The following interview is a conversation we had with Bryan Mahoney, CEO and Co-Founder of Chord Commerce, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $40 Million Raised to Power the Future of E-commerce Data
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, thanks for having me, Brett.
Brett
Not a problem. So I see you started your first company in 1999, so I’d love to use that as a place to begin. Take us back to 99. What was going on in your world?
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah. Holy moly. I had recently graduated university. I’m canadian. You might pick that up in my accent through this podium. Yeah. I graduated from McGill University, and while I was there, my second year of business school, I had started a small company as a side project with a fellow classmate. The two of us had sort of developed this little side hustle where we’d figured out how to hack a piece of software called PowerPoint that had recently become quite popular among business students. And we’d figured out a way to add animations in PowerPoint. And when we first got up in front of the class and delivered this presentation, people were blown away. And our classmates came to us and said, could we actually pay you to do something similar to make our presentations look really great?
Bryan Mahoney
To distract people from the relative lack of quality in the content and being entrepreneurial, we said, yes, absolutely. So we became these PowerPoint hackers and presentation shapers, and it sort of planted the seed for us. Like, back in 97 and 98, the Internet was really becoming a thing, and businesses were looking to get online and establish some amount of profile. So we quickly parlayed this expertise that we had in PowerPoint and developed an affinity for writing HTML and CSS. And we ended up finding opportunities to work with businesses that were trying to get online. And one thing led to another, and we ended up having a small agency, an agency that really became known for working with small businesses, helping them establish an online presence.
Bryan Mahoney
And then one thing led to another, and we started to invest more and more in technology, eventually getting to e commerce. And so that was this side hustle in 98 that became a real business in 99. And it was at that point that I had a decision to make. So I mentioned I was a business student, and suddenly I’m running an agency that is focused on computer science. I didn’t have a computer science background. I had, in fact, decided to go to New York and become an investment banker. And I had signed a right, agreed to a job, a very generous job offer. And my classmate, who I’d now started this company with, was a year behind me.
Bryan Mahoney
And I decided to put that investment banking career on hold and wait for him to graduate and give this company that we had started another nine months or ten months to see if it could really take off. And I think, looking back, it was the right decision. That little company became a not so little company over the next 15 or 16 years, as we continue to grow and expand our client roster and expand the services that were doing, getting towards the tail end of that, we really established a niche for ourselves, working with venture backed startups from the United States that would come to Montreal, Canada, that were trying to start direct to consumer businesses that had sort of become our niche.
Bryan Mahoney
So from PowerPoint to web presences to e commerce to direct to consumer, that was the sort of the beginning of my career. So 99 until 2014 or 2015, when I ended up leaving that agency in the hands of my co founder.
Brett
And did that agency get acquired?
Bryan Mahoney
That agency did get acquired, yeah. So I had mentioned the sort of like the first wave of direct to consumer. We worked with a number of those brands. And then in 2014, I actually met Henry Davis and Emily Weiss. So Henry Davis had recently left Index Ventures to become one of the first employees at a company that was then called into the gloss, went on to become Glossier. Emily had found Henry. I don’t remember exactly how the story went. Emily, of course, was the CEO and founder of into the gloss and Glossier. And she was looking to find a sort of a business counterpart for her, someone that could help her scale this vision that she had. And she had just incredible vision.
Bryan Mahoney
And Henrys first day on the job, he was sort of tasked with finding an agency that could do the design and development of this foundational platform that would go on to become Glossier.com dot. We had a mutual acquaintance in common, and so he picked up the phone and called us. Our company was called Dynamo. And he described this project that he had in mind and asked if that was something that we would do, that we had a good reputation. We said, absolutely. And it was one of these conversations where you felt like the person on the other end of the line you’d known for a really long time. And it was someone that I really wanted to do business with.
