2458 - Revolutionizing E-Commerce Personas with Reap Commerce's Brice McBeth

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Speaker B: Josh.

Speaker A: I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it with us right now. Bryce McBeth. Uh, Bryce, uh, you're a friend of the show. Uh, you've been on before. You were the founder and CEO of Reap Commerce and the co founder of Neurograph. Uh, your websites are Reap Commerce, which we have linked up, and neurograph IO, which is really cool stuff. I'm excited to talk about. Uh, Bryce, before we get first off, thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having me, Josh.

Speaker A: It's always fun and, and, uh, you know, before we get going, talking about your superpowers and what you do, I, um, always love hearing what leaders, uh, do for fun or kind of geeking out on outside of work. And, um, we were talking about, uh, golf. All right, tell me about your, your golf hobby or, or passion.

Speaker B: Well, yeah, the reason I'm bringing it up, I guess there's a lot of people that play golf, so it's not really anything super unique, but I think it is able to capture a lot of things that's, uh, going on in my know. If I play by myself, it gives me a little time to kind of get a little breathing room and maybe even think about business or think about relationships, things like that. If I play with my kids, it's an entirely different game and gives me some good quality time with my kids. If I'm playing with friends, that's an outlet as well. It's a lot of fun. Um, we talked before about golf and, uh, you, uh, you were talking about how it can be intimidating. And it is for me too, but that's like part of like overcoming my fears and learning to just kind of put myself out there, you know, so there's just like a lot of Life lessons baked into it. But I do find that just getting out there, get some fresh air and especially walking a course and pushing the, you know, the, the uh, the, the, the cart is like a six mile sled push. So it's a pretty good exercise too if you, if you count up all the steps.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I guess you're right. I mean when I think about now, I, I, I live on a golf course and out of the past 20 golfed maybe three or four times. Um, and you're right, it's, you know, I'll go to the um, driving range. I know I'm not good at the driving range, so I think that that's what kind of keeps me from like truly embarrassing myself on the, on the course. But what I will say, you know, especially for um. Yeah, it, it is, it, it's, it's a, it's a great opportunity. You know, you're engaged in the game, you're, you have a lot of time, uh, to just, you know, probably not staring at screens as much. I would imagine you're kind of just engaged in trying to be in the moment, you're thinking about the game. But you know, I remember the last time I went with, with a couple of buddies and um, yeah, we just chatted, you know, for a couple of hours. And that was, that was really great. And I missed that. I think especially as guys, you know, sometimes it's hard to get play dates with our friends and go is uh,

Speaker B: kind of a good excuse, you know, uh, 100%. Yeah. And I'd say, you know, the, especially with all this AI stuff going on, how fast things are moving, it's so easy to get caught up and spend 12 or 15 hours a day behind a screen trying to figure out your next breakthrough or just even get, stay caught up on stuff is, you know, takes a lot of time. So having something that calls you outside I think is like really important. But also like when you play with friends, like at one point they were uh, they were bad golfers too. Like. Yeah, if you play with good people, then they will forgive a lot of bad golf. So.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think especially if I position them, um, uh, for what you're about to experience. Um, yeah, yeah, me, I mean literally like I miss the ball entirely and crap like that. So that's why it's just like, you know, I feel like, oh man, I'm kind of stuck in this thing where it's like I, I probably just need to get lessons is, is really what I do. I, I, you know, And I've done that like with um, swimming. I've done that with um, uh, now and I've did uh, that with pickleball. It's like, you know, just a little bit like a refresher course I feel like would probably do me some good. Anyway, thank you so much, Bryce, for inspiring me.

Speaker B: I'm called Action too, by the way.

Speaker A: What's that?

Speaker B: It's a built in call to Action too. If you sign up for lessons, you got to get out there and play. You got to follow through on it. So.

Speaker A: Yep, yep, yep, yep. All right. I'm inspired. Thank you so much. Now I'm gonna wait as a. We're recording this. It's the middle of summer here in Orlando. Probably wait until, uh, let's see, when does it start to cool down? November?

Speaker B: Never.

