.
Highlights
- 🚀 Dash Applications provides a plug-and-play database for Amazon advertising data and connects to any reporting platform.
- 🧠 It solves the difficult task of building scalable reports from the Amazon agency side, enabling agencies to stand up reporting quickly.
- 💣Their proprietary bridge engine helps managers explain Amazon performance changes confidently, calculating contribution to ACOS change down to the Search Term level
- 📊 The data subscription updates every day and continuously refreshes for the last 60 days to catch all the restatements.
- 🤖 Dash data master is a GUI for your data that enables you to go down to the very bottom of your data stack and see it in real-time.
- 💼 It helps any Amazon agency bring that Amazon advertising data in a scalable way to combine it with omni-channel reporting and operations reporting for Amazon.
- 💲 Unlike manual data sources that spend countless hours in maintaining data source, Dash Applications have built tables that enable easy querying giving on the spot analysis.
- 📈 With Dash Applications, users can build their report on the fly and access data continuously updated and refreshed enabling quick responses.
Full Transcript: How to Help Amazon Agencies Succeed in 2020 | Sam Hager | Dash Applications – YouTube
Transcript:
(00:00) hey everyone this is Rob Stanley with the econ whiz podcast welcome to season 2 2020 our first episode of 2020 I’ve got a special guest Sam Hagar he is with dash applications specifically on the Amazon side so and today we’re gonna be talking about how to help out Amazon agencies succeed and and all the applications and different
(00:23) tools that – application has they can really help you succeed in the Amazon world Sam thanks for being on our podcast I really appreciate it absolutely Rob thanks for having me man so we’re gonna dive right in we’re gonna dive right in and start talking about how – applications helps Amazon sellers let’s start with what’s your best either
(00:44) service or tool you guys are currently offering and what does it do and how will it help people out sure so the first thing that we’re actually going to launch with in our beta to the public in q1 in 2020 is our – data subscription when we were on the agency side of things Rob which I think we’ll get into
(01:05) a little bit later yeah we realized that it was really really difficult to build scalable reporting from the agency side so you were off and really prisoner to downloading and exporting manual reports and then building a you know reporting stack on top of that and it constantly broke I mean that was hours upon
(01:23) countless hours of time that we spent every single month – just to prepare reporting for our clients so through – we’ve actually built basically a plug-and-play database for your Amazon advertising data and so what that enables you to do is basically plug in any reporting platform or bi tool Google Data studio tableau power bi whatever
(01:42) may be and actually tap in your Amazon advertising data that’s number one updated every single day continuously refresh for the last 60 days so that you catch all the restatements as well as with some unique tables that we’ve actually created because we were finding that we were analyzing the data in a
(02:02) specific way that we needed available in our reporting so it’s you know really what we’re trying to solve is just giving agencies the ability to stand up reporting really quickly and then also bring that Amazon advertising data in a scalable way to combine it with omni-channel reporting as well as with
(02:17) your you know business reporting and operations reporting for Amazon and so that’s what we’re launching within 2020 with that we also have a platform that basically if you’re not super technically you know skilled or you don’t have that data science person in the in-house that can write those sequel
(02:31) queries to go really get you know the data extracted from your database we actually have what we call datum dash data master and that’s that’s just a GUI for your data and it enables you to go down to the very bottom of your data stack you’ll search terms asons campaigns ad groups whatever you need to
(02:48) slice and dice and actually be able to see that in real time without having to go write queries and so that’s that’s one part of the – Amazon platform that connects directly to your – database yeah yeah so let’s let’s go into some specific example you on spot but I’m going to so yeah obviously you don’t
(03:07) need to mention any company names or anything but give us some examples like what can people expect using you guys versus just doing the reports directly from Amazon like we were just talking about yeah I mean really the the landscape right now is that you have a couple companies out there that are gonna have connectors you know to the
(03:26) Amazon data you know or you’re forced to like we said export those reports manually and so the difference is is when you have a manual data source that you’re maintaining you’re spending countless hours and your people your team are you know spending hours to maintain that data source but whether it’s sitting in Excel or maybe even an
(03:45) Access database or whatever maybe they have to literally go into the platform for every single one of your clients download that report and actually maintain that database you know that data source every time you want to update reporting or even analyze your information and you know on the spot when you have questions come up from
(04:02) clients that’s a really hard thing to do and to keep you know sustained on a monthly basis as your client base grows from the agency side and so you know with – we actually have built some tables that when you connect they already have your monthly numbers aggregated right away so we’re gonna connect into the single table you have