Bryan Mahoney
We agreed to commercial terms quite quickly, and before we knew it, Henry and Emily had flown to Montreal, and were facilitating a design sprint. And so this process that we had adapted and adopted a dynamo to sort of kick off these projects, were now taking glossier through. So that was, I believe, in June of 2014 we did that. We went on to launch Glossier.com in October of 2014. And I really started working with them mostly on the services side, still running this agency those first couple of months. And what our agency had also started doing after, say, six to twelve months working as the sort of the in house design and tech arm for these companies is we would help them to hire their own in house team. And that was always the plan at Glossier.
Bryan Mahoney
So lets get off the ground with an agency partner. And then because Glossier also aspired to be not just a beauty company, but have this, like, really strong technology component to their business, they wanted to hire an in house team. And because they didn’t have any in house technologists, I was kind of operating in this fractional tech leadership role and helping them run the interview process. And I remember one day debriefing on a candidate that id recently interviewed with Henry, and we agreed that it wasn’t the candidate they wanted to hire. And he made this joke, boy, it’d be great if we could hire you. And then wed both laugh uncomfortably.
Bryan Mahoney
I actually was running an off site for the 15 year anniversary of my agency, and I remember hanging up with Henry and calling my wife and saying, hey, do you want to move to New York? And she said, what on earth are you talking about? I was like, I don’t know. I’ve just got this feeling. And then I said, actually, you know what? I got to go. I got to go back and run this session. I hang up, but before I can get back and run that session, Henry had called me back and said, I spoke to our board and if there ever was a chance that you wanted to take this job. I was half kidding, but I’m mostly serious now. I said, we just hung up the phone. What do you mean you just spoke to the board?
Bryan Mahoney
How long have you been planning this? And that ended up the beginning of my transition away from running this agency, moving my family to New York, and taking that job at Glossier and them taking a chance on me and me taking a chance on them. And again, I think things happen for a reason, and that was absolutely the right thing for me to do in that moment. A few months later, we decided to accelerate the rate at which were hiring engineers at Glossier. And my business partner at Dynamo at the time wanted to slim down that company a little bit. He wanted to sort of focus it more on design and a little bit less on engineering.
Bryan Mahoney
And so we did acquire hire a portion of that team, and we completed the acquisition of the agency, coinciding, I believe, with our series B or series C at Glossier about a year later. And so that was the end of nearly 18 year run for an agency, and was real proud of the work we did there. And it was awesome to be able to have those colleagues that I’d worked alongside of for so long join me on this adventure at Glossier. And that team went on to do, I think, some pretty amazing things. And I think if you look at what Glossier was able to do in the direct to consumer capacity, it’s still looked at as one of the standard bearers.
Brett
What was that like, making the transition from agency owner and operator to a CTO?
Bryan Mahoney
Well, there’s no business book on the subject. I would say it was a really amazing experience. I’d never really had a boss before, so going and working for Emily and Henry was actually, you know, to be honest, it wasn’t much of an adjustment. We’d gotten to know each other pretty well over those first six months, and they trusted me to do my job. They were reasonably hands off, and so it was transitioning to working instead of across multiple accounts, really like being able to go really deep one account. I didn’t pretend that I knew everything. I think I was really curious, helped by the fact that I had an awful lot of familiarity with the team that was working alongside. And, yeah, I think I did a pretty good job making that transition.
Bryan Mahoney
I think early on, especially moving countries and moving cities, I really focused internally for a while. And I was talking to someone about this the other day, and I forgotten about this until recently, but early on, I think it was in a one one with Emily. She had encouraged me to really develop my network in New York. It was important to develop so that, like, glossy was going to be this big thing. She could just see it. And it was for her, having that technology leader that was as much external facing as internal facing, which she thought was going to be crucial to my success. And I think she was right.
Bryan Mahoney
I think the hardest part of my transition was like, developing a new network in a new city and in a new country and this industry that was emerging in sort of direct to consumer. And that was really great advice. And it took me a while to sort of, I think, really lean into that challenge that I was able to. And those are the types of relationships that I built way back then that are continuing to pay dividends today.