Speaker A: Yeah, never. So, um, well, Bryce, share with us, uh, the work that you do, uh, both through Reap Commerce and Neurograph.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, um, I've had a E commerce consultancy for 18 years that helps E Commerce brands get unstuck and achieve profitable scale. Um, the reality is it's really hard out there. E Commerce has gotten extremely difficult. You know, the, the marketing channels are extremely saturated. The customer acquisition costs are up, like the ability to track, you know, users and attribution is broken. Like dashboards are just dashboards on dashboards that stop telling you anything really useful. And the one thing that nobody has really been able to tell brands is why your customers actually do or do not buy. I can tell you what they do, what they looked at, where they came from, what percentage of them click through or what percentage of them purchase, how much they purchased. But it doesn't tell you what's going on between the years. It doesn't tell you why people chose to buy from you. It doesn't tell you why people are choosing not to buy from you. And that's what we have dedicated the last, uh, couple of years here at uh, Reap and Neurograph to figuring out. So Neurograph is a technology that helps get to the root of what I just described. Reap Commerce is an E commerce consultancy that provides services around that technology to help brands truly understand the different types of customers that they have. Not just who they are and what they look like, but like what the buying scenarios are and what they think about the brand. Once you know what they think about the brand, it's a lot easier to make decisions and come up with new strategies to do, uh, well, with a whole new market. Opportunity essentially was what it becomes. That's what we're doing.

Speaker A: Yeah, I can't imagine what, um, when, when you are having conversations with new potential clients, what kind of things are they expressing in terms of their frustration? Um, you know, to me it just feels like there's so much crap out there and I blame a lot of lazy marketers, uh, who are excited about, you know, we were talking about AI earlier, you know, excited about all these AI tools and I get it, like, it's cool. Um, but I don't know, man, I see I'm starting to see a lot more customer or consumer blowback from, um, overly AI, you know, brand, overly AI brands and like, you know, when they're engaging, um, as AI in a place that should be maybe a little bit more human. Um, you know, I'm concerned about that mostly because I'm concerned that that's going to cause collateral damage to legitimate great brands that are just, you know, they're just trying to make the world a better place with their products.

Speaker B: Yeah. Oh my gosh. I mean, yeah, I mean, you said it. There's uh, there's so much noise and there's a lot of novelty. There's a lot of really interesting concepts out there and it's fun to tinker with. I haven't really found a ton of tools that really are game changing, um, yet. You, uh, know, I think it's, I think it's coming. Um, but at best it seems like what it's going to do is create parity between all these different brands and all these markers. It's kind of like Shopify. If you think back, you know, a couple dozen years ago when Shopify and even Google and Meta to some extent popped onto the scene, it made like, they made it super easy for anyone to set up a new website and anyone to put a credit card in and start running ads on Google and anyone to start putting a credit card on Facebook and start running ads. Anybody could set up a business within like five or seven days. Right? Just, they just made it easy for everybody and almost feel like AI is potentially, uh, doing this, you know, going to do the same thing. There's still just a lot of noise, a lot of novelty. Everybody's struggling to stay up to speed on all this stuff. Um, but at some point when everybody figures out what tools really move the needle, it potentially could create a lot of parity, especially between all these different agencies. If they, if they don't have their own secret sauce, they're all using the same tool with the same source of information. There's not really going to be high differentiation. Everybody's going to use the same AI tools to get the same results for the same brands.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So um, it's going so fast and I've never really been someone who could see five or 10 years in the future. I've been really good at solving problems but I think especially at the rate things are changing now, I have no idea what's coming in the next year. That's also what has created the urgency for me to pour so much time and attention into it and figure it out.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, so, but yeah I 100% agree with you.

