Matthew Wadiak
speaker
57 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Matthew Wadiak’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Sure. Blue Apron was the first meal kit company in America providing all of the ingredients and a recipe card that allowed customers to cook step-by-step recipes at home. And we grew from a tiny fulfillment center originally in Queens doing about 20 meals or 20 customers per week to millions of meals per week in three major geographies and five distribution centers.
We had a lot of cadence from day one because we, first of all, you have to understand the era. It was a time in which there was a massive underserved audience. And whenever you see pent up demand, it's about capitalizing on that demand from a marketing perspective to get share of market and capture as much total addressable market as possible, right? Yeah.
So we did something that was really unique on day one. And I entirely attribute this portion to my co-founder, Matt Salzberg, at the time. We had initially built a referral program into our initial web product that included rewards for customers. You know, as many companies have rewards for customers who are loyal to their brand. But what we did was a reverse referral program.
And back in those days, thinking back 15 years ago, we would, instead of giving the buyer a reward or a free box for loyalty, we would allow, after the second box ordered,
the the customer to gift three first boxes to their closest friends and on its head initially we had thought we don't really know how people are going to respond to this because it's not a selfish gift it's not something that people receive personally it's the gift of giving right yeah yeah It was fascinating because we were the first to do that, that I know. And that became a viral sensation.
So for the first few years of the company, 80% of our customer acquisition with double digit monthly growth, sometimes triple digit monthly growth, was attributed to our referral program, which was really novel for the time.
Yeah. So if you if you think back to the days of Iron Chef and Emeril Lagasse and the Food Network's peak, when people were still watching cable or more people were watching cable, at least. There was more interest in food and food celebrity and celebrity chefs than any time in history with less people actively cooking in America than any time in history simultaneously. So I think what we have...
hit was the cultural zeitgeist was saying we want to do this thing we want to cook at home but because people were watching cooking on tv and not cooking at home a lot of folks didn't know how to cook so oh apron ended up being the gateway that empowered folks to learn the basic skills to chop vegetables and prepare a piece of meat and put a basic meal together with their family
So that was embraced. And of course, you know, the rest after that VCs and PEs jumped on that and advertising went crazy.
Yeah, so acquisition through Facebook early days was our first cohorted spend into customer acquisition. And back, I'd say, you know, in the early days of Facebook, two years in or so, we didn't really have to advertise on Facebook for the first year. After that, we started dripping spend into social engagement and spending money on CAC. That was fairly cheap at the time.
You know, back then you could have a business selling almost anything and have, I mean, people didn't talk about ROAS back then, but you could imagine like a seven or eight ROAS, right? In today's terms.
Facebook has been smart in that their strategy as a business is to take as much money from their customers as possible without bankrupting the company. It's great for their bottom line, but it's not the sole channel to acquire customers anymore. And we need to be a little bit more educated in our span as modern entrepreneurs. But back then, we could acquire a lot of customers online.
through Facebook. And then of course we had influencer based ads, early days of, of influencers and social engagement and paid. And then we started, you know, things like, um, you know, my heart, you know, we did Howard Stern, we did TV, we did direct mail. We really did all of the channels at one point or another. And as the company became more mature, it became clear that, um,
Without recalling exact numbers from like 10 years ago, it was very good. And, you know, our CAC to LTV ratio was excellent. I still look at that. And I think a lot of folks, you know, look at ROAS and tacos and, you know, that kind of stuff today, especially Amazon sellers. But it really all boils back down to ratios between, you know, acquisition and LTV ratio.
And, yeah, it was very good, obviously, in the early days without a lot of competition. We had high loyalty. We had high spend on a per customer basis. And over time, you know, when there was more P.E. and V.C., anything good is going to get copied. Right. People all dumped their VC checks into advertising, in many cases at a loss, and it became a bidding war.
I think that's something we'll have to be aware of and conscious of is, do I want to grow at this pace? Do I want to attract investment in lookalike companies? And what am I prepared to do? How am I prepared to think about not just where I am today with LTVs and CAC, but what happens if this market becomes saturated and how I'm going to address that through different channels?
Yeah, we had various programs. We had a kids' cooking school program. A lot of our customers were parents. So in the summertime, we would do an engagement around several boxes in succession that were also learnings, kind of like a summer school cooking, where you'd plant peas and we'd set a can of soil with peas. And that one week, you'd plant them. The next week, you'd water them.
The third week, you'd clip them and use them in a salad. So we had really cool projects like that. We had lots of affiliate stuff going on.
However you can engage customers in a creative way is useful because those are ultimately going to be your highest value users and customers. So I love stuff like that. And I think, you know, companies always have opportunities to be more creative. And oftentimes those kind of projects and those retention strategies are, you know, are fun and they don't cost much money, right?
So I'd say that that's really important. The other, I think, big opportunity that a lot of entrepreneurs miss out on from an LTV standpoint is really, really good customer service because the distressed customer is really just asking to become a lifetime customer if you treat them properly. So I think having really great CX is critical for any consumer. Yes.
Showing 1–20 of 57 · page 1 of 3
Next →