(04:20) all of your sellers all of your merchant sellers vendors available to you a across all your months historical record that is kept forever and ever and you can tap into that and basically just build your report on the fly that data is continuously updated and refreshed and like I said you know even when you’re just trying to answer a
(04:41) simple question that acclaimed my lab Achuar that you’re trying to understand internally you know really really hard to do that if you have to go pull man your report update a pivot table make sure that you’re looking at the right stuff you know with the – data mastering the GUI that we built through our
(04:56) platform you can go self-serve on that there’s there’s nothing that you have to do manually and your data is right there and you know that it’s updated and refreshed and that you’re looking at the the most relevant stuff and I think that’s those are a couple of the biggest advantages yeah yeah so just so maybe
(05:09) some people are a little bit clearer so let’s say I’m an agency I’ve got let’s say 50 clients underneath me I would come to you I would basically ask you about the different services see which ones that fit in my company now do you find that most of the agencies are they reselling it are they offering it as a
(05:30) package or you know kind of like how are they on the agency side using your guys’s software to either do value add or are they out you know or is it all a cart yeah it’s I think it’s more value add if we had to categorize it that way in the sense that you know the agencies are really just struggling to be able to
(05:50) grow in scale so if you hit you know if you get a 50 client roster and you’re manually updating your reports for every single client you’re probably spending north of a hundred hours on recording every single yeah which is is literally unsustainable right and so when you come to – and you say hey we’ll tap into the
(06:09) API for all of your Amazon accounts all you have to do is log in with Amazon with literally the credentials that you use to log in with Amazon we get access to the API for you start pulling that data immediately and that database is going to be ready for you the second that you connect to – and and you have
(06:26) literally just cut out a hundred hours of work for that 50 client roster and that’s probably on the light side honestly yeah and that just you know to answer the question I think it’s just without that service you know you’re you’re really hamstrung your ability to grow the agency and your prime minister no it sounds like I mean
(06:46) it saves the agencies money you know not that we want anybody to lose their job but I mean you gotta streamline things right I mean you got to look at your bottom line you’re competing against other agencies out there so absolutely that just makes sense just out of curiosity what what’s one of the I’ll
(07:01) give me like the top report are download that most people request like you know I’m sure there’s one that they request more than others as far as you know what the agency needs or yeah yeah what it what it must say agency what sir when they come to you there’s probably one a couple of reports that they want to get
(07:19) the most right that’s usually ones like it’s a P&L statement at the end of the month is it a you know what their cells were but you know there’s gotta be something like that right well and this is customizable – yeah your clients obviously but I think the primary question that they come to us with is
(07:36) like can you can you literally tap into all of our accounts at once so we can see them all in view right because every time you want to go for reports you have to log into every single account on Amazon so you got to go do the merchant selector right go in grab that one go get your reports we eliminate the need
(07:56) for all that and in our platform you have a dashboard that literally has all of your merchants in a single view so that you can see what’s going on and then you know the pain and anguish that occurs is kind of what we’ve been talking about to this point right is just I I have this problem nobody like I
(08:11) don’t have somebody technically internally to build this database for me which by the way is really expensive and then you also have to maintain it for all of the API updates that Amazon rolls out on a monthly basis yeah which is what we do for folks right so as far as like what data do they need or what do
(08:29) they most request it’s all of your advertising ad sales spend a cause at least at the aggregate level but by the way we have them all the way down to the search termination level so when you are ready to go do the analytics beyond the reporting element of what you’re trying to deliver it’s there and ready for you
(08:47) which we haven’t talked about the rest of the platform yet but that’s basically what that’s and next so I mean not to get get too much into you know reports and stuff but you know we wanted to start there so we that’s your most that’s the reason most of the agencies come to you is specifically for reports right now but –
(09:03) does more than that so let’s let’s kind of go over we can go one by one what’s like the next thing that most agencies are gonna request from you guys yes our application wise yeah for sure I mean the request comes for data first because reporting is always the first thing you have to deliver for your clients you
(09:21) literally can’t have clients without reporting right and so that that’s the clear and obvious ask and then from there you know that’s the reason we’ve launched with data but we also realized you know and we kind of actually did do a little bit backwards in hindsight now but we actually built the analytics
