How can AI be used to personalise customer buying experience at an individual level? In this discussion with Shwetank Tamer, founder of Cooee we learn how he has taken his experience of eCommerce optimisation and has developed a truly innovative platform that helps online retailers deliver a superior experience to their customer base.
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Episode Transcript
Matthew Todd
Hi. My name is Matthew Todd, and welcome to Inside the ScaleUp. This is the podcast for founders, executives in tech, looking to make an impact and learn from their peers within the tech business, we lift the lid on tech businesses, interviewing leaders and following their journey from startup to scale up and beyond covering everything from developing product market fit, funding and fundraising models to value proposition structure and growth marketing. We learn from their journey so that you can understand how they really work, the failures, the successes, the lessons along the way, so that you can take their learnings and apply them within your own startup or scale up and join the ever growing list of high growth UK SaaS businesses.
Hi, and welcome back to the podcast. I’m joined today, by Shwetank Tamer from Cooee. And yeah, great to have you on the podcast. Let’s kick things off with the guests introducing themselves telling us a little bit about your background about your company as well. So yeah, over to you, please.
Shwetank Tamer
Hi all Shwetank. I’m founder and CEO of Cooee, for people, you know, who still haven’t figured out what Cooee really means go check out the dictionary. It’s an English word, which means calling out. And that is what our brand is all about. We help ecommerce and digital brands in white and entice their customers that helped them boost sales and repeat purchases.
My background, I’ve spent about 15 plus years with enterprise sales, majorly working with very large telcos was living out of a suitcase for many, you know, over a decade. And that helped me and gave me an exposure to work in about 60 different countries. Why and how I came about to coil is something that was building up throughout. And, you know, used to be a very common theme that we go and create products, digital apps and websites for these enterprise customers.
Building really nice product features UI UX, then, of course, they wanted customers. So you know, we’d spend money on digital marketing, and bring in those app downloads, etc. But these customers will still call us in three months later saying, you know, nobody’s using it.
And that’s where the whole thing dawned upon that this was a global problem. And if you look at it the other way that you and me, everyone here, Matthew uses a smartphone today, on an average, there are about 80 to 90 apps on our devices. But we ended up using only five, these five products or services are not the best products, maybe, however, why we ended up using them is because they use deep tech for user engagement.
So it doesn’t matter how amazing your product is, you know how much money you spend on bringing the customer, what also makes a huge difference in today’s world is what you do have the customer data and how you engage your customers. And this was a big problem for organizations. And that’s why I thought that my next chapter in the in the journey was gathering all my experience from the professional career and then trying to, you know, develop this AI platform that is in the shape and form of Cooee today.
Matthew Todd
I see no sounds sounds really interesting. I want to dig into more about what some of those features on the platform look like what you’ve got planned for the future. But given that experience, then that you you had with those kind of enterprise customers, how did you identify the things that were needed to solve those engagement problems that you saw?
Shwetank Tamer
So I think one of the most important things that we all should realize is customer data. Right? It’s becoming more and more, I would say prevalent, with GDPR, a few years back, mostly in the European and the Western world, people now understand that brands do collect and gather their data as well. Right? But what most of the small and medium scale, guys still don’t understand is gathering data is not even, you know, half the battle won. Because you need to be able to generate insights from that data, and then deploy it in such a way so that you can deliver that experience to the customer. Yeah, that’s the second part. And the third part is have this system interconnected in such a way that you’re continuously learning from that data? Is it working or it’s not working?
There are a lot of companies today who talk about AI. In your opinion, AI is the most abused term. You know, for the past two to three years, everybody talks about using AI. But what they don’t know is, if the input of the data, the format into data is not correct, AI is always going to give you wrong outputs.
So what we understood was even large enterprises, they use on an average eight platforms to deliver customer engagement. Yeah, and every time data hops between one platform to the other, it’s like Chinese whisper, right? Because whatever kind of standardization you do, every platform has their own ways and stores and, you know, formats to store data. So there needed to be a mechanism which is more horizontal, rather than verticalized. Where you can really gather data, deliver their engagement, and also continuously learn from it. And all of this based on the most important thing to delight your digital customer is, you know, how you can personalize their experience. So we got on a mission to build this platform, which helps with customer data, drawing those insights, and, you know, helping brands increase their sales at the end of it.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. And do you have an example of the the kinds of insights that you’re able to generate and and how brands are able to use those to deliver a better experience?
