EPISODE SUMMARY

Jesse Pujji is an entrepreneur, investor, and executive who currently serves as Founder & CEO of Kahani, a shopify app that brings mobile first shoping experiences to e-commerce websites. He also runs Gateway.xyz, a venture studio and holding co building companies for the future of DTC.Prior to Gateway, Jesse co-founded and was CEO of Ampush, a digital marketing agency managing over $1BN in media spend and partnered with brands such as Dollar Shave Club, Uber, Birchbox and Hulu. He also led efforts in two strategic acquisitions, one divestiture and raising $15M from Red Ventures.

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EPISODE NOTES

On this episode of DTC Pod, Jesse joins Blaine to talk about the future of commerce. They discuss mobile commerce, moving from agency to brand owner, increasing conversion, bootstrapping, fundraising, testing out MVPs, getting customer buy in, developing product roadmaps, and much more.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

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1:17 The Future of Mobile Commerce

So the best way to think about Kahani is ask the question if Shopify or Squarespace or any of the big Ecom, website builders were to build today, what would they use? Would they use a website? Our answer is no. We think that what they would use is something that looks a lot more like TikTok and Instagram. So that's what we're building with Kahani. The vision is in three or five years, you won't go to a URL where you'll start scrolling and tapping around. You'll land on a video or really a picture that sort of takes over your phone. And from there, you'll start to swipe, tap and use all the mobile features that we're used to using in apps. You'll use those on an ECom URL. So that's kind of the big vision.

4:00 Startups Are Like Video Games

I will say entrepreneurship is like a video game. You know, you, you gotta beat the boss on level one before you get to level two. You know, I dunno if you're a big gamer, but when I was a kid, you'd put the cheat code in, you'd go to level five and you'd get crushed. Because even if you could cheat your way to level five, you didn't even know what to do at level five, because you had to have beaten level three and level four to, to figure it out. So I think the same is true for building businesses.

16:00 Strategies for Day 1

I think affiliate and email are day one strategies because you get someone else to send you traffic for free, right? So even if you don't have product, of course they're not gonna like it, but I think affiliate you can treat it like they're early customers. If you're a brand, you call them, you build a relationship with them. Hey, this is Jesse, I'm trying to sell a new type of iPhone charger. Here's why I think it's a winner. I'd love for you to place it on there, but look, I'm early. It's funny how much people hide that in the early days. And in my experience in my career, even as an experienced entrepreneur, I've found that sharing that truth and that vulnerability people wanna take a bet on you. You know?

18:30 Your Job as a Marketer

It's my number one piece of advice for, for DTC entrepreneurs or even CMOs at bigger companies is when you complain about your CPA relative to your CPM, all you're saying is that I'm not a very good marketer and you go, well, what do you mean by that? I was like, well, other people are somehow making their business work for a $20 CPM. It's your job as the marketer to figure out the click-through rate and conversion rate needed to be able to compete in the market because somebody else is willing to pay $20.

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