(09:37) platform first before we built out our data subscription so we realized that you know when you have an advertising platform that in an analytics platform that’s helping you kind of as a decision support system to manage your accounts on a daily weekly monthly basis you know those platforms require your data yeah
(09:57) and you are not getting access to that data but you have the need for it so we realize you know we want to enable agencies to be able to have all of their data because we’re using it in the platform and they shouldn’t have to pay for it twice right like that’s that was a pretty obvious thing to us and was
(10:15) also the pain that we experienced on the agency side when we were in that world and so you know the next ask that came was well I have to go prove to my client every single month or bi-weekly the value that I provide to them okay well how can we facilitate that narrative and so we actually have a couple things in
(10:35) the platform that are we’re really excited about because I think they’re pretty novel within the space one of the core engines to the platform is called the bridge and what we’ve been able to do it’s actually a financial concept that came out of some of our co-founders backgrounds but basically the idea is
(10:51) you know in any given time period can you explain what drove change in the advertising performance we’ve actually built an engine that down to the very most my new attribute is able to is able to explain that contribution to the change from month-over-month what that enables you to do is number one you know immediately what has
(11:13) changed and in what direction secondly you also know what caused it and third what that allows you to do is build the narrative and the conversation that you have with your client and it is the we did this in Excel and the reason we built it in the software is because we couldn’t we could not execute it in a bi
(11:33) tool we tried in tableau we tried in power bi we couldn’t get to this bridge that we really needed to be able to explain change and so we built it in the software that’s actually what we built first and there’s a bunch of other things that we can get into but this core engine the bridging engine you know
(11:52) is unique in the sense that there is no question that you cannot answer with data and I think that was really really powerful us for for us when we were working with our clients on the agency side because from there there’s there when you really have transparency into the data there’s no question about
(12:13) what’s happening and who’s doing what and what strategy is being enacted because there’s nowhere to hide right you want to have the data as transparently proposed as possible right because from there and now it’s just conversation of strategy you’re able to say like well you know CPC went up by 20 percent across these certain keywords do
(12:34) we want to keep driving marketing investment to those because we have this initiative to drive organic ranking and those particular head terms maybe we’ll call them even though the a cause is out of line of what we want the overall portfolio to achieve you know exactly what those cpc’s are down on those
(12:52) keyword components without having to say well I think CPC went up do you want to pull back but you can actually isolate that and say it’s these head terms that are really important to us and at the cost of a cause we can continue investing in those keywords yeah I mean as a store owner if I hire two agency I
(13:10) mean former store owner but you know if I hired an agency that’s what I’ve expect I would expect monthly reports showing me you know where where is the money going where am I putting this money where can I add more money to create that more fire to get more money back right you want your ROI I mean you and you guys
(13:28) are providing a way to go in there and basically break that down and hand it to their customer and say here you know here’s a report showing where you’re making money where it maybe you’re struggling you know where we’re trying to help or where it’s you know succeeding because I mean I I’ve in the past I’ve hired SEO people I’ve hired
(13:48) PPC fill I mean I’ve done a lot of that stuff in a lot of times it was like hey I’m you know here’s a thousand dollars a month what am I getting I mean I think my cells are up but show me something on paper I mean you want that validation you know and and I am that’s what I’m hearing for you is you guys are able to
(14:08) give that validation whether it’s going up or down and that I think that’s huge because you know being able to go back to a client and show them you know here’s where your money’s going or you know here’s what we’re doing and here’s how you’re now making more money or we need to improve I mean that that’s a that’s a great
(14:23) thing so I really like that it’s both for the internal conversation as you are working on strategy with your co-workers in the agency you know and trying to achieve results for your clients but it’s also for that external conversation right to the point of date with data transparency becomes validity right I
(14:40) truly believe that I mean in the sense that when you say you know we want to we have what did you do for me this month you know we have certain initiatives that we’re going to align strategy to and if the data is telling us that we’re not aligning to those strategies we can course correct right and and without
(14:57) that transparency down to the lowest level you will not be able to do that and we just needed that we needed the ability in that we needed to be empowered to be able to have the data down to the lowest level but also show the relative contribution to the changes how it was occurring across periods whether is month over month week over
(15:16) week you know quarter-over-quarter to be able to say yes we are executing this strategy and say it confidently without having to kind of you know obscure the details of what’s happening in the accounts and I think an important note too is it’s it is not solely confined to return right because and the agency side it you