Shwetank Tamer
Yes, Matthew. So So typically, if you used any other engagement platform, right? What happens is, you go to your graphic designer on Photoshop, right? And, you will ask them to create five different images. And these five different images are usually, if I’m fashion brand, are of, you know, the five new things that I’m launching in the season, for example, or the five top bestsellers that I have, yeah, and this information of what are the top bestsellers is something which is coming out of my analytics platform. So I need to go and see, which is the product which is, you know, doing well. And then I get that image created, and then I create the segmentation. And then I run a campaign. And then I pray. Yeah, that’s that’s how the legacy platforms work. The way we design is we, because we gather the customer data on what they’re doing, what they’re clicking on, what they’re buying, etc, inside your digital store.
We automatically show this to the brands who use Cooee’s platform that this was your top performing asset, or this is the this is something what has delivered the maximum amount of sales in the past seven days. And that product is then promoted to the people automatically who haven’t bought that thing.
Right. So that’s such a huge stalking difference in the approach, approach becomes very one to one, rather than, hey, what this is what I have. And now I want to push it to on the 1000 people. And I just want to see how it goes. So that that is how an insight driven campaign or engagement can be delivered using our platform.
Matthew Todd
I see. So it’s going beyond segmentation, then decide what type of customer is this to kind of go narrower into or what is their what are their buying behaviors? Have they bought this, as you say, have they not bought this? In order to then determine what actions you can then push out to them to drive more engagement? Is that right?
Shwetank Tamer
Yeah. And funny enough, you mentioned the word segmentation. Because, you know, that’s a that’s a deep learning for us in the past few years is when we when we build a platform, and because it was a platform built from scratch up. We did not do anything on segmentation. We thought it is going to be a one to one personalized platform. It’s just about a customer persona at an individual level rather than bucketing them in every 50,000 user and then segmenting it. Of course, of course, this takes time because no way I can work very well without appropriate amount of data. But what we realized is when we go and tell, you know started demoing our platform to customers, and they’re like, Yeah, this is amazing. Everything’s good. But I want segmentation. And I’m like why would you want segmentation when you can deliver it one to one? No, because just what I’m used to it, but I want that manual control to do it. And I actually had to we actually had to build segmentation coming back, just to go and you know, because change is difficult, and we understand that there’s human psyche and you’re so used to in your comfort zone.
So segmentation is a very funny topic and but a very important learning for us. But yeah, we definitely go beyond segmentation because we are one to one kind of a platform.
Matthew Todd
I see. And I think that’s really interesting because I think a lot of people might approach that problem as how can we use data to improve our segmentation or automate elements of the segmentation, but while you’re talking about is essentially a hyper personalization, a segment of one, really where you can use a lot more data, a lot more insights combined with that AI, as you mentioned, to deliver something genuinely personalized. I think that terms personalization, often overused, and I’m sure we’ve all received templated emails that are obviously templated, or they’ve not done the templating, right, and you get high percent first name or whatever it might be. But I think true personalization definitely goes beyond those very rudimentary kind of techniques.
Shwetank Tamer
And to add to that, Matthew, what is too personalization is, again, subjective, different brands, different approaches, etc. And like the way industry works, right, there are different ways to solve a particular problem. Our stab at it is based on what a customer is looking at surfing, clicking, buying, not buying the category, the you know, the genre of products on a particular website. We gather this data. And this data is automatically fed into our AI platform, and different machine learning pipelines. And then we combine multiple AI algorithms to create a unique image for every single user at scale.
And then that image is delivered to them in a form of a notification pop up. And then we are also building the omni channel standard, this image can also be part of an email or WhatsApp for that kind of, you know, communication. Because when you when you kind of deep down, break this image into, you know, further view, that image is a product recommendation, based on what you bought, or what you like. It has some personalization that we can personalize it with your name. We’ve started working with GPT, two and DBT. Three, so personalize some text for you. Then we add a layer of price optimization algorithm there by discounting. So not everybody is just given a 20% off straightaway. But it’s like, you know, what product am I promoting you? What is the price right product, and what’s your propensity to spend? What’s your RPU, and then machine learning calculates that this customer should be given a 20%. And this should be given a 22%.
