The New Customer: How AI Changed What People Expect

I have a three year old. When we bring her to a store now, it's so stimulating and they want to just run around and like, what's that? What's that? Can they grab things?

Imagine now, like, the brief is, how do you recreate that for people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s? I love that. They walk into a store and they have that same joy a three year old has when they go into a grocery store. If you're not immediately walking into something or going on a website and you're like, what's that?

What's that? What's that? What's that? I'm interested in this.

I want to read that later. There's an issue. Today I brought on John Samponia, the CEO and co-founder of WonderSaws. Let's talk about what it really takes to create a customer experience that people will fall in love with today and tomorrow.

It's going to be really important for brands to lean into what makes them unique and special and it's kind of like triple down on that. If you're not thinking about your brand as almost like this luxury experience, you're probably going to get lost in the model of everything else that's a little bit mediocre. The implications of what makes the business special can be kind of like sprinkled throughout the entire journey in a way where it feels really relevant in that moment. Do you think people crave some of that more analog experience now?

You don't have to throw out the past to embrace the future. When there's a ton of noise in one direction, there's usually a massive opportunity in the other direction. Take what you know about SEO and throw it out. It's all going to change.

I think there's going to be like two spectrums that start to play out. One that are like hyper hyper efficient around ranking high within LLM results, one around being like throw it all away. Let's make an experience for our customers. There's a lot of noise.

There's a lot of tools and if you trace every single one of them, you're going to waste a lot of time. You know, the way we've always done emerging technology at Wondersauce is John, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to hear more about what you're doing at Wondersauce.

But before we dive in, I want our listeners to know the context. Could you tell us what is Wondersauce? Wondersauce is a business acceleration agency. We help brands kind of overcome different stages of growth.

Sometimes it's like literally getting to market for the first time. In other cases, it's scaling from 10 million to $100 million in revenue or even some stuff behind the scenes, like larger or operational issues that are preventing growth, like migrating and rebuilding an e-commerce experience or a mobile and website or something like that, like larger infrastructure lists. So it's a mix of different challenges, but it's all kind of tied to growth and it keeps things interesting.

I love that that's your answer because it is so like that could mean anything. Like we do growth. We do business growth. We do business acceleration.

Like I just I love that because it really does keep the door open for you on. I'm interested in that. I'm interested in this. Oh, you know, in 10 years growth looks different.

So you guys keep getting to evolve with the times. And so with that, you're the CEO and the founder, right, John? Co-founder, yeah. Co-founder.

What inspired you in 2011 to build Wondersaws? You know, spending the first few years of my career working at different agencies sort of got a good trash course into what it was like to service clients to pitch projects to deliver amazing work. And, you know, you start kind of developing a deep kind of point of view on a lot of the operational stuff. Like why are you doing it this way?

Why are you doing that way? If we had a company, we would do it like this. And I think that kind of like paired with the I met my business partner and we were both kind of like geeking out on just like the operational aspects of the agency world. And we were always like, yeah, one day we'll do it, one day we'll do it.

And those conversations progressed aggressively over like six happy hours after work. And then, you know, we ended up doing it. I think like lasted a year later. And we were, that was 2011.

We were like 26 and 27. And we didn't really know anything, which was awesome because you're super young and naive. And you don't have to work every single decision you make through like a million de-risking scenarios. Yeah.

And you end up with like your quick decision that are usually correct. And yeah, it was an amazing time. And I wouldn't change it for the world. And even if they're not correct, you can pivot so quickly and easily, you know, that young, that agile, you likely didn't have, you know, a family counting on your income or anything like that.

It's, I think some of the best entrepreneurship comes at that age range whenever you're kind of young, maybe a little bit inexperienced in the arena, but you've got like a lot of, a lot of ideas and a lot of passion to apply those ideas and like a willingness to pivot and take risks that people who are well established just don't have. With that, it's been since 2011 that you guys launched this, how has it evolved because you've been now at the forefront of witnessing a lot of technology evolution and change?

And as you shared at the beginning of this, you didn't exactly know what you guys are getting into. So how is like your vision for the company changed? Honestly, it's kind of remained pretty much the same. I think our point of view on what it means to be an agency and how to construct one has gone through different stages of popularity.

And I think it's our vision now of being we are more full service. I think it's becoming important again. But it's funny like when we started, when we launched the business, our mission statement was kind of like we grew up with the internet and the internet grew up with us. The idea that we were on that generation where like we would remember like keyboard class and like elementary school.

And then there was like a computer with the internet one day. And then like begging our parents for AOL and like middle school on like live wire and Napster and college free and post Facebook and you know our 20s where like the iPhone came out and the app economy and here we are with like AI and Web 3 and all that stuff. So it's like the internet just changed as we grew up. And I wanted to create a company that was as fast as the culture of the internet.

So it wasn't like we need to do social media. It was like no, like this is just a thing that exists that millions of people are on. So like your brand has to have a point of view and a presence here. So let us help you with that.

Ecommerce is clearly important. We should understand those things. So it was never like decisions to expand our service offering because we were like hungry for revenue or anything like that. It was just stuff that all made sense together.

And you know I think now as the world gets in my opinion smaller and smaller and smaller as like a bunch of companies kind of control the internet and control how people kind of use it. You need to really understand how paid media, owned properties and content all come together to ultimately inform a customer journey. So I think like long story short, you know we wanted to be full service from the start. We are today.

It used to be not cool. I think it's more relevant though. What do you think makes Wendersauce so unique? Is it this offering that you guys have this like full service perspective and that you're kind of willing to dive into anything?

I think it's anything but it's all tides and this idea of like you know two real paths around unlocking growth for your business usually revenue growth. That's what we're like we're kind of there for or operational adjustments and change. But I think what really makes us unique is the fact that we've been super pragmatic from the start. Even like early on when we were winning like design awards and people were like oh they're a really cool design shop.

Like that was all like smoke and mirrors. So like the real bread and butter of the company which was being hyper hyper pragmatic around working with our clients to work backwards from business goals and ultimately achieve them. And that's what led to loyalty and led to referrals or led to word of mouth. It wasn't the that are worth look great and that's part of it but it was really around the idea of like sitting down and being you know way more you know aware of they're hiring us to change their business not to just like develop a bunch of art or fancy things.