(15:34) know the value that you provide is the business acumen in the understanding of strategy that you can then go deploy well beyond what may be you know an automated platform could achieve for you so set another way like the goal of the agency isn’t to say well here’s the a cause and I’m just gonna turn on an
(15:56) automation tool and we’re gonna hit that a cause right number one because that often doesn’t work and we can get into all the reasons why that doesn’t work but number two because that’s not the value you provide value provide is by managing two other objectives like new product launches gaining awareness
(16:13) growing market share improving organic ranking on really important terms for your category right and that doesn’t always align with just hitting a singular a cause so and this is kind of back to the point which is when you have objectives that are not just hit this a cost they often will affect the overall a cause of the
(16:33) account of the portfolio right so if you’re not able to explain like here was the contribution of those objectives down to the campaign ad group keyword level to the overall a cause you’re not having to inform a conversation about about how you’re achieving each of those objectives that are within your stack of
(16:52) initiatives right because they causing all of it and we and we know that from the agency side because if the brand’s just wanted that they could do that with a platform and that’s not that’s ultimately not the value prop of the agency right yeah absolutely and and I’m gonna steer just a little different
(17:10) because we get a lot of listeners that are Amazon sellers they’re probably know possibly not using agency yeah so you know one of the things Sam’s talking about is let’s say you’re just getting started and everybody should be doing if you run or own a business you should be looking at the numbers you should be
(17:27) looking at your numbers and you should be seeing where can I make adjustments or where do I need to add a little more money or where can I make changes I mean being I do the marketing for feedback whiz I’m looking at numbers a good chunk of my day I’m looking at you know Facebook ads I’m looking what creatives do we need AdWords you
(17:47) know we’re looking at all you know what do I need to get done blog articles all that stuff and we’re looking at not just the content but what are they doing how many people are they driving to us what is rri and then you gotta also kind of the flip side of that is you got to also understand that some of these things are
(18:05) is instant like you you know yeah you might get lucky and put up a video and it goes viral first thing but the reality is you know even this video that we’re gonna put up right it’s gonna go on YouTube we’ll probably see a surge and then it’ll take time for people to catch onto it and start watching it I
(18:21) mean that’s just that’s just the reality of it same with ads I display ads right like I I read this article that talked about display ads and gosh you know I can’t remember the exact time but like it how many times it took of somebody seeing that display ad before they would react to it right usually five to seven
(18:38) right yeah five to seven and and there was and actually a person went through the whole process of what it’s like it was actually John Lawson he did a whole video on here stage one you know it’s kind of a blur you don’t really see it you know I don’t remember exactly how I did it but I’m having John on actually
(18:54) in a couple months anyways it’s kind of that same process you’ve got to understand that when you’re doing ads or advertising or feat pay-per-click or a new product it takes time right and yeah you’ll get lucky and some of these things will shoot through the roof but it takes a little time yeah and I could
(19:10) talk about this particular topic probably all day long because we often when we were on the agency side got the question directly from brands like you know what how should I think about this platform basically you know we’ll take I’ll take one angle with this right now which is one of the things that brands I
(19:29) think relative to agencies have the mindset for and so for all the brands out there and you know I’m speaking out of turn I’ll get corrected I’m sure in the comments but I run it in a business they should be a brand so yeah yeah and I’m just saying you know I don’t want to assume anything for how the brands
(19:45) approach the platform of course but you know when you come from the brand side and you’re not engaging an agency to do a particular thing like advertising or marketing you are more primarily driven by the bottom line by the profit margins that you achieve on a most and what that causes is most of your
(20:01) strategic objectives all funneled back to did the breakeven the profit margin number right and then that always informs the conversation about what you’re able to do strategically which is here’s the thing I would like to dispel is when you think about it’s funny because I have this conversation very
(20:25) often but when you think about what kind of marketing your return you would want to get on an ad dollar right and you say okay let’s hypothetically speaking I’ve got a twenty dollar product and my margin is let’s just say fifty percent before any of the Amazon fees Amazon E’s get taken out now I’m about thirty five
(20:44) thirty percent so you’ve got to be and then oh by the way I have some other you know shipping and I’ve damaged and I have some other things that I’m going to take off so now I’m down to a ten percent margin so you go to your agency or you or you go to your internal team and you say okay all of our advertising
