Episode Summary

Benjamin Davis is the founder & ceo of TryNow, the try now buy later software platform for e-commerce. TryNow raised their series A from Craft Ventures, Shine Capital, and the founders of Affirm, Plaid, and Paypal. They power Try Before You Buy for major brands like Mara Hoffman, RE/DONE, Goodlife, and more. Prior to founding TryNow, Benjamin worked as both a venture investor, and ran operations for an apparel brand from which the idea for TryNow was born.

Episode Notes

On this episode of DTC Pod, Benjamin joins Blaine and Ramon to talk about the future of commerce, how brands can build better customer experiences, why removing friction is key, the challenges of selling online versus in retail, thinking in terms of LTV, brands thriving on TryNow, raising capital, founder perspectives, the technical challenges of building the platform, solving for fraud, financing, complex corner cases, and what's next for Try Now.

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Episode Highlights

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16:00 - Brands That Do This Win

The challenging part of e-commerce also the most beautiful part of e-commerce, which is that shoppers are never satisfied, they always want more. And so it's this asymptote relationship where you can always get closer to a perfect customer experience, but you will never arrive there. And if you are, and that's why like the greatest force for driving enterprise value is just focusing on the customer.

16:45 - Do It For Your Customer's Customer

Most companies will say that they care about the customer, but very few actually do that at every single step of their process. And so I think like that, that to us was paramount because as we think about our two stakeholders, merchants and shoppers, merchants are our main, who we interact with the most, right? Day, day in, day out, we're constantly focused on driving value from merchants. But at the end of the day, like stoppers are, the most important part to both of our businesses

18:50 - What Businesses Need To Know About Risk

All businesses are in the business of de-risking their business, de-risking elements of their business. No matter what stage you're at, as you grow, you have a new set of risks and focus, focus on de-risking, is key. It's actually how we manage our annual planning process, so it's very opportune.

30:10 - This Is Karma In Business

There is no separation between what's best for the shopper and what's best for the merchant in the long run, in the very long run. But ultimately customer centricity is how you win.

This episode is brought to you by:

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Benjamin Davis - Founder & CEO of TryNow
Ramon Berrios - CEO of Trend.io
Blaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Seated

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