Brett
Let’s jump ahead to your latest transition. And that transition was to found another company. And that company, of course, is cord commerce. So what does cord commerce do?
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, that’s a good question. So we are a commerce data platform today, and we’re a pivot, I should say. And even the chord story is a series of pivots. So before getting to chord, there is a segue. A company called Arfa, a company that I started alongside of Henry Davis, who I worked with at Glossier. So in early 2019, we left glossier together with this idea. Well, I mean, that sounds a little bit ominous. We left on wonderful terms, like four and a half years at a startup is a really long time, and I think it was time for us to get back to building. We wanted to do something that was earlier stage.
Bryan Mahoney
And Henry had proposed this idea that he had for Arfa, where he saw this next wave of commerce coming, where brands were going to be a little bit leaner, maybe we’re not going to raise quite as much money, but they would otherwise want access to the same level of sophistication in terms of tools and data and customer experience that we benefited from at Glossier. And his vision here was to create multiple brands and have them on top of a shared platform where we could have these shared learnings. We raised money under this idea that bringing this company to market called Arfa. The first product that we worked on at Arfa was in fact the technology stack that today is in market as cord commerce. But we built it for our own brands.
Bryan Mahoney
And then in 2020, we had an opportunity to launch two of those brands. We were operating in the personal care space in some ways, trying to create a new type of CPG company. The first brand we launched was a brand called Hickey, which was an all gender sweat brand. A few weeks later, we launched a menopausal beauty brand called State of Menopause. And these were really our way to kind of classically dog food, the software product or platform that we had created to power our brands. We were able to do that with a really lean team. And so we developed a really sophisticated approach to technology that was still approachable for a lean team. And after we launched that second brand in 2020.
Bryan Mahoney
That’s when we sort of had this epiphany that perhaps the real value in what we had created was in the technology stack and a better way to monetize it, instead of through the creation of our own brands, was to make it available to other founders who were looking for similar solutions. And so at first we tried to just take the tech out and have it be its own standalone company because we really liked building brands. But again, we got some really good advice along the way from our investors that encouraged us to choose Elaine and really to focus. And so we decided that the right path forward for us was to divest to the brands, to find another home for them and to really go all in on putting a product wrapper around this data and commerce stack that we had built for ourselves.
Bryan Mahoney
And so in late 20, early 21, we pivot into the company that today is in market as cord commerce and we’re really selling the software we created for ourselves. And that comes from, in aggregate, when I look at the team that I have like truly decades of experience on the front lines of direct to consumer commerce. And so when we came to market, were a full commerce platform. And what that means is were the storefront provider, were the back office provider, and then crucially, we did everything below the surface, the data stack, if you will. In my experience, that’s actually the hardest part to get right. Recently, we have decided to focus almost exclusively on that latter part, the commerce data platform, where we’re more agnostic to your storefront technology and your order management system or commerce back office technology.
Bryan Mahoney
Instead of competing with Shopify or Salesforce, it’s an awful lot easier for us to partner with them. And so that’s what we’re focused on today, really delivering this enterprise grade turnkey data stack. For brands who are trying to do really sophisticated commerce, going from selling to.
Brett
Consumers to selling to the brands that sell to consumers is obviously a big shift. What was that transition like? And what did you learn from that transition?
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, great question. That transition was in all honesty an easier transition to make because the day we became cord, we really believe that were operators. We had created a system as operators for other operators. And when I think about classically in enterprise SaaS, you start with this super small product because you see a market opportunity and then you can follow this like product led growth strategy. And a lot of times the folks behind those ideas and companies don’t necessarily have experience in the shoes of the people that they’re selling to. And in our case, we really believed that were onto something with what were building and we’re so enthusiastic about getting into the hands of other operators because we felt their pain.