And then we add the call to action button. And all this is created on an image using computer vision. So and what I mean is, if if, you know we select that Matthew, liked a white shirt last time, and let’s try and promote him a gray shirt, for example. The image of the gray shirt is taken. And then we find out that where is the space on that image where we can add the other layers of text discount call to action button, without these information coming on top of the shirt, because we want the customers to be able to look at the short but also have the other elements.
So this is quite complex, deep tech that we’ve been able to achieve. And the last part of personalization level layer that we’ve added. We also deliver this on time based or even based personalized to every single user understanding on a mobile app, you know, what is the best time to send them this push notification based on the usage? And on digital web e commerce website? Where did they bounce last time? Was it the third category page that the customer did not purchase? So we will show this notification to them on the second page so we can prevent bouncing?
Matthew Todd
I see it sounds very multi layered and very, yeah, detail but very impressive. I think it certainly sounds like what you’ve been able to achieve would otherwise require a very specialized team and multiple disciplines and, you know, analysts and graphic designers and everybody else to come together to do that. There’s certainly could never be scaled certainly not profitably.
Shwetank Tamer
Yeah, and this is a very interesting, you know, point that you bring in Matthew is when we were even talking to those very large companies about you know, having this deep tech personalization. Like you know, what Netflix does today is based on the kind of genre of content you’d like They show different parts of the thumbnail to different people of the same movie. Yeah. Right. So for example, let’s take Stranger Things as a show, which is very popular. And if I like humor, then a thumbnail of Stranger Things shown to me will be, you know, the boys laughing there or having fun or smiling, enjoy. But if somebody else likes horror and thriller, then the image this is going to be completely different.
So these top brands have set the benchmark so high, they leave the that kind of taste in the digital consumer of today that they expect similar kinds of things with every brand. But when you talk about data science, when you talk about, you know, putting the money etc 80 to 90% of AI models don’t go into production. So even if you spend half a million dollars to hire five data scientists working on a project for the past two years developing algorithms, you know, the return of investment or surety that this is going to bring you increased revenue is like you’re not used to it kind of ratio.
So makes it just incredibly hard. That’s why we’ve been trying to develop these models, where we started with as a generic model for declination price optimization, and all the other things. And then slowly, slowly, with more and more data, you’re trying to also get, you know, custom, industry based model, like we work with a lot of food tech, a lot of fashion. So now we have models, which can help those industries very specifically and deliver results.
Matthew Todd
I see. So you’re approaching it, industry by industry, then in order to improve and train those models for particular types of products as well as behaviors.
Shwetank Tamer
Yes, we started more generic, because, overall, you know, we wanted to build the whole, I would say, the brain of the platform first. Which is, which is the whole mechanism of having these multi layer personalization, deliver a simple image, etc. But eventually, if we adopt more personalization, even that, you know, point 1%, increase the number of clicks, can generate incremental, you know, revenue for customers. And that’s what we’re aiming to. So we are getting more and more inside specific ecommerce verticals and specializing into that now.
Matthew Todd
I see that that makes a lot of sense. And in terms of when you decided to try and get this off the ground, then how did developing that generic model? How did you go about gathering enough data to even be able to take on board the first customers and generate a meaningful impacts?
Shwetank Tamer
So three parts to that, Matthew. First one is, we knew that we will not be able to show the value of one to one personalization at a start. Right? We were honest with our customers. We told them that guys, depending on the scale, the whole AI automation can take between three to six months.
If you have pre existing data that includes Google Analytics, or any of the software’s give it to us, so we can feed that in our system. So we did that for multiple customers. So we were not perfect from day one. But we were not starting from ground zero. I see had some data. So there’s some level of personalization, we could do. There are some customers that we on boarded who didn’t have any previous data.
But having that ability to deliver these kinds of notifications that we allow them to do in a Canva based interface where you don’t need data scientists and you don’t need designers, it still was a huge improvement for what they could already do. So we reduce their operation times. We reduced their spend on multiple other platforms, they could use just one instead of you know, replacing those four or five, they’re spending multiplier there. So they saw value right on day one. And eventually they knew that if this is the value that I’m already getting on day one, or the next six months, it will multiply and we’ll also be able to bring in those marketing automations.