Speaker A: So obviously huge decision in E Comm is what kind of creative um, like how are we going to communicate that message, that product, you know, with our clients. Do you mind kind of explaining uh, briefly how neurograph works? Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay. So essentially, so let me explain sort of the outcome that kind of back into how it works if you want to get into it. But uh, essentially um, if you if describing in simple terms like you know, brands have typically have an ideal client profile or an ICP that they're after. Right. Uh, a lot of times that was created by the founder or the executive team or marketing team M or something like that to help create an identity for the rest of the team to rally around and go create creative that would draw people in and buy their product to solve a particular problem for that Persona. What we are discovering with the use of Neurograph and through our services at REAP is that number one, uh, the brands don't know their customer as well as they think that they do. Um, and many times, I would say nine and a half times out of 10, that's almost 95 times out of 100. Uh, there are four or five other Personas on the website that the brand knows nothing about that are frequently, almost every single time we can find another ICP that is worth more is more valuable than who they thought their ICP was. So how do we do that? Well, we um, it's um, we collect behavioral data about what is happening on the website, ultimately what they end up purchasing. So we tie into the commerce data and then we get demographic enrichment data from third party sources to really flesh out and understand who these people are, where else they purchase. Which gives you a lot of signals uh, as to why they buy from one place or another. So you pair all those together. And a lot of times if you take a large company, uh, large, particularly like a large retailer, restaurant business, say like Brinker has been a restaurant, a restaurant client of mine for 18 years. They spend a lot of money on third party enrichment data to better understand the demographics and Personas of their customers that come into Chili's and Maggiano's. And then that's an IT endeavor to get that data into their uh, systems. And then marketers still don't have access to valuable information at their fingertips. They have to go hire a consultant to then come make sense out of all the data. And that consultant sometimes just make stuff up. Yeah, we're, we're essentially taking this data, actually make it far more useful, but also making it affordable to like mid market brands. You don't have to be a, or a Ford or a GM to afford this level of data. Now it's accessible to pretty much any E commerce business. Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, well, Bryce, um, we just have a couple of minutes left. Um, and um, do you, I would imagine you do demos with, with neurogr, right? So you can kind of talk in the, in the customer's language so that they can see how this might work for them.

Speaker B: A demo is fine. I think if somebody was really interested in it, I would offer them a, a diagnostic, a Persona diagnostic. It's really uh, not difficult for me to do. It takes uh, a couple weeks worth of time to collect enough data to get some significant amount of information. But uh, especially if they're coming uh, from your show, then what we would offer them would be a, a personalized Persona diagnostic. And what that would entail is I would tag their site, collect some data and report back to them. I would guarantee it would be worth their time because I would guarantee that they would find out something about their customers that they did not know before that would be invaluable to finding their next breakthrough. And frequently, like I said, far majority of times they're finding new market opportunities by just doing this complimentary diagnostic. And then if they choose to keep using it, there are some reasons why you would continue using it, but we can have that discussion later. I um, would say better than a demo. I could offer them like the ability to kind of actually look at some of their, their own personal.

Speaker A: Well over the years you've worked with a lot of e comm brands, including some pretty big ones that, that folks have heard about. Um, so uh, and then just real quick on, on reap commerce because I know we just have a couple minutes left here. Um, is that uh, all in the same, um, like I'm just trying to uh, kind of figure out our own Personas. Who's listening to this podcast, who should Go where?

Speaker B: Yeah, so we deal with mostly uh, E commerce brands are doing anywhere between one and a hundred billion dollars. I know it's a big range but uh, that's. I, I actually do a lot of, you know, mentor work in the startup and emerging like CPG space, uh, for E commerce specifically. Um, I find that uh, those are a lot of times in that size. They're still trying to um, you know every, every dollar truly matters and they're still trying to figure a few things out. So usually the most impact I can make is when they've made some progress and they're doing at least a million or two. Direct, uh, to consumer, um, but uh, yeah, so it's typically direct to consumer brands running Shopify, uh, up to like $100 million a year in sales. Uh, much bigger than that. They're usually dealing with multiple agencies and a lot of times it can be difficult to get everybody on the same page. So it's, I could have a material impact the bigger the company is. But uh, if the, if the environment doesn't um, support, you know, agile, you know, changing of the process and methodology, then it's going to take a while for them to, to see the, the benefit of the Service.

Speaker A: Well, Bryce McBeth, founder and CEO of Reap Commerce, congratulations on nearly 17 years of Ecom leadership. And then uh, congratulations as well with the work you're doing with Neurograph as a co founder, uh, the website for that neurograph IO reapcommerce.com Bryce, thank you so much for the conversation.

Speaker B: Josh, appreciate it. As always,

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