Bryan Mahoney
We know where the hard parts are and we really felt like we’ve been able to productize, like I said, sort of decades of experience. So that transition was pretty natural. And as I look back on the arc of my career, starting first on the services side or on the agency side, where you get an opportunity to work across multiple brands, and I’ve always been someone who’s been quite curious. I want to understand their brand, I want to understand their problems, and I want to help them design the right solution for that. And then when I went to glossier, especially as glossier sort of achieved this level of recognition and success, I used to get pinged all the time from other technology leaders or commerce leaders or CEO’s of brands that would just sort of ask for advice.
Bryan Mahoney
I’d make a number of different platform recommendations or team recommendations. Now fast forward to cord. I’m a part of a team that has built a platform that I think has all of those answers to these conversations that used to be one off conversations and now I have an opportunity to sort of deliver at scale. So that transition, working alongside of other brands and really learning about their businesses and watching how the technology that weve created can be a part of their success, its kind of like what ive always been looking for. The harder part of the transition was figuring out how to do the SaaS side of things and how you sell enterprise software. Theres a real process and a real magic to this. And we’ve already covered the fact that I started a company in 1998.
Bryan Mahoney
I’m quite old, but I’ve never done this before and I’m learning as I go. Been really fortunate to have some experienced SaaS sales leaders join us recently. And just watching them really lean into what they’re exceptional at has been awesome. And sort of being able to delegate that responsibility, I think is something that at least in 2024, that I’m super excited about. I think that this is really what we need to take us to the next level.
Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media podcast production studio that helps b two B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else to set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast. Visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode.
Brett
You know, a lot of the conversations I’ve been having lately with b two b founders, and just what I’ve seen online lately is there’s a lot of talk around this idea that b two b marketing or traditional b two b marketing is just very boring, very dry, and a lot of b two b marketers are now going to look at d two c brands and try to get inspiration from how they market themselves, their marketing philosophies, their strategies, all of that. Looking at quartz marketing, it doesn’t look like a traditional enterprise software. It doesn’t look boring. So talk to us about the intention of the branding there and the general marketing philosophy.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, another wonderful question. All credit here goes to Henry Davis again. And then Helen stead. So Helen was someone that we worked with at Glossier. She was the creative director there and she joined us at Arfa and then has gone out on her own and does a lot of branding design. And when we decided that were going to pivot and become cord, we called Helen. She was our first call. We’re like, we need a brand for what we’re building and we don’t want it to look like every other b two B software company. We are commerce operators that have built the platform for other commerce operators and we really want it to resonate with them. We want to be able to tell our story. And she got to work and she just did a fantastic job.
Bryan Mahoney
A little while later, we had an opportunity to work with Red Antler, an agency that probably needs no introduction. They’re behind some of the greatest direct to consumer brands that are out there. They took Helen’s work and they amplified it and they helped us with that storytelling. And so I look at the brand today and I’m really proud of it. And I think our marketing team is doing a really fantastic job being really creative and trying to strike that right toward, if you’ll allow the pun, between enterprise grade tech, because truly we’re an enterprise grade platform. But in this sort of, this approachability that you normally find in consumer and yeah, I mean, great to hear that you think that it’s coming across in that way. It’s something that we’re quite intentional about.
Bryan Mahoney
I want it to feel more like a brand site, something that you want to buy, a brand that you want to be a friend with, as opposed to a platform that you’re going to choose because you don’t want to be fired.
Brett
Another founder who doesn’t have a competing product but hes selling into a similar space. He had a website that was very nice as well and I asked him about that and he said I have no choice. Were selling to these companies that are cool brands. They have a great identity. They’ve spent a lot of money building out that brand. Hes like, I cant have some shitty enterprise looking software site that were trying to sell to, they expect to have a cool looking brand. So that was his view on it. And it sounds like its probably similar for you Preston.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I think you got to invest in brand. We’ve gone through a couple of different iterations of our website as we decided to focus more on the data side and let go of doing like the full commerce platform. Our marketing team and in house designers like just got to work with the brand assets we had and retold the story and they did it really quickly. And listen, I’ll look at our website all the time and there’s like 50 things that I want to fix and I think like that’s always going to be the case and that’s not unique. My time at Cord, when we used to look at the dynamo side, it was the same thing, and then the glossy side, it was the same thing.