Matthew Todd
I see. So you, you have enough value because of of the way that your platform works such that if customers did have that existing data, you could you know, it’s not as good as it obviously would be now but it was sufficient to deliver an optimization, you know, whether it’s in terms of revenue or in terms of operational costs, in order for them to be interested in giving the platform a go.
Shwetank Tamer
Yes, because we should understand that value comes from two things, right? One is, if I’m able to optimize what I’m already doing that also delivers me value. And second, if I can, of course, grow and increase more than that gives me another value. So our aim was to go and take a stab at both sides of things, because of the way we’ve developed this platform.
Matthew Todd
I see that makes sense. So in terms of the types of retailers and commerce brands that you’ve got on the platform, as well as your ambition, is there a particular size or scale of company or brand that this tends to work best with?
Shwetank Tamer
Yeah, we know, Matthew, that, you know, the top 10% of the companies will never use us. Because they irrespective, this is the technology that we’ve developed with a lot of them don’t use. But you know, it’s the very large play with that amount of data, they have their in house development teams to, you know, do whatever teams are mean, and major focus is for the segment, who struggled the most with this is the small and medium sector companies, the ones who would go and choose a Shopify, to sell their products, for example, right.
On an average, we’ve seen that companies using Shopify, they host about one to 50 employees, most of the time, it’s 1 to 20 employees. And they’re small teams trying to run helter skelter for everything, they need to look at a product, they need to look at customer care, they look at pricing, marketing, shipment, logistics, customer support. And because you have lack of resources, our platform helps them with marketing automation.
So in the simplest way, you know, once you go and set a rule in our platform, every time if I go back to a particular website, once a week, I’m automatically shown different offers, without anybody intervening there, all they can do is go and check the results to see you know how this so called logic is performing. If they think that they need to go and change something they can go and you know, change some kind of things, and then track. But once you set that rules in place, it really helps them in doing what they really are supposed to do, rather than you know, trying to do things like this.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, it sounds like it’s certainly for for those type of merchants that are on on Shopify and other platforms like that, that yeah, they probably are very busy probably don’t have the in house teams and capabilities to do anything, you know, anywhere close to what you’re describing.
So when it comes to just looking at the pricing page and the list of features on the website, as well, as seems like you’ve got a pretty well thought out set of different tiers of features and prices. I wonder if you could kind of describe briefly how you have approached that how you decided on what those tiers should be how you decided to price those?
Shwetank Tamer
Sure. I think that goes back. You know, if we look at it, the previous question that you are asked is, how can we deliver value. And we understand that we want to deliver value, which I said if one is reducing the operation time and second is really doing the incremental revenue value. So when you can, first of all, we have a free tier, anybody who wants to send under 1000 notifications a month and go and sign up, no credit card needed nothing. They go and experience the platform because we are early stage as well, we we keep on talking to our customers to understand what they think how can we try to save every second and every click on the platform as well.
So it’s very important for us, and then the lower side of the first two tears are more about people giving access to the design element of the platform where they can go and create those unlimited designs, and then deliver that experience. In fact, very soon, we’re also launching a feature that you can go and create a template, very Canvas style on our interface, and then press a button and AI will generate 20 versions of that particular template using your brand colors.
Then you can just go and pick and choose from it what looks best for you and then deliver that. So the template creation and delivery when it comes to overall operations can be done in the first couple of tears. Yeah, but when we are really talking about that one to one generation that’s available, you know, with our premier tear because it also needs that computation, you know also needs that whole cloud expenditure spent because we are trying to generate an image for every single user at scale. And that’s where the revenue also goes very high.
Shwetank Tamer
It’s five times easier to sell to an existing customer, rather than selling to somebody new. Because you’ll end up paying so much money on digital ads. And just a 5% increase in retention can increase your revenue by up to 80%.
So customers need to think in this way that, you know, most of them focus on acquisition, they need to understand that it’s five times easier to sell to an existing customer, rather than selling to somebody new. Because you’ll end up paying so much money on digital ads. And just a 5% increase in retention can increase your revenue by up to 80%. And that’s what we focuses on the repeat purchases, the upsell, cross sell, that marketing automation, so that the customer that comes in, we understand what they’re looking for. And notifications should be the way for them to find what they’re looking for very fast. Just click of a button.