(21:01) dollars have to be at a nine percent or better a cause meaning I only have nine percent on every single product of margin to give up and that’s all I have available for marketing okay totally okay because cash is king and I understand that cash flow literally should drive everything because you’re thinking about a whole lot of things
(21:22) that that are dependent on your cash flow right here’s the fallacy is that often with Amazon when you look at that one-time acquisition and there are a lot of there are a lot of fallacies but when you look at the one-time acquisition you say well that wasn’t a nine percent a cost like okay so I said I spent nine
(21:38) cents on the dollar to acquire this customer who by the way is gonna come back to us five times and their lifetime value is a hundred dollars not twenty right now all of a sudden that was a much smaller percent of the total yeah and your cost per acquisition over the lifetime value is looking a whole lot
(22:00) better right especially for a customer that you won and that you know you won away from your competitors because it was on a brand agnostic search right now there’s a time value consideration which i think is really really a conversation that gets it just does not happen as often or as prevalent only as it should
(22:24) secondly every time you get a conversion especially on a non brand keyword in Amazon in advertising or otherwise you are informing the a9 algorithm and we all know that Amazon is a search engine and the whole game is to be visible in the search engine without having to pay for it advertising levels the playing
(22:44) field in that sense because you get to pay for some of those spots in visibility well every time you get a conversion whether that’s your 9% a cause or any or otherwise you’re informing your ranking and the algorithm that’s actually going to improve over time as well so when you are limiting your advertising and marketing dollars
(23:03) to a particular a cause you’re probably missing out on opportunity to gain market share and new customers that are going to be more profitable for you all over time that’s kind of in a nutshell like one of the fallacies that I think in brand situations when Amazon is managed internally often gets a little
(23:21) askew because profit margins are much more of the driving factor of strategy so if you disagree with Sam’s direct cellphone absolutely you’ve been in this world a long time it’s obviously your opinion and people are gonna differ and some Merrigan agree and some well that’s just that’s his way it is I think it’s
(23:43) great information and I mean speaking of the a nine algorithm I’m gonna throw a little plugin feedback whiz did a blog article about the a nine algorithm that actually is doing really well out there it has a lot of real detail information we try to update it when things change or we get more information so quick plug
(23:59) there so for our blog but yeah I mean Sam’s got some great information we’re we could go really deep and talking about a lot of pretty detailed stuff but we don’t want to bore you so Sam tell them what other applications you guys do just kind of high-level over all of them tell them kind of you know what service
(24:18) you guys offer and stuff like that yeah so I mean we’re primarily a software company right we want to build the applications that we wish we would have had when we were on the agency side starting with – data and data master to be able to self-serve on your data build scalable reporting on top of it with
(24:32) that the rest of our platform so we have – data and we have – Amazon I mentioned the bridging engine which is a huge core component of our analytics but we also started knocking out some of the things that we wish we would have had across accounts when we were managing advertising as well which includes
(24:49) things like setting a budget and in a cause goal and then actually showing that in context – pacing so one of the differences for agencies it’s they often have a monthly budget that they’re trying to hit we wanted to enable pacing you know in the conventional sense of like okay how am i pacing relative to
(25:07) that budget both from an 8 class as well as the spend level that’s kind of like first order and then you can set other goals on top of that you know we also enabled some things like campaign budget balancing so that you can allocate spend to the right campaigns relative to kind of how we were talking about those
(25:24) objectives and rebalance your portfolio and see how that’s actually on a go-forward basis how that’s going to affect your return so we actually allow we give you that worksheet to be able to do we also have some workouts that we enable optimizations so when you’re looking for negation opportunities in
(25:40) advertising are you looking for potential keywords that you can target out of you know at a better rate we have filters on your data down to the search term level so that you can immediately see the things that are good candidates for negation good candidates to promote into you know better match types or
(25:57) invest more span in – and we call those the workouts and then you know now so that’s kind of the core of the analytics we’re actually you know we’re continuously developed continuously developing the platform we’re very early so we you know like I said we’re launching with the data product we actually in the next couple weeks have a
(26:16) keyword bid tool coming out so that you actually can manage – you know your accounts directly from the – platform so we’re starting to move into the ability to actually take those insights that were able to serve us through some of the bridging engines and some of the functionality that we have in the
(26:34) platform and actually then go take action on those you know through through our platforms we’re moving into that space it’s it’s it’s still you know a couple weeks couple months off before we’ll be fully fledged but right now if you sign up for data we’re basically giving our analytics and management platform away