Bryan Mahoney
Like, I always want us to be getting better and at the same time I really appreciate the work that the team has done and how they make it their own and are always trying to better.
Brett
It’s the curse that every founder has. Yeah, you sit here, sit looking at your own website and you start wanting to tweak things and you just spend a lot more time than anyone else looking at it. So you notice those things.
Bryan Mahoney
Exactly.
Brett
Who’s the ICP today?
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, the ICP are brands that want to connect with their customers and deliver these differentiated experiences. And so I think like anyone that has a meaningful direct to consumer component to their business, they don’t have to exclude exclusively be direct to consumer. Today we see an awful lot of brands expanding into multiple channels and we think that’s awesome. But cord works best for customers that want to collect first party data, that want to have all of their first party data in one place. They want to be able to have data science running alongside of that data so that they can deliver a better customer experience, whether it’s online or through marketing channels, or use some of that data to incorporate it into the next iteration of their product to deliver a better product.
Bryan Mahoney
And so those are brands that have achieved a reasonable amount of scale. So we look at those as the sort of the largest mid market to emerging enterprise, mostly brands that are based today in North America, but we’ve got designs to expand internationally as well and that mostly are shipping a physical product. Henry tells a good version of this. We work best for brands that imagine you placed an order on Amazon a couple of days ago and a box was up at your doorstep. You probably don’t remember what you ordered and you’re not in any hurry to sort of like open up that box.
Bryan Mahoney
And then you go online and you order a new product because you got a text message, a drop from a brand that you adore and you get this branded box at your doorstep and like, you basically were like, hey, hold on a sec, bro. I got to pause this podcast because this thing just showed up that I cannot wait to open the box and experience. That’s our ICP. It’s those brands who know you really well and know how to market to you and you love their product and you love their brand and you can’t wait to open the box. That’s our ICP.
Brett
That’s such an accurate description of how some brands make consumers feel. With my fiance, she became obsessed with Graza, the olive oil, and it was that exact same scenario. Like, our building notified us that a package has been delivered. Normally they bring it up later in the day and she like called down and had them like bring it up right away and open it up like it was Christmas. And it’s just insane to see the impact that a brand can have on a consumer when you’re used to like just walking down the grocery store aisle and throwing olive oil in. Like, you don’t think about it, but brands are really making it into an experience which I think is very fascinating.
Bryan Mahoney
Me too. It’s not brand new either. It used to be you’d have sort of four or five brand loyal to and you would stick around with those brands forever. Now, I think so much of our identity runs through the brands that we’re associated with. And I don’t know about you, but like, I’m always excited to introduce this new brand that I’ve discovered to a friend or to a family. Like, it’s something that I’m really excited to share and that’s the power of great brand. And I think we’re getting back to that now where if we think back a couple of years ago, it didn’t matter how great your brand was, what mattered was how much money you could spend to acquire customers and like, the product mattered an awful lot less. And I think that was like this moment in time.
Bryan Mahoney
And I’m excited to see us move beyond that, back to a place where the words on the page matter, the product in the box matters, the experience really matters in these brands are going to be an awful lot more durable and it’s less about like how much you can spend on all out customer acquisition. And we’re back to like being great marketers and being great brand builders and being really fantastic at building product. That’s the era I grew up in and I’m happy to have had experience in all of these different waves of commerce. But I really think we’re settling into this next wave where direct to consumer finds another place. Nothing makes me laugh more than when people like say direct to consumer is dead. I’m like, direct to consumer is just getting started.
Bryan Mahoney
If you’re not collecting great data, if you’re not leveraging your own channels to learn more about your customers, then you’re going to be left behind. I just don’t think you can build a great and durable brand without doing that.
Brett
What do you think the future of commerce is going to look like? Let’s zoom out. Maybe three to five years from today. What does it look like?