We, Cooee, have a philosophy where we believe notifications should be like Google search, you go and then you just get exactly what you want with less number of clicks and less number of hops. And that is what we are trying to change. Because traditionally, we don’t like notifications, they have that negative connotation to it. They’re spammy, they are impersonal. You know, that’s the first thing Matthew, you do once you wake up in the morning, you just remove all your notifications from your phone, because they are just so generic. And we are trying to change it by this one to one personalization.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, yeah, I see. And I think the way you’ve described the feature set and working through those tiers, as well makes a lot of sense. So it’s, it seems like you’ve certainly got good alignment between not just your operational costs in terms of the cloud infrastructure required to deliver it at go up the tiers, but there’s a good increase in value across those tiers, as well. So yeah, once customers do come on, they’ll see some results. And then they’re driven to try a little bit more in terms of, you know, more advanced personalization methods, etc.
Shwetank Tamer
And, eventually, we really want to change these tiers in such a way that the customers feel we have more skin in the game, we would want to change our pricing model to a value based model, where, you know, we want to go and say that, hey, hey, Mr. Brand, if I’m able to generate those, X 100 pounds for you every month, give me a share of that incremental value. That’s going to be huge.
But as most of the guys listening to this, and you know very well, Matthew, value based pricing is a very tough thing to crack. We are an early stage company. So you know, we need the revenues coming in for all the things but eventually, if I was a customer, I would know that I can onboard a platform where if they are offering me value, then I share, you know a percentage of value they create for me. And hopefully we can achieve that in the coming years.
Matthew Todd
Absolutely, I think is always an interesting topic of discussion. And I know many brands have experimented with implementing different forms of value, alignment and pricing structures based on that. As opposed to usage based pricing tiers, which I think don’t always provide value, it’s not uncommon to see anything usage based, you know, reach a tipping point where all of a sudden, you know, starts off very good value.
But then all of a sudden, because of increased usage, the costs can start to spiral out of control, yet they’re only getting an incremental amount of additional value compared to when they were pipe paying a lot less potentially.
Shwetank Tamer
Yeah, and it’s a tough call. Markets change, people’s perception change, you need to continuously keep on changing and experimenting. So I don’t think anyone in the world knows the answer was the perfect thing because it’s different for different things. Just to substantiate what you’re saying Matthew, like I love HubSpot for what they do. Amazing company, of course, grown whatever. But they have this pricing plan which is 90% off for startups. And if you have revenue under whatever, which is a perfect way to bring your customer in.
However, I know a lot of people who do not use HubSpot for that reason is they calculate how much they will have to pay right from the second year. Yes, the delta between 90% and even if it’s 35% is so huge for them. That remains such a big hindrance for them to onboard new customers. So, but again, you know, I’m just saying it’s a small example. And I’m sure they have their math that they have the research behind. But from from a customer perception, I think value is quite an important thing. And that has to be the inherent proposition on all the pricing plans.
Matthew Todd
Absolutely. I think buyers now are a lot more used to buying different types of SaaS products, subscription based products. And I think they are doing that mass more than they perhaps were before. If they work out what their growth plans are, and everything else. I think they are a lot more aware of and hear other stories of people using the HubSpot and intercoms and other products as well, where they have, you know, fallen foul of their own success and seeing those prices start to massively ramp up.
So I think it definitely does speak to different buyer kind of behaviors as well as levels of buyer awareness. So I think it’s, it’s definitely gonna be interesting to watch where a lot of these other companies may have to adjust those, those pricing tiers to be more value based, as you say.
Shwetank Tamer
Just to throw some numbers at that. Matthew, just the SME sector, globally, is going to spend about 100 and 20 billion on SaaS in 2023. And on customer engagement platforms, they’re going to spend upwards of 20 billion. Just in a year. So this is a huge market, like digital customer or E commerce, I think even our customers, they’re spoiled by choice today.
There’s not just one guy who can come and say, you know, this is the only thing I think it’s overall value, what they can get, which is what we are trying to do by not just increasing revenue, but also operational cost. And trying to couple all this with a unique value proposition which no other platform is offering at the moment. Yeah, looking forward to, you know, seeing how this pans out in the coming months and years.