(26:51) for free because we want to get really good beta partners in that that are help they’re gonna help basically inform our roadmap and you know help us build a really useful tool yeah I mean crank me if I’m wrong but I mean I’m basically hearing if I’m starting an agency Rob is on agency comm so not yet just kidding
(27:09) no I mean it sounds like you guys are doing almost all the work form I mean I’m just gonna be real hairy you got the tools you’re offering are pretty much handling a lot of the stuff that you know these agencies either had to manually do or they had to bit and piece from different you know different
(27:26) vendors to put together or try to create themselves so I mean that’s that’s awesome so I got to ask how did you kind of get started by prior going to – and getting that whole thing started what’s sort of your background where did you come from yeah we I’ve mentioned a couple times when we were on the agency
(27:46) side you know and that’s kind of our origin story on – application so I met my business partner Todd Bandar Celt about three or four years ago now yeah I would here in Colorado and and we got to talking and he had just actually exited from Amazon he was pretty high up there in Seattle at headquarters and you know
(28:05) he was really looking to plug in and you know basically take all his expertise and help people kind of figure out and navigate the space and the most direct path for that was was from the agency or the managed services side because you know there was a whole ton of brands out there that didn’t know what to do with
(28:22) this Amazon channel and they didn’t really have anywhere to go to get help and so he was early with one of our other partners at – Alex Herndon at an agency called Amplio out of Boulder and they you know at that time we we were some of the early ones you know in the Amazon game and we built up a managed
(28:41) services division there they Alex and Todd exited from that business and then we have went and built another division in it in an advertising agency called booyah out of Denver and they were you know that that was an opportunity for us to go plug into a different model where they were conventional like paid media
(28:59) digital agency and then really wanted to kind of figure out this Amazon component because they had a ton of skills on the digital advertising side and it was you know it was not a far leap to say that those could translate over to advertising in Amazon which was true you know and through all that time we always
(29:17) kind of had it in the back of our minds that we wanted to build software for this space because there were just so many inefficiencies and so many hurdles that we ran into as we were trying to build these agencies right like we mentioned the reporting thing you know at a bare minimum that’s that was one of
(29:33) the issues but you know so through those experiences you know we really kind of just felt the pain in English of trying to build the agency and and – applications really came together to try to solve those issues and and that’s you’ll see that manifest in our in our products that were coming out with so so
(29:50) just I was clear when did you come on board which one of those agencies yeah so I was I was at both the agency in Boulder as well Denver kind of helping build both those divisions and then you know went to – full-time I guess I’ve been there for over a year and we’re all partners in the business so it’s been
(30:07) you know we we’ve kind of all been working on it for the last three four years it was just we really took the leap to kind of dive in and get a product to market over this last one year yeah so what’s your background in software data analytics what what’s your background to this so I’m uh I’m a CPA by trade which you know I was never good
(30:26) one it was just where I started and now I I started in accounting and Toddie as a finance background as well and and so we you know I went through kind of the whole accounting Exodus and then I was I got into this startup space out in New York City I was out there for about a year now half helping raise money for a platform
(30:47) and got really interested in just you know we were on kind of operations and sales side but I was watching you know the developers kind of create this thing in real time and I really wanted to be a part of that so I wouldn’t did a coding bootcamp just to kind of get my feet wet and understand like you know how the whole
(31:04) thing worked and you know at that time then came out to Colorado and that’s about when I met Todd and it was always kind of with the intention that we you know I wanted to go build software and we just didn’t really know what it was yet until we tried to build the agencies and realize like whoa this is a really
(31:20) good use case for software because we’re finding ourselves doing the same things over and over really painfully and and again that’s awesome so we’re you you already touched a little bit on the beta and stuff but kind of just elaborate a little more you know where’s – applications going next with tools
(31:40) you’re working on what can you kind of tell us that’s coming up yeah I mean I don’t want to like spill the beans on your things you can’t podcast 16 doing really worried – really hot tape no I mean you’re scoot over a lot everybody see your whiteboard behind back they’re just you know mind scribblings but we
(31:59) you know like I mentioned we’re really trying to go to market with our – data product because we’ve just we see the most apparent need for that initially so we’ll have that ready in q1 for open beta and we call it beta because there’s always some bug’s to work out we’re not doing a full public release yet but and