Bryan Mahoney
I think commerce is increasingly everywhere and it’s going to become increasingly experiential. I believe the hard parts of commerce used to be the storefront experience and the checkout experience. I mean, the amount of times we would build a custom checkout, trying to make it incrementally better, those are becoming more solved problems, I think. And commerce is really a part of like all of our experiences. And the more we interact, the more commerce lives everywhere, the more you as a customer, your data lives everywhere. So Im sort of speaking and playing my own book here where we want to collect all of your data across all these different places to facilitate a better commerce experience wherever your customer is. But thats kind of it. You’re going to establish a relationship with a brand and you’re going to be loyal to that brand.
Bryan Mahoney
You’re going to follow them around and you’re going to find opportunities for those transactions. Thats why I think theres sort of like this fascination around attribution, like pixel perfect attribution. I want to know exactly what the customers last click was on this last thing before they bought this thing so I can repeat that process. It’s kind of like a false promise. It’s not, you’re not going to get pixel perfect in attribution anymore. It’s about showing up consistently where your customer is and giving them a really great product and a great experience. And don’t get me wrong, I want brands to invest in attribution so they understand where their ad dollars are working, et cetera. But that’s only going to be directionally correct.
Bryan Mahoney
I think showing up consistently, being great stewards of your customers data, and repaying that with great experiences is the future of commerce. What shape it’s going to take? Is it always going to be browser based in five years? Is everything going to be voice based? I don’t know. I’m pretty convinced it’s not going to be a bunch of AI shopping on our behalves. I really think we’re always, as humans, going to want that interaction with other humans who are behind the brands. I think the commerce experience is going to become more and more seamless. I think you’re going to have smaller transactions, but there’s still a long way to go in the traditional shopping experience. Again, I don’t know about you, but I still like shopping online. I like exploring, I like reading reviews. I like the discovery part of it.
Bryan Mahoney
And I like the anticipation of knowing that this product is going to show up on my doorstep. Maybe it’s something, it’s an olive oil that I’m going to serve at dinner and show to a bunch of other folks, or it’s a new winery that I’ve discovered, or it’s a new piece of sort of workout gear that I can’t wait to try out. Like that magic of commerce has existed for a really long time and I think technology has made it more accessible. And if I had to make a bet, I think technology is going to make it even more accessible in three to five years. See it as being fundamentally different than what exists today.
Brett
When it comes to your market category, how do you think about the category? Is it commerce data? And if so, is that something that e commerce operators are like? Are they searching for that? Do they have a line item of, okay, we need a commerce data platform. We’re going to shortlist some vendors. Like, what does that look like at a line item level? And what does it look like at a category level?
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I really like this question. It’s the right way to answer this. I used the term accessible before, and the modern commerce stack, as we think about it, has never been more accessible. This is one of the things that Shopify has done really well. They’ve made it really easy for you not just to get online, but to deliver, I think, a pretty good customer experience. And part of that magic runs through their App Store where Shopify can’t have all of the functionality and whatever you’re missing, you can reasonably find through an app. I think that approach works well to a point commerce operators figure out. I think a few years in or with some amount of scale is each one of these apps creates a data silo that makes it increasingly difficult for you to have a really holistic view of your entire customer.
Bryan Mahoney
And even if you manage to get all of that data into one place and you can use it to train or to enrich or even to deploy some of your own AI against, now you got to get that data back in front of that customer somehow, either through a different experience or through a marketing channel. When I think about the category right now, theres a lot of point solutions that are promising quick wins. Just install this thing and want to make this better. I see a lot of people trying these things out. I really like working with folks that have tried these different approaches and realize that there aren’t that many shortcuts. Actually, what they’re looking for is getting back to basics and having really great infrastructure and having their data in one place. They actually need to use it.
Bryan Mahoney
Reminding them that they got into the brand business because they’ve got this superpower to create brands. They’ve got an intuition about what their customers want, but they can’t be cut out of the loop. They need products and platforms and data that give them superpowers. And so folks that have realized that and are looking to use technology as sort of an accelerant or as this way of giving them superpowers, that’s where we’re going to do the best. And I think that somewhat reasonably category agnostic, actually, it’s really anyone that wants to create those better relationships with customers.