Matthew Todd
No, absolutely. I look forward to seeing that develop as well. And and would you say that’s really your competitive advantage at the moment is in the technology, that the models you’ve been able to train in the way you’ve been able to integrate them as well as the pricing and positioning of that?
Shwetank Tamer
By 2040, 95% of all the purchases are going to be via the internet. So personalization is just going to be more and more important
Shwetank Tamer
I would say that Matthew that the way we combine these multiple AI algorithms to create that unique image for every single user at scale, I haven’t seen anyone else doing it. And again, our focus is on notifications at the moment, it’s a very, it’s a small part of the entire digital experience industry. But we want to just have a razor sharp focus on one small thing, try to solve that properly, you know, grow and then you know, do the other things. Like we can easily deliver omni channel, this image that we create, like I was talking earlier, we can deliver over email or WhatsApp or you know, some other channels. But we didn’t start with that, because we all do it.
Hopefully, people will be able to see, and this is the this is the best level of personalization that we can deliver to our customers where by 2040 95% of all the purchases are going to be via the internet. So personalization is just going to be more and more important. And a small point there, we do this all with first party data. We don’t integrate with Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn are the other ad networks. So every thing that is coming is what the user knows they have accepted for it, they are giving it to the brand. And then we are delivering the experience what they you know, deserve.
Matthew Todd
I think that’s interesting from a couple of perspectives. I think there’s obviously the trust perspective, and people being buyers, customers being more aware of how third party data is, is used and utilized, as well as, you know, the Apples, the Google’s that are introducing more restrictions around cross platform tracking and all those other elements as well. So I think that’s really interesting. But I think also it does keep that personalization within the customers experience of that brand and how they are choosing to engage with that brand.
Shwetank Tamer
Yeah. So again, our statistics came out from you know, a month back. About 65% of customers now expect personalization by default. But most of the small and medium brands still struggle to even understand what is customer data, forget about, you know, generating insights and delivering something. So we hope we can really make a difference to the brand, not just from revenue perspective but also of what people talk about, and you know, those vital things really help in today’s world of social media.
Matthew Todd
I think it’s only going to matter more as as time goes on, and people expect more. But I think, even if people are not consciously aware of what those expectations are, I think like the example you gave earlier talking about Stranger Things, I think people are used to engaging with these bigger tech platforms, they may not be consciously aware of why those platforms seem to work so well for them because of these elements of personalization, and other things that are going on behind the scenes.
Shwetank Tamer
And I think that’s the beauty. That when you’re trying to deliver a tech, so nicely blended in the UI, UX of your product, that the customer doesn’t understand that it’s a third party element, or something spammy, that’s where you have found the perfect balance between data and design, which is pivotal. And yeah, hopefully, we will be able to solve something like this for the brands who have signed up with us and upcoming future.
Matthew Todd
And what do you see the the kind of evolution of Cooee looking like, what was your vision? What are your growth plans? What are you focusing on now?
Shwetank Tamer
We we see the internet, shopping, ecommerce space growing, I know there is a slump, we’re talking about at the moment, given how things are. But I see this is temporary, or maybe you know, things were inflated by they’re gonna come back in the next year or so. But me sitting at home and trying to buy different things at the comfort of my sofa is just going to increase.
The way we see is, and what we’ve already started working on is delivering augmented reality based experiences for products embedded in your notifications. So today you get a notification saying, hey, Matthew, this is a new sofa, for you, or this is a new, you know, pair of Nike sneakers for you. And then you click go and click there, and it shows the picture of the Nike shoe, instead of just clicking on the, you know, clicking on the button there, it will open an augmented reality experience where you can bring forward your feet and then actually check the shoe right there. And clicking buy.
That’s something we are betting really big on. It’ll solve two different kinds of use cases, one, it will give you an idea of how the product really looks like. You know, for a lot of things, you can place the product or even, you know, go and turn it around 360 degree check the size and this is this can all be done exactly to scale.