(32:18) and the reason it will be in beta for some time is because with – data you also get the – Amazon platform and we and we really want to build that platform hand-in-hand with our partners that come on for the data side and so you know next kind of couple months look like we’re finding the platform and then
(32:37) getting that into into a place where we can launch with the true analytics and management capabilities we also have another side of the business which I haven’t talked about a ton yet you mentioned at the top of the call that you know I’m I’m on the Amazon side of – applications we also have a couple folks
(32:52) on the other side of our – planning business which kind of similar to our story of going through the agency kind of evolution and then experience the paining anguish you know they went through the same thing for ERP and taury management systems and actually implementing those you know related to NetSuite and a couple of the other
(33:15) technology stacks that a lot of other people would recognize and so where that comes together for – is we’re actually now tapping into the mws data out of Amazon the api’s as well to get orders and to build an open to buy tool that actually helps inform retail teams about though that cash that’s a built up by
(33:34) inventory related to a forecast that we’re going to build in between so basically what we’ll be able to do is connect your inventory management to your Amazon and marketing investment and the connection there is both the operations data as well as the forecast that is going to help inform you side of
(33:51) those so trying to get there you know pretty quickly obviously everything takes a little bit more time than you think it’s going to but I think what would be really ideal is that we would be able to offer the mws data in the same way that we are able to offer the advertising data so that you can enrich your reporting with
(34:08) sales and inventory as well yeah that’s awesome so I mean obviously any agencies are listening are people that want to become an agency why don’t you let them know how how do they get a hold of you make sure you plug the website yeah and I think you know – I do want to I would be remiss not to mention that you know this
(34:27) is actually this this works really well for brands – you know okay yeah yeah yeah they we have brands that come to us number one first of all because it’s super economically priced but we start at 300 bucks I think for up to $50,000 and managed spend in advertising API so that’s if you look out at the pricing
(34:45) that’s really really competitive yeah the reason is is because we want people to have access to that you know what we do in value at in the software afterwards that’s that’s a whole nother conversation right yeah but basically for brands you know number one they have reporting needs as well internally for their internal
(35:01) stakeholders but also the brands are really cool because they they’ll ask different questions you know so when they’re managing their accounts internally they have different pressures than the agency has you know they are probably more of them the mad scientist’s that are going in and want to know every single minut detail about
(35:19) performance within their account because they own that you know I mean there’s so much closer to the source and so you know the bridging engine that I described in some of the other functionality in the platform we actually find that brands you know will request that bridge report almost on a daily or weekly basis
(35:34) because they want to know exactly what’s driving change and they don’t have a filter they don’t have anybody else to answer to they just want it because that’s their job right so needless to say it also works really well for brands and we think it’s you know we think that for anybody that’s looking to get their
(35:50) Amazon baby incorporated into the rest of their into the rest of their reporting really easy solution just to plug in to a dash database yeah yeah again so yeah give a plug you know how did they get ahold yet the website website is – applications com I’m Sammy Hagar H a ger at – applications comm you
(36:11) know I’m all over LinkedIn I tried to share some front end every once in a while with Robbie and and and just you know trying to help one of my main things is I really just try to give information that you know hopefully is not misleading in any way because I think there’s a lot of bad information out there on Amazon in particular you
(36:29) know if you’re going to conferences and you’re hearing things unless they’re literally from Amazon experts you’re offering gonna get some some bad information and one of those things is like Amazon’s advertising is expensive because there’s not there’s not as much inventory you’re like relative to like
(36:46) where else are you getting an extra turn like I don’t know but yeah that’s me so I mean it’s just you got to watch out for little things and so yeah if you want to get in touch with me feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn I’m really active there and I’ll respond pretty quickly so that’s where I like to
(37:02) have good conversations as well awesome Sam thanks for being on the podcast I really appreciate it anybody who has any comments I mean feel free to send them to myself or Sam if you’re watching the video feel free to you know putting the comments below and if I can’t answer it all a message Sam and get an answer to it so it’s great
(37:22) having you on I really appreciate it help me kick off the first podcast of season 2 of 20/20 so thanks for being on Sam I really appreciate it honored to do it Rob thanks for having me man really appreciate it and yeah well for the comments we’ll see how they come please subscribe to our YouTube channel
(37:38) and for more information please visit feedback was calm