Bryan Mahoney
I keep coming back to the same thing and not doing it by in this kind of like whack a mole point solution type way, it’s really having this like super solid foundation that gives you a real competitive advantage and allows you to iterate and evolve over time.
Brett
Moving into our last couple of questions here, yes, as I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised 40 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, well, fundraising is hard. That’s what I’ve learned. I feel fortunate to have been able to do it alongside of people that have done it before me. Feel real fortunate to have found some really fantastic investors. We have always been somewhat old school in our approach to fundraising, which is to say we like to meet funds months before we need the funds I expect the journey were on at core to take a long time. And I want to have investors and a board around the table that want to be on that journey with me that have been through the highs and been through the lows and can be super supportive and ultimately have a shared vision.
Bryan Mahoney
So I think its important to find the right group of investors that believe in you, especially early stage investors who are focused oftentimes on metrics and product market fit. And all those things are great. I feel like we found investors, especially in the earliest stages, when were a seed series company or a pre series or even a series a company. As much as they were looking for product market fit, they were looking for founder market fit, and they took a look at where we had come from and where were trying to go, and they’re like, well, you are the founders that are going to do this by operators, for other operators, having been in those shoes, were really betting on you.
Bryan Mahoney
So I think its matchmaking, being able to tell a really compelling story, putting together a really good team, and then not being discouraged hearing no. Thats the other thing I learned through the fundraising process is you’re going to hear no a lot. And that doesn’t mean you have a bad business, it just means you got to keep going. And so, yeah, anyone listening here that is out there fundraising right now, you’re probably hearing no an awful lot. And the other thing that I learned, too is to ask for feedback. I think investors, they’ve got a job to do, too, and they’re looking for optionality, and sometimes they don’t want to give you that direct feedback. That feedback or that quick no.
Bryan Mahoney
That you need so that you can make your pitch more compelling or you can improve your pricing or even make your product better. So don’t be afraid to ask for that feedback, even if it’s not the answer that you ultimately want to hear.
Brett
Let’s imagine that I come to you and I say, Bryan, I built some interesting e-commerce technology. I want to go to market. What would be the number one piece of advice that you’d give me before I start trying to sell to these e-commerce or direct to consumer brands?
Bryan Mahoney
Find some brands that are willing to build with you. Again, I feel real fortunate that there are some brands that took a chance on us and that were willing to exchange the fact that were riskier and were early stage in exchange for having some amount of influence over our product roadmap and build with them. And we did that and having some credible logos, having some feedback, having some real life. Customers on the platform made it an awful lot easier for us to bring it to market and to be confident in conversations with brands that we didn’t know yet. And I would also say, just be real curious. It’s not just about selling your software. I think understanding the unique challenges of the business that you’re trying to sell into is a truly underrated skill.
Bryan Mahoney
So be curious, offer advice, even if it means not necessarily getting the sale. It’s a long game and having a really good reputation. I think sometimes you’d be surprised when people do circle back and say, you know, it wasn’t the right time for me then, but I really appreciate that feedback you gave me then. And I’m curious to hear where you are with the product, because maybe it’s the right time for us now.
Brett
Super useful. All right, Bryan, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here. Before we do, if there’s any founders that are listening in and want to follow along with your journey, where should they go?
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I mean, the best place to follow along would be Chord Co. Try to keep things updated there. I am unfortunately very quiet on the socials. I do a pretty good job of accepting most LinkedIn requests, so you can find me on LinkedIn and Bryan MTL is the acknowledgement to my hometown of Montreal, but I’m otherwise pretty absent on the socials these days.
Brett
Fair enough. Bryan, thanks so much. It’s been a lot of fun.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, thanks for having me, Brett.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit Frontlines.IO podcast. And for the latest episode, search for category visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
Twitter
facebook
linkedin