And second is the virtual try on space, clothing, jewelry, accessory fashion, watches, footwear, all these ecommerce products, is there. Thier customers will be able to try that on straight there. And early trials of augmented reality based ecommerce transactions are showing a very, very positive sign of conversion rates by up to 70%. And another thing that it really helps with is reduction in your returns, which is a very high operational cost as well for brands. So that’s where we see the evolution going. And in the next year, our SaaS platform will allow customers to, you know, automatically run these augmented reality based engagement.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I think that’s really interesting for for both of those reasons, you mentioned both on the conversion side as, as well as reducing the operational cost of returns. And I, myself, I’ve noticed a couple of brands starting to experiment with that, whether it’s, the other day, I was looking at a new monitor for my desk from LG, and they had exactly that augmented reality experience. And my hesitation was, I don’t know how big this is going to be on my desk. I know what the size is, in terms of numbers, but how is that going to feel on my desk?
And they provided exactly that AR experience to enable that. And another example was a watch, I think my wife was looking at, they’d integrated that as well. So she could actually visualize it on her wrists. You know, turn her wrist around, see the watch from different angles and really, you know, experience that without having to go anywhere to do that.
Shwetank Tamer
So as consumers, right, this has instant value for us. Again, no big brands can do this. They’ve been working on this for quite some time, Amazon started the whole AR experience shopping in the US, a lot of those versions are available in the UK as well. I know some of the brands in the UK like Next and some others also offer the furniture layer. But what Cooee is doing to take this a step further, is when we come up with a recommendation for a particular product for a user and then deliver that in AR. You know, that’s going to be even that immersive experience personalized to you.
Matthew Todd
Yeah a level even beyond by personalizing it on top.
Shwetank Tamer
So again on AR we can talk about some numbers there. 250 million people look at the AR filters every day on Snapchat, every day, Matthew. And that generates about 6 billion impressions on a daily basis. And that’s just one single AR from a brand. So for example, McDonald’s, come up with a new burger filter. 250 million people are looking at that every day. We can generate 250 million unique, immersive experiences at scale for them. And that’s where we are heading towards?
Matthew Todd
Well, I think that’s fascinating in terms of potential and opportunity. And, yeah, I look forward to seeing how Cooee develops, how you managed to tackle that. And, you know, be interesting to have you on again, when you’re a bit further down the line and talk about some of the learnings you’ve had from that some of the results you’ve seen from from being able to deploy that as well, it definitely sounds really, really interesting. And definitely, that combination of that improved AR experience combined with the level of personalization, you’ve got to certainly sounds like a very, very valuable combination of technology.
Shwetank Tamer
Indeed, and I’d love to chat with you further down the line to also learn from you. what all are the other products that you’re buying online using AR so that we can also go and you know, build those things around it?
Matthew Todd
Thank you, i’ll be respectful of your time today, but I think we’ve covered quite a lot of really, really interesting points. And I hope the audience has been able to take away a lot from this on a value based approach to developing and delivering products, as well as some insight from the commerce and buying behavior side as well. But before we wrap things up, is there anything you’d like to kind of leave our audience with in terms of lessons that you’ve personally learned from, from building your business to date.
Shwetank Tamer
The only, the only thing I like to say this to everybody is entrepreneurship is hard. A lot of people will say that they understand. They don’t. That’s that’s just the reality of it. But when you’re trying to build something, I think what matters most is your conviction. What’s in your head, people will not be able to see, they will not be abel to image. If you believe in what you’re doing, go on with it. Take small steps every single day. And you might end up delivering something completely different than what you are thought of. But you know, every single day you improve. So what matters most is your drive. And if you keep on going, I’m sure you’ll reach where you want it to. So I’m trying to do the same. I wish you do the same as well.
Matthew Todd
Fantastic. I think that’s excellent advice. And a great place to to wrap things up for today, at least. Thank you very much for your time, much appreciated. And I’m sure our audience will will get a lot for this as well. So thank you again, and I hope we speak soon.
Shwetank Tamer
No thank you so much, Matthew for giving me the opportunity and it was lovely chatting with you. Looking forward to further interactions and learning from everyone who’s listening to this. Feel free to reach out to me in case I can help anybody in anything at all. Thank you again, Matthew.
Matthew Todd
Thank you for joining me on this episode of Inside the ScaleUp. Remember for the show notes and in depth resources from today’s guest. You can find these on the website insidethescaleup.com. You can also leave feedback on today’s episode, as well as suggest guests and companies you’d like to hear from. Thank you for listening.