William Neill

The problem with that is that it goes out of date pretty quick. And as we've learned through analytics, a lot of sites do actually change their product data weekly. And some of the major sites are changing it daily.

And if you want to keep up with that, unless the user opens their app daily and you're able to use an in-app browser behind the scenes to scrape that data again and bring it in, it's not reliable. And it certainly doesn't scale in terms of if someone adds one product and then another person adds the same product. How do you know those two things are apples and basically match them?

There was a lot of really interesting stuff that had to happen to figure out how to get product data reliably and do that server side and then obviously plug into major product feeds and things like that where we could so that we didn't have to go and actually

spend resource on scraping or things like that that's soaked up a lot of focus and engineering time is yeah thinking about how do we scale that product data side because for most of our business a lot of things just hang off of the fact that we need really good product data to actually do almost anything else with the product okay so as you step out on the balcony you look across all that you've built what are you most proud of

You're proud of building the team, actually. Listening back to some of the other people that have been on your podcasts and the things they've said around people and team, I can't help but echo that because it is so essential. So I'm really proud of the way that we've managed to find people that are so passionate about what they do. The business takes on a life of its own.

Being able to step back from the business and not be someone who has to work on it in terms of like day-to-day in the kind of grind mode that you have to be in the early days of getting the venture out the door and be able to look at more of the opportunities for where is the business going and... What are the things you want to do in six months time?

Having that space and opportunity to be able to do that now is all about building out a team that can go ahead and execute on the things that we've got to get done to get there. Just having that trust and the capability to do that is massive.

There's obviously loads of things that you learn and you look back and you go cringe like that. Why did we do that? And how could we have thought that was the right thing at the time? If we think about the tech side of things, because I think people would pretty much trump anything on this learnings area in terms of building the team and things, but...

I think it's building out features without validating the use case or the analytics behind supporting that decision. So we've gone ahead and we've built things on hunches, which is sometimes you just got to do that because you've got to move on an opportunity where you go, yeah, I'm blending things together and I'm looking at this and going, yeah, this makes sense. Let's go ahead and do that.

But ultimately launching something that has fallen short of the goals that you had for it. And in retrospect, seeing that there were cues in the analytics or I guess in the interviews that we were having at the time with customers that would have pointed to the fact that it wasn't something that was going to fly.

I read a book recently and it was taking small bets and thinking back on the way that we've done things and the learnings on that. It's that we've probably made small bets that probably should have stayed small bets bigger and put more time in them that we actually probably should have instead of just shipping them and seeing what happened and then building more of those bets.

I guess the biggest learning, like a mistake, would be to say, let's build three big bets in the next three months or so, rather than saying, let's build three bets in the next two weeks and launch those and then start optimizing from what we've learned from those three things.

It comes back to the resourcing, motivation in the team, happiness of investors, and basically everything else in the business hangs off of that momentum. We've probably wasted too much time and lost momentum on things that we felt were important and big opportunities, but actually should have stayed as small bets that we just launched as something we could do in a week and then learn from that.

There's a lot of really interesting stuff to do in the space. When you come back to the sort of nuts and bolts of what that's actually all about, it's about saving what we like to think about internally as purchase intent. And there's this kind of simple way of saying that. It's like you've got something that you have your eye on that you aspire to have or buy.

What's the least friction to get you to have that thing? Our job at Basket is to essentially build a really good funnel or process that helps you as a user to have more of the things or better of the things that you really want to have around you in your life. I think more is actually a bit of a challenging word because I use it in the sense of like quality things rather than just more stuff.

So yeah, a lot of our product now and our future is focused on how do we break down a lot of that friction that still exists in researching, finding products that you like. There's the recommendation side of things.

There's the inspiration, discovery mechanisms of e-commerce, aggregating a lot of that into one place, making Basket a source of not only inspiration that you're finding individually, but that you're finding with your friends. And it's that kind of collaborative shopping.

If you could take Figma and think about the way that design has evolved with a designer in a laptop's like isolated environment to now being this kind of like multi-user collaborative kind of space. So how do we bring that kind of sense of collaboration and stuff to the fore and make that really exciting? Building out ways that we can work better with the operating systems that exist.

So looking at what Apple's doing with a lot of their product direction and saying we want to be on that journey and how do we basically support that ecosystem? Same with Android and looking at that and also web. We've got multi-platforms where we're looking at just basically deeper integrations with those to make shopping more seamless.

For me, it's not really like one person or something, but I think it's probably people in my life that draw energy and ideas from. I would love to say something around some author or someone famous that inspires me, but the reality is not really. I think I look up to those people who consciously try to make a difference in the world that they can influence, the platform they've got to do that on.